Plot Versus Motif in Monsoon Mansion

As I read through Monsoon Mansion, I assumed that there was a plot driving this story. For the majority of the book it really did not feel to me as if it were lacking in plot, but I think the turning point for me was when the narrator and her mother dance in the rain together. I realized that the thing holding me in the story was not a plot at all, but an underlying motif that the author was carrying throughout the body of the memoir. Water plays a pivotal role for the narrator as she is growing up and well into her adult life. We see water on the cover, but it also highlights the highs and lows of the narrator’s life. For example when the water in the mansion gets shut off, when she gets sick from the unclean drinking water, when her family is trapped by the monsoon that damages the mansion, all of these are lows. But we can also see joy around water, like when she meets Diyosa for the first time, her Christmas wish being to go to the beach, and her love for swimming that follows her through life.

I found myself tracking water throughout the story more than any other character. I kept searching for each little way that water popped up and what it did in the story. One of the most powerful of these little moments for me was after Norman had sent the narrator’s mother to the hospital. On their return to the house, Norman offered the mother a glass of water, and the narrator storms upstairs to think about the mother drinking this water. There’s something about water in this moment. Water is an essential need, but there is an excess of it in this story. It surrounds and drowns the reader, just as the narrator feels she is drowning in the mother, just as she feels her father also drowned in this woman. It creates a parallel between the reader and the characters in this story, allowing the reader to feel grounded without necessarily providing a traditional plot arc.

An author cannot control the trajectory of a memoir because the events have already happened, they are telling the story as they experienced it. Not all stories come as perfectly formed arcs, life is not necessarily a thing that moves forward in one direction easily. To force a memoir to adhere to a plot seems harsh, and delves into much deeper philosophical debate. If a memoir needs a plot, then what is the plot of one’s life? I certainly could not tell you the plot of mine, if there is one I assure you that it would not sound like a good story (to me at least.) Memoirs need room to explore the space they take up without forcing them into a certain teleology. By grounding Monsoon Mansion in the motif of water and weaving it throughout the story, the author is able to roam her narrative freely. I personally do not believe that a clearer plot was necessary, and perhaps you did find plot as you were reading. But I was less engaged by what event was on the horizon and more enticed by when I would get my next sip of water.

The Cautioner's Tale A Visual Journal

By combining a journal entry format with a visual style, R.M. Wilburn utilizes page space to help unravel information and tension that comes in following Mary Morgan’s journey. The reader can pick up subtle clues visually that reveal information Wilburn does not have to explain. The wrinkled, mismatched pages, torn clippings rather than cleanly cut, and blotches and spots found on the entries, all express Mary Morgan’s life on the run. We, as readers, infer that she is collecting random scraps of paper to write on in what was left of the world after “The Great War” and Rump’s reign. At one point, she writes on what looks like a  blue envelope that consists of half the entry on the page. The readers do not need long description or exposition to understand Mary Morgan’s life as a fugitive. We see that the mismatched collection scraps that she calls her journal. The events are what hold importance and Mary Morgan is doing everything she can to document it. 

Although the journal format evokes a sense of privacy and intimacy, for the speaker it is a dialogue with the readers. She states in her opening entry that she writes the journal in case something happens to her. She writes knowing that others may read her work, and uses “us,” in the following page, also addressing the reader as “you,” and thus blurs the line of public vs. private in her personal journal. This journal is meant to be public and including various forms of documentation from official documents, letters, physical items, all make it easier for Mary Morgan’s readers to grasp the situation as quickly as possible. 

As a visual journal, one that is public, allows Wilburn to build tension through what is seen but not explicitly commented on. One great example is on location/page 35 upon entering Poison Skillet. Visually, there is a pink page that serves as the written entry, with a ripped corner, and labels and surveillance footage below. Wilburn uses the page space to divulge as much information as possible without telling it. The surveillance camera focuses on a “target,” a human male, and that is placed by the labels of mysterious “meat-like substance” Rump rations and a deliver tag for “human flesh (muscles and fat).” These visuals follow the note that describes Poison Skillet as “one of the many shady places” that is also referred to as “Rump Dumps since he did nothing but worsen their conditions.” Wilburn goes further by having the ripped page reveal the entrance to Poison Skillet, blocking out the tag underneath except for the underline word “LEAVE.” Mary Morgan does not speculate what the meat might be, not to the reader, but gives all the clues to the readers. The cluttering that happens on this page, with sections of the different documents being cut off, does not take away or hide information. Rather, it makes the reader focus on specific words or phrases. 

This visual genre opens possibilities for the arc to develop quickly, avoiding long descriptions and the reader being dependent on the speaker’s words for information. The evidence works not only to progress the story, but also to avoid having an unreliable narrator. Rump’s reign is distorting and manipulating media and information in Mary Morgan’s world, and she is making sure that the reader has all the correct information through various sources. Though the graphic novel is short, it depicts Rump’s rise and fall as a complete arc, and addresses multiple deaths of Mary Morgan’s allies. The pace did feel too quick, and it may be due to the vast amount of information presented on each page. 

:(

Response to The Cautioner’s Tale by R. M. Wilburn 

I put the book away at eleven PM and tried to sleep. No luck. There was a tightening in my chest, my body kind of refusing to release, and I couldn’t get my thoughts under control. Just live with it, I told myself. Grow up and fucking relax already! I kept tossing and turning. The buzz in my head might’ve been audible. The book was so unpolished, its politics so unsubtle yet so tame and predictable, the plot so convoluted, the characters were less than cardboard signifiers, the humor forced and scatological and unfunny, the graphics amateur and unpleasant to read, the world-building unconvincing… This book was a hoax, starting with the bogus awards on its cover (vanity competitions with expensive entry fees that award nothing other than the right to use the label for promotion). It was a sad confirmation of publishers’ bias against self-published work. As a twelve-year-old, I had been a pretty forgiving reader, tolerating puns and wordplay without a problem. If the thing had bored me, I’d just ignore it altogether and copy a book report from the internet. But now at grad school when I was committed to being a good student—to think that I would need to write about it, quote from it, labor to critique something that’s not worth a second glance, talk about it for two hours, that I would be expected to treat this as an example of the kind of craft I should produce, and that a whole semester of this might conceivably follow….

It was already one AM when I finally flicked on the light and picked up the nearest Margaret Atwood to calm down.

I carried the unhappiness and the remnant exhaustion for the past couple of days, all the while berating myself for not coming to terms with it (Just suck it up! Everyone else can do it, why can’t you? What’s so special about you?!). Why was my reaction so strong? I’ve been trying to guard my time. Any waking moment of clarity not dedicated to basic survival and to writing my own work should be invested in reading books that are undeniably good, to inspire me and so that I know what to aspire to (thousands of books meet this criterion; even high school curricula are littered with masterpieces). I went back to school with the hope of finding a structure that would support this ambition, and overall, it has. Why now can’t I have the flexibility to take classes with syllabi that align with my creative goals? Why would I need to bang my head against work that is so remote from what I want to do? Am I in the wrong place? I feel so alone with this. Should I leave? And so on.

That’s it for my self-pity, for now. Here’s some evidence:

World building. The book purportedly takes place towards the end of the first half of this century. The aesthetic, however—created almost solely with very basic Photoshop templates—aligns with a sort of Victorian-ish maybe fin de siècle maybe towards the mid-20^th century max (my partner said it looks like Pirates of the Caribbean). It’s unclear how a regime that has advanced technologies of repression as well as time travel (did they seriously evoke the trope of the Time Travel Taboo to just leave it hanging…?) and fossil fuels has lost all electronics (as well the mountains of salvageable and usable electronic waste) and reinvigorated a robust postal industry; but don’t count on this author to put any rigor into world building (or proofreading, for that matter)—self-promotion takes too much time (they remind the readers to review the book at least twice).

In terms of the history of this world, the author dumps info with stylistically unjournalistic newspaper clips (I guess that in addition to electronics, norms of syntax, basic non-second grade cryptography, and correct Russian, the centuries-old journalistic standard has also disappeared in this post-apocalypse) and, in the very beginning, with a “NOTE” that explains what happened (another Great War (very original) won by a generation of “warriors” (ditto)). Never mind that all this explaining breaks the journal form, it also raises the suspicion that Wilburn hasn’t read much so-called genre fiction, or at least hasn’t internalized the first lesson: Reveal everything, explain nothing.

One highlight of many: “I was devastated! To think I’d sent Bumbly Snaxx, a world-renowned middle-grounder, to his death was heart-breaking. But rather than regretting my hand in this, I allowed this great loss to motivate me toward another solution.” Truly devastating. Such loss. Human tragedy captured in written form. I feel it.

But for real, perhaps this author thinks that “genre” fiction allows shallow emotions and flat characters. Not true. You’d think they’d privilege plot instead, which, despite taking most of the book’s real estate, doesn’t really seem attempted. This is most mind-boggling when Comey takes over and Trump’s reign ends with no preface from one page to the next. Twists and conclusions aren’t led up to, they’re simply announced, not allowing the reader to follow the investigation. This is done in a poor, convoluted way. For example: “Of course! I studied the note closely but did not find a key to decipher it. Under these conditions my fellow spy and I had decided that we were to always use the number 5 as the code key. This meant I needed to replace each letter with the one that came 5 letters later in the alphabet.” How easy: the struggle is finished with no transition from one sentence to succeeding bewildering sentence, and suddenly everything’s figured out. They didn’t even bother to think up or research sophisticated cryptography (try a One Time Pad). At least they saved us the tedium of actually figuring it out. The one merit of this book: brevity, accentuated by its lack of numeration. Cheers for that, more time for me to tie my rope.

Others: “My first order of business was small but mighty…” followed by: a quaint letter with a button enclosed and a couple of exclamation POINTS! Mighty indeed.

“I was not ready to take on a new name.” Seriously? This is the most elementary form of underground organizing. Then again, their politics are not about organizing decisively for collective liberation, but about praying for impeachment to magically happen from one day to the next. (If only the deep state could take over and save the spineless liberals of the unpresidential farce that produces books such as these….)

Reading this book is like being locked in a room with my in-laws with no way out and no possibility of opening my mouth to talk back. It almost makes me re-question my anarchist politics in favor of a totalitarianism that would curb such publications.

I’d beg for Faulkner. What were your previous students thinking? Please, please just give me Faulkner.

Arc, Genre, and Medium

     The Cautioner's Tale is a blend of three genres: Mystery, Sci-Fi, and Diary/Journal told through the medium of a graphic novel. Medium here plays an imperative part in creating cohesion and blending amongst the three genres. For example, the tale opens to a tattered piece of paper with three battered photos attached, along with a news clipping paper-clipped to the letter. Inside the letter, Mary Morgan - our eventual hero - uses the genre of Diary/Journal writing to set this story up as a historical artifact. As a genre Diary/Journal posses an a certain authority, especially when it comes to the keeping of history. Think of The Diary of Anne Frank for instance or Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Diary and Journal is treated as a piece of history, which is how the genre functions here. To underscore this attitude, Wilburn choses her language carefully, too. Morgan’s first words to the reader are “In case something happens to me, let it be known for the record that my name is Mary Morgan and this is my journal. Everything that follows is true...I’ve included evidence when possible….”(pg 8). Record and evidence stand out here because once again, it highlights the genre and underscores the authority given. The reader is set to believe that this is an unbiased account - it isn’t - because Morgan is posited as an investigator with facts and records. It’s clear that our narrator is supposed to be trusted.

      Now, imagine trying to read this without evidence. That’s what the illustrations - the cornerstone of graphic novel as a medium - are here: a way to provide the reader with evidence. The hodgepodge of pieces of notes written on papers of all sizes, the collection of articles with serrated edges, etc. The illustrations add credence to the story and move the story arc along. One of the other functions of the animations, though, is to also give life to the Science Fiction aspects, too. Think of the photos of Fortuitous Max and Bumbly Snaxx, for instance. How would we imagine these characters without the photos aiding us? The photos are visual cues and clues to the audience. The impact here is that the story becomes almost tangible, which is an important facet of world building.

     I keep trying to imagine this tale as a novella and I can’t. I would not be nearly as invested as I am with the images to guide me along. As mentioned in class, this is a dense tale because there is a LOT of information coming at the reader - even to the point that I have to keep going back to double check names and characters - but the images break down the world and build it up in a way that’s easier to consume. I just keep imagining blocks and blocks of text in novella form or epistolary without attached evidence.

      But that isn’t the only function of the story’s graphics. Like Mary Morgan, we’re piecing together the story as it goes. As an audience, we see the buttons, we wonder what they are and why they’re being sent. It allows the reader to invest in the mystery genre as well. We simply aren’t just reading, we’re piecing it together with Morgan. We’re even given the chance to learn that the mystery isn’t over through Morgan deciphering the letter from PC.

      Ultimately, had I to read this on my own, I wouldn’t have. Not because I didn’t appreciate that blends of genre or the use of journal/diary, but rather because its too close to modern day America for me.

The Cautioner's Tale

The Cautioner’s Tale was not a comic book like I was expecting, but a simulation of a journal, with a strong nod to the Victorian epistolary tradition.  Something about all the toxins and metal pieces reminded me of some sort of steam punk reality, and there are many letters, something you would find in many Victorian novels since letter writing was the texting of the day.  It’s not consistent in its form as a journal or diary, along side the newspaper clippings and bits of paper are bottles, signs, and large boxes, gracing the page as if they could be tucked into the physical book along with the paper pages.  If it was important enough, it found its way on the page.  I suppose this makes it less of a journal, but it did fill it with more of the things the main character is seeing and investigating.     

            I found the world building of this story interesting, it draws strong parallels to our world and references very clearly certain current events, but it is still a bit different from our world.  The references to food quality hit me the most.  A restaurant with “poison” in the name and fish in a river that no one in their right mind would eat.  I think this made the world the most real for me, the very low qualities of food and living standards expected from the world and institutions around the characters is sad.  Other devices are a bit heavy handed, like the voting ballot with only one option on it, or the names of the characters that are evil, they’re always full of undesirable words.  But despite never getting much of a full description of the world, I did feel very grounded in it.  Maybe there are a lot of dystopias being made right now, but it felt vivid and real to me.

            The visual style gave us documents and images to examine and get the feel of what the character is collecting and experiencing, but it lacks the visual depth and complexity of a comic book.  The buttons come up very soon and are fairly obvious.  The clues are explained as she receives them, there isn’t much mystery to them.  In looking at the text you can see if it’s supposed to be from a newspaper, a receipt, an official letter, or a scrap of a note added in later.  This gives us knowledge about what’s private and public knowledge, also how risky the information is or what its physically been through to get to the main character, but it doesn’t provide visual poetry or the ability to let our eyes wander and discover new things about the story. 

            Since the entries are written after the main character has already experienced something dangerous or enlightening, the entries feel more like summaries of the past.  We are removed from the action and told what happened by the character, leaving the power of the events a bit flat.  It felt less emotional, I was never anxious that the main character might not make it or had met their match, since almost every entry ends with them resolving the issue they brought up at the beginning.  It’s difficult to keep tension in this format, everything feels like it’s already over and decided, and since the main character is bringing everything to us, we just wait for the next bit of information.  It felt like the character explained what they were trying to figure out and then the clues just appeared, “…I did not expect such blatant confirmation of my path forward as what I received from reading the scholar’s words.”  (Wilburn).  I felt this happened a lot.  Clues, hints, and new leads appearing whenever the story needed them to.  Most of the entries didn’t resemble scenes, and so I did get tired of the same kind of set up to move the plot along.  How she solves the clues is usually remembering an old code she developed years before, so her cleverness or her ability to solve a problem or clue is lost on us.  There’s little creativity or interesting thought that goes into solving the problems presented, making each discovery seem easy.           

-Iris

How genre defines possibilities in the arc

The Cautioner's Tale is both a graphic novel and a mystery, so there is a lot of space and opportunity for the illustrations to guide the reader to the answers and conclusions of the plot. I was a little surprised to find that actually the illustrations were more supplementary, rather than employed in their own right. For example, the box that Mary inherits from Canker Raux is visually rendered, yet Mary spends the better part of a page describing the contents in detail. Similarly, she includes the fanmail she received by magic and also describes and explains the letters, and the mystery of the buttons.

It felt weak to me that she suddenly "remembers" that Canker and she had this secret code they made up as kids, when she realizes she can in fact decide the note inside the box. Convenient revelation that could have been set up better, especially considering she has space for a lot of backstory.

Otherwise, the scrapbook method uses the genre pretty well, the reader discovers the visual clues along with Mary, the author reveals information gleaned in messages from her murdered friends. It's interesting to me that Mary stumbles in the final revelation, the literal puzzle piece to unlock the secret safe, when she decides to trust Gadsby Pork, despite his lecherous tone and swine like appearance. We're glad she did, since it revealed the trove of documents that Ancillary Pawn hid in the wall. This story had a low revelation rate, since so much of what is unknown becomes clear through Mary's musings, it never developed tension or intrigue for me.

R. M. Wilburn could have left more for the readers to figure out, especially considering the possibilities for reader interpretation of illustrations. I ultimately felt the pictures weren't necessary and didn't add anything, it felt like a wasted opportunity.

The Cautioner's Tale - Genre Blending/Visual Keywords

In thinking about what to write about for this blog post, I found myself considering what the genre of The Cautioner's Tale is. Yes, it has the elements for mystery so it's understandable why it would be considered so, yet R.M. Wilburn is not subtle in the slightest about what events this story set in the future alludes to despite the elements of sci-fi (timerox/time travel). So, here I sit thinking about how these genres impact the arc when coupled with the epistolary form in which the story is presented. This brought me to the epigraph, “The Dying Man” by Anonymous Penn in the year 2046 AD as well as the other objects and writing on the page.

Each of these objects lends itself to the genre of mystery as, at the outset, they appear to be random objects (a diner receipt, loose nuts, a puzzle piece, buttons, etc) which could be easily glanced over by readers unfamiliar with the epistolary and graphic novel forms only to find as you continue to read that these are the things which leads to the truth of the events which have taken place and are the visual representation of key words within the narrative. That being said, the physical representation of each of these objects gives each of them far more narrative power than if they were each described in turn. Even moreso, their placement on the title page next the poem describing the economic state of the world (the streets “burdened w/ starving crowds” and “jobs [...] promised are overdue”), the political (“we were bamboozled by a rigged election”), and the social (“our needs are many, but our choices are few”) creates a feeling of dystopia right off the bat. All of these statements give the reader clues about the setting in which the story takes place and compliments the demands the form places on the reader. While the form gives us an experience which is very close to the action of the narrative, it also demands that the reader trust our narrator and what is being told to us and don’t question the laws of the world we’re dropped into. Because of this, when Mary Morgan begins to tell us about timerox and time travel, we as the reader have to accept that this is something which is possible in the future world in which she lives rather than question if this is possible or realistic which is a hurdle often encountered when reading a novel in the traditional narrative form.

All this being said, I think that the genre blending which occurs here benefits from the graphic form in terms of arc overall by creating a more interactive piece as a whole and mimics the mind of Mary Morgan herself (and most writers, if I may be so bold to claim so). While most mysteries are laid out in a certain way in terms of arc (event which requires investigation, clues and investigation, accusation of culprit, etc), the form here bends this rule only slightly. On the whole, rather than a clue being revealed to the reader and MM as the narrative progresses, we are given almost all of the clues right away on the title page. Looking back, all the the pieces are there on that first page, but it’s not until we encounter the objects in the context of the journal that they begin to make sense such as how Rump wants everyone to “button their lips” and this phrase is repeated while buttons are being sent to MM. More often than not, phrases and ideas have to be repeated multiple times before they begin to impress themselves into the mind of a person and we can begin to piece it together with other information we have been given much as how while the phrase “button your lip” was repeated several times, Mary Morgan and myself did not figure out the connection to the buttons being sent to her until after several repetitions of the phrase which lends itself to the limited scope the form gives us while also playing into how the events are allowed to play out in the genres being blended.

The Cautioner's Tale and Learning What Not to Do

The decision to create The Cautioner’s Tale as a graphic novel is what works most in this book. The illustration are beautiful, though they seem a little too arranged, a little too much like pages from my sister’s scrapbooks. The book itself seems a little too arranged. It feels like the author, R. M. Wilburn, is chaperoning the reader conclusions she wants them to reach. We can learn from that, though. We can explore that.

The Cautioner’s Tale is an obvious metaphor and warning about the current political situation in the United States. First, she names the villain Herr Bigly Rump. The current U.S. president is named Trump, though he is often mocked online as tRump. It’s also a sort of American tradition to use German (Herr) to denote evil. This is probably a reference to Nazis and our American forgetfulness that Nazis took their murderous example from the American eugenics movement. Wilburn uses German again later in the book by naming the head of the FBI (and next president) Dastardly Gott, forgetting perhaps that Gott is German for good.

Names are a big deal in the universe of The Cautioner’s Tale, punny and obvious. We  have Ever Hopeful, Juggler Vein, Parsimonious Creed, Ancillary Pawn, and on and on and on. They feel self-consciously clever. They also feel as though the author doesn’t think the reader is clever, and so she must create these names to help us separate the good characters from the evil. This leads to some apparent questions about the intelligence of the main character and the electorate in this universe.

The metaphor and warning of the tale are equally overt. Canker Ranx literally warns that Mary Morgan (the hero) “must destroy gateway to 2016” in a coded message and Mary asks herself “Was this when he learned how (and how not) to tamper with elections” (loc 30-31). The conclusions Wilburn wants the reader to reach are painfully obvious. There are multiple references to a Last Great War that almost destroyed humanity twenty years before the book takes place (2045). Here is the warning: something is going to happen in 2025, and that something is instigated by the election of 2016.

But The Cautioner’s Tale isn’t only a warning that our current universe is going to create the universe of the book. It’s a metaphor of our current universe. Rump is a double for Trump, even down to the promise to “make the world great again” (loc 43), the suggestion of Russian involvement with the involvement of Chain Yankervich, “a tyrant and Evil-doer by all accounts” (loc 25).

Mary Morgan works the clues out just quickly enough to find the next clues. She doesn’t seem able to put them all together until just before the end when she is very conveniently at just the right place. Suddenly her mind works much more quickly than it has anywhere else in the book and she puts all of the clues together to know just what to do.

The Cautioner’s Tale is visually beautiful. But the plot and storytelling are frustrating and obvious. Still, I can learn from this. I can learn what I don’t like and what I don’t want to do. The reader was given a lot of clues in The Cautioner’s Tale, textual clues and visual clues. I learned here that I need to be subtler. I need to trust the intelligence of the reader and that it’s ok if the reader reaches some conclusions I don’t intend. The cleverness of the names really turned me off. This was partially because of the un-subtlety of it, but it was also because there were so many of them. Why would I want to name characters that never appear? That gives the reader too much to keep track of. It also feels like showing off. The metaphor of the book was also quite heavy-handed for my taste. This teaches me that I’d prefer to create metaphors that are more indirect and implied.

No, I didn’t enjoy The Cautioner’s Tale. But I learned from it.