Danse Macabre (56 page)

*One reason for the success of Marvel's Spiderman when he burst on the comics scene in the late fifties may have been his vulnerability; he was and is an engaging exception to the standard comic-book formula. There is something winning in his vulnerability as Peter Parker and in his frequent klutziness as Spiderman. After being bitten by that radioactive spider, Peter originally felt no holy desire to fight crime; he decided instead to make a bundle in showbiz. Before long, however, he discovers a truth which is bitter to him and amusing to the reader: no matter how great you looked on the Sullivan show, Marine Midland Bank still won't cash a check made out to The Amazing Spiderman. Such touches of realism laced with rue can be traced to Stan Lee, Spiderman's creator and the man probably most responsible for keeping the comic book from going the way of the pulps and the dime novels in the sixties and seventies.

At the other end of the spectrum are the characters of fantasy who are either powerless and discover power within themselves ( as Thomas Covenant discovers it in Stephen Donaldson's remarkable
Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever
trilogy, or as Frodo discovers it in Tolkien's epic tale of the Rings), or characters who lose power and then find it again, as Scott Carey does in
The Shrinking Man
.

Horror fiction, as we've said before, is one small circular area in the larger circle of fantasy, and what is fantasy fiction but tales of magic? And what are tales of magic but stories of power? One word nearly defines the other. Power is magic; power is potency. The opposite of potency is impotence, and impotence is the loss of the magic. There is no impotence in the stories of the sword and sorcery genre, nor in those stories of Batman and Superman and Captain Marvel which we read as children and then—hopefully—gave up as we moved on to more challenging literature and wider views of what the life experience really is. The great theme of fantasy fiction is not holding the magic and wielding it ( if so, Sauron, not Frodo, would have been the hero of Tolkien's Rings cycle); it is—or so it seems to me—finding the magic and discovering how it works.

And getting back to the Matheson novel, shrinking itself is an oddly arresting concept, isn't it? Tons of symbolism come immediately to mind, most of it revolving around the potency/impotency thing . . . sexual and otherwise. In Matheson's book, shrinking is most important because Scott Carey begins by perceiving size as power, size as potency . . . size as magic. When he begins to shrink, he begins to lose all three-or so he believes until his perceptions change. His reaction to his loss of power, potency, and magic is most commonly a blind, bellowing rage:

"What do you think I'm going to do?" he burst out. "Go on letting them
play
with me? Oh, you haven't
been
there, you haven't
seen
. They're like kids with a new toy. A shrinking man. Godawmighty, a shrinking man! It makes their damn eyes light up . . . Like Thomas Covenant's constant cries of "By hell!" in the Donaldson trilogy, Scott's rage does not hide his impotency but highlights it, and it is Scott's fury which in a large part makes him such an interesting, believable character. He is not Conan or Superman ( Scott bleeds plenty before escaping his cellar prison, and as we watch him go ever more frantically about the task of trying to escape, we suspect at times that he is more than half-mad) or Doc Savage. Scott doesn't always know what to do. He fumbles the ball frequently, and when he does, he goes on to do what most of us would probably do under the circumstances: he has the adult equivalent of a tantrum.

In fact, if we regard Scott's shrinking as a symbol for any incurable disease (and the progress of any incurable disease entails a kind of power loss which is analogous to shrinking), we see a pattern which psychologists would outline pretty much as Matheson wrote it . . . only the outline came years later. Scott follows this course, from disbelief to rage to depression to final acceptance, almost exactly. As with cancer patients, the final trick seems to be to accept the inevitable, perhaps to find fresh lines of power leading back into the magic. In Scott's case, in the case of many terminal patients, the final outward sign of this is an admission of the inevitable, followed by a kind of euphoria.

We can understand Matheson's decision to use flashbacks in order to get to "the good stuff" early on, but one wonders what might have happened if he had given us the story in a straight line. We see Scott's loss of power in several widely spaced episodes: he is chased by teenagers at one point—they think, and why not, that he is just a little kid—and at another he hitches a ride with a man who turns out to be a homosexual. He begins to feel an increasing disrespect from his daughter Beth, partly because of the "might makes right" idea that works unobtrusively but powerfully in even the most enlightened parent-child relationships ( or, we could say, might makes power . . . or might makes magic), but perhaps mostly because his steady shrinking causes Beth to have to constantly restructure her feelings about her father, who ends up living in a dollhouse before his fall into the cellar. We can even blackly visualize Beth, who doesn't really understand what's happening, inviting her friends in on a rainy day to play with her daddy.

But Scott's most painful problems are with Lou, his wife. They are both personal and sexual, and I think that most men, even today, tend to identify the magic most strongly with sexual potency. A woman may not want to but she can; a man may want to and find he cannot. Bad news. And when Scott is 4'1" tall, he comes home from the medical center where he has been undergoing tests and walks straight into a situation where the loss of sexual magic becomes painfully evident:

Louise looked up, smiling. "You look so nice and clean," she said. It was not the words or the look on her face; but suddenly he was terribly conscious of his size. Lips twitching into the semblance of a smile, he walked over to the couch and sat down beside her, instantly sorry that he had.

She sniffed. "Mmmmm, you smell nice," she said . . .

"You
look
nice," he said. "Beautiful."

"Beautiful!" She scoffed. "Not me."

He leaned over abruptly and kissed her warm throat. She raised her left hand and stroked his cheek slowly.

"So nice and smooth," she murmured.

He swallowed . . . was she actually talking to him as if he were a boy?

And a few minutes later:

He let breath trickle slowly from his nostrils.

"I guess it . . . would be rather grotesque anyway . . . . It'd be like . . ."

"Honey, please." She wouldn't let him finish. "You're making it worse than it is."

"Look at me," he said. "How much worse can it get?" Later on, in another flashback, we see Scott as voyeur, spying on the babysitter Louise has hired to care for Beth. In a series of comic-horrible scenes, Scott turns the pimply, overweight babysitter into a kind of masterbatory dream goddess. In his doubling back to powerless early adolescence, Matheson is able to show us just how much of the sexual magic Scott has lost. But at a carnival some weeks later—Scott is a foot and a half tall at this point—he meets Clarice, a sideshow midget. And in his encounter with Clarice, we have our clearest indication of Matheson's belief that the lost magic can be found again; that the magic exists on many levels and thus becomes the unifying force that makes macrocosm and microcosm one and the same. When he first meets Clarice, Scott is a bit taller than she, and in her trailer he finds a world which is once more in perspective. It is an environment where he can reassert his own power:

Breath stopped. It was his world, his very own world—chairs and a couch he could sit on without being engulfed; tables he could stand beside and reach across instead of walk under; lamps he could switch on and off, not stand futilely beneath as if they were trees. And—almost needless to relate—he also rediscovers the sexual magic with Clarice in an episode which is both pathetic and touching. We understand he will lose this magic as well, sinking away from Clarice's level until she is also a giant to him, and while these episodes are somewhat softened by the flashback form, the point is nevertheless made: what can be found once can be found again, and the incident of Clarice most clearly justifies the novel's odd but strangely powerful ending: ` . . . he thought: If nature existed on endless levels, so also might intelligence . . . Scott Carey ran into his new world, searching." Not, we devoutly hope, to be eaten by the first garden slug or amoeba to cross his path. In the movie version, which Matheson also wrote, Scott's final line is a triumphant "I still exist!" accompanied by shots of nebulae and exploding galaxies. I asked him if this had religious connotations, or perhaps reflected an early interest in life after death (a subject which has become more and more important in Matheson's later work; see
Hell House
and
What
Dreams May Come
). Matheson comments: "Scott Carey's 'I still exist,' I think, only implied a continuum between macroscopic and microscopic, not between life and life after death. Interestingly, I was on the verge of doing a rewrite on
The Fantastic Voyage
, which Columbia is supposed to be making. I couldn't get involved in it because it was so technical and I would rather be involved with character now, but it was like a small continuation of the end of
The
Shrinking Man
—into the microscopic world with rod and gun." Overall, we can say that
The Shrinking Man
is a classic survival story; there is really only one character, and the questions here are elemental: food, shelter, survival, destruction of the Nemesis (the Dionysian force in Scott's mostly Apollonian cellar world). It is by no means a tremendously sexy book, but sex is at least dealt with on a level more thoughtful than the Shell Scott wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am level that was the common one for paperback originals in the fifties. Matheson was an important figure in pioneering the right of science fiction and fantasy writers to deal with sexual problems in a realistic and sensitive way; others involved in the same struggle ( and it
was
a struggle) would have included Philip José Farmer, Harlan Ellison, and, perhaps most importantly of all, Theodore Sturgeon. It is hard to believe now what a furor was caused by the concluding pages of Sturgeon's
Some of Your Blood
, when it is revealed exactly how the vampire has been obtaining his supply ( "The moon is full," he writes both wistfully and chillingly to his girl friend in the book's final paragraph, "and I wish I had some of your blood."), but the furor happened. We may wish that Matheson had dealt with the sexual angle a little less solemnly, but in light of the times, I think we can applaud the fact that he dealt with the sexual angle at all.

And as a fable of losing power and finding it,
The Shrinking Man
ranks as one of the finest fantasies of the period we've been discussing. And I don't want to leave you with the impression that I'm only talking here about sexual power and sexual potency. There are tiresome critics—the half-baked Freudians, mostly—who want to relate all of fantasy and horror fiction back to sex; one explanation for the conclusion of
The Shrinking Man
which I heard at a party in the fall of 1978—I'll not mention the name of the woman whose theory this was, but if you read science fiction, you'd know the name—maybe bears repeating, since we're on this. In symbolic terms, this woman said, spiders represent the vagina. Scott finally kills his Nemesis, the black widow ( the most vaginal of all spiders) by impaling it on a pin ( the phallic symbol, get it, get it?). Thus, this critic went on, after failing at sex with his wife, succeeding at first with the carnival midget Clarice and then losing her, Scott symbolically kills his own sex drive by impaling the spider. This is his last sexual act before escaping the cellar and achieving a wider freedom.

All of this was well-meaning bullshit, but bullshit is still bullshit and will never be mistaken for McDonald's Secret Sauce. I bring it up only to point out that it is the sort of bullshit that a lot of fantasy and horror writers have had to labor under . . . most of it spread by people who believe either secretly or openly that the horror writer must be suffering from madness to a greater or a lesser degree. The further view of such folks is that the writer's books are Rorschach inkblots that will eventually reveal the author's anal, oral, or genital fixation. In writing about the largely scoffing reaction that Leslie Fiedler's
Love and Death in the American Novel
received when it was published in 1960, Wilfrid Sheed adds, "Freudian interpretations [are] always greeted by guffaws." Not much bad news at that, when you remember that even the most staid novelists are regarded as a bit peculiar by their neighbors . . . but the horror novelist is always going to have to face what I think of as the couch questions, I guess. And most of us are perfectly normal. Heh-heh-heh.

Freudian huggermugger set aside,
The Shrinking Man
can be seen as just a pretty good story which happens to deal with the interior politics of power . . . or, if you like (and I do), the interior politics of magic. And Scott's killing of the spider is meant to show us that the magic is not dependent on size but upon mind and heart. If it stands considerably taller than other books in the genre ( small pun much intended), and far above other books where tiny people battle beetles and praying mantises and such ( Lindsay Gutteridge's
Cold War in a Country
Garden
comes to mind), it is because Matheson couches his story in such intimate and riveting terms-and because he is ultimately so persuasive. *

*This examination of lives in microcosm continues to hold a fascination for writers and readers; early this year, Macmillan published
Small World
by Tabitha King, a malign comedy of manners revolving around a fabulously expensive presidential dollhouse, a nymphomaniacal presidential daughter, and an overweight mad scientist who is as pitiable as he is frightening. Published in 1981, it lies outside the temporal borders of this book, which is probably just as well; the lady is my wife, and my view would be prejudiced. So I'll only add that my prejudiced view is that
Small World
is a wonderful addition to this HO-scale subgenre.