Subject: (urth) Ardis Dahl: American Monster

From: Robert Borski <rborski at charter.net>
Date: Tue, 07 May 2002 04:34:15 +0000

It is only at the end of "Seven American Nights" that Nadan Jaffarzadeh is
finally able to glimpse the totally-revealed body of his lover, Ardis Dahl,
and this act in itself requires some trickery--Nadan must ignite an
alcoholic drink with his laser pistol, viewing by the blue flames it
generates her exposed glory. Far from enjoying the vista, however, Nadan
deems Ardis a monster and kills her. But what exactly does he see that
prompts this, and is it even valid? Quoting again from Kathryn Locey's NYRSF
essay: "Nadan's last perception of Ardis is extremely suspect because he has
seen her face and clothed body by daylight, and felt her in the darkness as
they made love. What hideous deformity could she possibly have concealed
from him?"

Indeed. On my first reading of "Seven American Nights" in 1978, I wondered
if Ardis might not be a man. She's tall for a woman, and popular accounts
from barroom anecdotes to movies like _The Crying Game_ make it seem as if
such sexual deception is at least possible, especially in the early stages
of a relationship. However, in my readings since, I've abandoned this
notion, not only because I believe Nadan would have discovered her concealed
manhood before the above climactic moment, but also because of Bobby O'
Keene's earlier-tendered remark, "Come and see me when you're ready for
something more wholesome." Perhaps he means consentual male-male sex is more
wholesome than inadvertent male-tranny sex, but I doubt it.

This led me to re-examine Locey's use of the term "hideous deformity."
Because in fact Nadan never mentions anything about a literal deformity,
although I suppose it's inferable enough given his reaction about how,
contaminated by his contact with her, he can now never return "to corrupt
the clean wombs of our enduring race" or even touch the miniatures of his
heritage should his mission to retrieve them succeed. Plus we have the
various deformed Americans Nadan has witnessed in his week abroad:
hunchbacks, dwarves, clubfoots, a woman with supernumerary teeth, etc., etc.
Still, given all of this, it's hard to imagine anything comparable--at least
that would provoke as violent a reaction in Nadan as whatever he sees does.

I would therefore like to suggest something else to you. Is it possible that
what Nadan actually notices by the ignited arrack is the burn caused by his
own laser pistol and that Ardis Dahl is the werebeast he attempts, but
fails, to kill on the night of the first egg?

Recall, for starters, that when Nadan goes out looking for Ardis's place of
residence (for he's already come under her spell at the theater, where she's
played Ellen in Gore Vidal's "Visit to a Small Planet"--note too how Nadan
adjudges her to have a "wild and innocent affinity for the supernatural"),
the moon is full and bright. Nadan senses something following him, although
he also admits it might just be the effects of the possible
hallucinogen-laced egg. Finding the home of Ardis's parents, Nadan knocks on
the door, and is greeted by Ardis's shotgun-wielding father. Nadan devises a
ruse about being lost and offers the couple a silver rial if they'll
accommodate him with a bed and breakfast, but is refused, although Mrs. Dahl
appears tempted. Claims Mr. Dahl, "I don't dare let a stranger in. Not with
no one here but my wife and myself." But is he really afraid of this
benighted Persian, and enough so to spurn a silver rial? Or does he simply
wish to protect the disclosure of his daughter's possible werebeast nature
should she return? Possibly even the shotgun is meant to protect them from
her--although given that he allegedly sells maps to the interior with its
fabled hoards of treasure, perhaps he merely hopes to protect himself from
thieves or brigands.

At any rate Nadan is about to leave (the Dahls having locked their door to
him) when he turns and notices a creature on the very top of the Dahl
residence. The creature immediately attacks him and Nadan fires his pistol
at it. When Nadan comes to--for he's knocked unconscious by the falling
creature--he's able to examine the beast, which he believes he's killed.
"When I glimpsed it on the roof it had seemed a feral dog, like the one I
had shot in the park. When it lay dead before me, I had thought it a human
being. In the moonlight I saw it was neither, or both." In the first draft
of my NYRSF essay, "Wolves in the Fold," I pronounce the beast a werewolf
and will do so now again. But perhaps more saliently the details provided by
Nadan to conclude his description of the monster are most curious: "It was a
female, with small, flattened breasts still apparent on either side of the
burn channel." But how would this story be any different if the werewolf was
male? On the surface it wouldn't--unless Wolfe is trying to make the
somewhat quixotic distinction that monsters come in both sexes. And notice
the specific site and language Wolfe uses to describe the wound: a "burn
channel" that runs *between* the breasts. Would such a channel (or its
healing scar), nestled where it is, be detectable several days later in the
dark by an importunate lover? A female colleague of mine with a zipper scar
from heart bypass surgery tells me says it's quite possible, "depending on
the nature of the foreplay, and perhaps even then," that such a scar would
pass unnoticed. And we don't know how badly the beast is actually wounded or
if laser burns cauterize the nerves so there's little post-blast pain.
There's also an onomastic link between "burn channel" and Ardis, which
derives from the Latin word for burning (ardent)--plus the laser link
itself, the weapon revealing the result of its own earlier firing.

Nadan, of course, believes he's killed the creature, but when he goes back
to see if he can find the body the next day he finds no trace. This may also
be part of the romantic embellishment on his account, and though he persists
in claiming he's killed the creature right on up until the journal's
penultimate paragraph, he also has trouble shaking first impressions,
calling the actor Bobby O' Keene Kreton all throughout "Seven American
Nights." Moreover, in describing his reaction to the discovery of Ardis's
secret, Nadan pens the following: "I now know that the thing I killed before
Ardis's father's house is real." But how and why does he know this? What
about Ardis leads him to conclude that the thing he "killed" is genuine? Is
it the burn channel he finally sees between her breasts--even as he attempts
to disassociate himself from bestiality by maintaining he killed the monster
he now knows is real?

As the hallucinogen in the final egg begins to take its effects (and I do
firmly believe that it's the sixth egg that contains the drug), Nadan sees
what we might describe as the peri and the djinn: Ardis, small and bright,
stepping from the candle flame, and a hairy face coming through the
window--but both as dynamically linked as the single particle that may be
either a positron or an electron, depending on its direction. And while in
Nadan's heart he may prefer the peri version, it's a heart illumed with
darkness now, and home to other things.

Robert Borski

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From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Date: Tue, 07 May 2002 15:46:13 +0000

Robert Borski's heroine as werwolf theory seems very sound.

>fails, to kill on the night of the first egg?

FWIW, this has similarity to a bit in URTH, wherein Severian is attacked in
the dark on the ship Tzadkiel.  As no doubt everyone here recalls, "Idas"
the albino (actually an undine juvenile) is the first assassin Severian
discovers, but Gunnie-the-love-interest was another one, and Purn was the
third (the one bitten).  Point: Gunnie was the one who was burned when
Severian fired his laser pistol against the assassins, and the burn covered
her chest and abdomen.

=mantis=

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From: David DiGiacomo <david at slack.com>
Date: Wed, 08 May 2002 17:55:58 +0000

>fails, to kill on the night of the first egg?

No, it's not possible, because...

>... in describing his reaction to the discovery of Ardis's
>Ardis's father's house is real."

If he had seen the laser burn, it would have been obvious beyond any
plausible dissociation that he had *not* killed the thing earlier in the
week.

Then there are the "few filthy rags of clothing" - Ardis would never have
dressed that way.

>What about Ardis leads him to conclude that the thing he "killed" is genuine?

I'm not sure, but I think he would have noticed a "blunt muzzle".

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From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Date: Wed, 08 May 2002 20:44:13 +0000

>I'm not sure, but I think he would have noticed a "blunt muzzle".

You present your case well.  It does seem odd, the disconnect between
killed/not-killed and "gone."

Then again, I hope we can agree that there is some kind of linkage between
Ardis and that werewolf which Nadan blasted.  And that there were no
remains of the werewolf when Nadan checked later--it was "gone."

Beyond that, we get into the murky realm of lycanthropy: transmitted by
film, by books, and by history, we have various traditions.  Some of them
match up to each other, some of them are at odds with each other.

When Nadan fails to find remains of the beast, we are invited to think
along two tracks: that the thing was imaginary (a  hallucination from the
LSD), or that the thing crawled away.

With Borski's theory in mind, it seems plain that the solution is a third
way, a hidden fork in the fork of the path.  The critter was killed, and
being killed it disintegrated like a vampire with a stake through it.  The
either/or nature of imaginary/escaped gives way to something like "both":
the creature was "imaginary" rather than corporeal as we know it, and it
did vanish like a soap bubble popping.

I hope you can see where I'm leading with this.  That Ardis might be
physically sleeping in her room, or wherever, and her spirit-self werewolf
goes out running around.  (Like an Id-Monster, if you will.)  The two are
separate, but linked, such that when the werewolf gets lasered and
implodes, Ardis gets the burn . . . even though she is physically nowhere
near the place where the laser is used.

The werewolf is thus like a witch's familiar, in some senses.

What I have just described is not the standard wolfman of motion picture
tradition, but I believe that it is supported in the older written
tradition.

=mantis=

Sirius Fiction
booklets on Gene Wolfe, John Crowley
PEACE: a timeline WITH dates! Come see!
http://www.siriusfiction.com/

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From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Date: Thu, 09 May 2002 20:12:26 +0000

>I'm not sure, but I think he would have noticed a "blunt muzzle".

First, I would like to say that I'm glad to see Robert actively posting
again, and look forward to more.

Second, as mantis has pointed out, David's arguments are valid. I have
always been puzzled by the nature of Ardis's "deformity", if she had one. I
concur with Locey that any significant defect could hardly have gone
unnoticed during the course of their coupling in the dark, so her secret had
to have been detectable only (or most easily) by sight. There must also be
some connection between Ardis and the werebeast earlier killed by Nadan, but
they do not have to be the same being. Ardis need only be the same _type_ of
creature.

Nadan spends two paragraphs relating Osman Aga's account of such a creature
as attacked him, but does not then name it. By Aga's account, such creatures
were the end result of genetic mutations caused by American scientific
manipulation of the food supply, to keep food incorruptible as long as
possible, and to reach market sooner. The werebeasts resulted from the
genetic damage caused by the concentrated chemicals found in the human
corpses which were being eaten by some people. So, the nature of the beast
is that of some sort of ghoul.

On page 385 (Ace pb) Nadan calls the thing that attacked him a "druj". Druj
means "lie" or "deceiver", and in early Avesta texts is a female
personification of wickedness and evil thought to spread corruption in the
world, inherently unclean. (Which is why Nadan viewed himself as unfit to
lie with decent women or touch sacred works of art.) There is also a
connection between the druj and corpses.

Nadan relates a dream in which he and Ardis are walking at night:

    "One of the hideous creatures I shot night before last was pursuing
us--or rather, lurking about us, for it appeared first to the left of us,
then to the right, silhouetted against the night sky."

This implies that such creatures fly, as does the fact that Ardis "sprang
up" when he lit the alcohol. Also, even a werewolf can't "leap" from a
three-storied building without paying Newton his due, but a winged being
could. I don't recall that werewolves can fly, but a similar American
werebeast might. According to Aga's account, the type of werebeast that
attacked Nadan had only been generated since the genetic pollution
occasioned in America during the previous century. How can that fact be
reconciled with the long-standing tradition of the garden-variety werewolf?
I don't see how it can--probability is certainly against it, but perhaps
Science, run amuck, has created what Fantasy only knew as nightmare, but
with wings. In the antepenultimate paragraph of the journal, Nadan writes:

    "Its [America's] eagle is dead--Ardis is the proper symbol of its rule."

In the same paragraph he refers to America as a "corpse-country". The sense
of uncleanness he finds in Ardis is associated with corpses. Werewolves
don't eat corpses, do they?

-Roy

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