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4.0 out of 5 stars
Shepard's Existential Finish to Griaule, June 10, 2010
This review is from: The Taborin Scale (Hardcover)
The culmination of the "Dragon Griaule" series of American magic realism tales for which Shepard is probably best-known that include "The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter," "The Father of Stones," and the original story in the series (though, chronologically within the tales' timeline, the one that immediately precedes this one), "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule." All are marked by their Latin American magic realism influence and their milieu, featuring a 19th century culture ensconced in a pseudo-Central-American landscape that's one step away from our reality. In this story, several characters are magically transported to their own near future to witness the enormous (think landscape-sized) dragon Griaule, allegedly dead, and under whose hulking sides and upon whose back entire villages are built, momentarily come back to life.
The story's viewpoint character is George Taborin, a collector of dragon ephemera (who appears as a minor character and textual "source" in earlier tales in the series). Taborin and a prostitute acquaintance named Sylvia are transported to a low-lying plain where a jungle is regrowing over what they soon recognize as the Carbonales Valley, the site of the city Teocinte and the realm thought to be under Griaule's previous influence. Apparently it is some time in the future, but within the bounds of this story, the plain becomes an existential landscape in which several human dramas are playing out. Taborin discovers others similarly transported. Griaule is keeping them all separated for several months, allowing each to proceed through a basic human moment of one sort or another in the process. Taborin rescues a little girl, Peony, from one of these groups. Peony has been horribly abused both physically and sexually, and Taborin, the battered girl and the prostitute Sylvia form a little semi-family where Peony is allowed to heal in a small manner. Eventually, they, and all on the plain, are herded back to an amphitheater to watch the ancient dragon Griaule's final magical transformation unfold. Taborin finds, as he has suspected all along, that he himself has not escaped being part of Griaule's exercise in manipulation merely because he is aware of the dragon's propensities.
Shepard's dragon stories revolve around fate and free will. Characters again and again think they're acting in either a noble, a self-sacrificing or self-serving, or a merely free manner, when in fact they're actually serving the dragon's purposes all along. The stories raise the disquieting notion that there's an alternative to a universe of supernatural fate or blind atheistic determinism. It may be that fate exists, but is actually EVIL and has a positive will to use us, abuse us, toy with us, and destroy us. The Griaule stories are kind of an anti-Tolkien take on the world: an immense, emotional will that has no care for human desires and needs (other than a positive intent to use them to its purpose) shapes our reality and the very landscape in which we move. We can't escape it because we're part of it, a thought in its immense mind, whether we like this fact or not. In this world, Griaule's mere whims are a far greater force than the most complex human plan for happiness or salvation, and humans always make themselves, whether consciously or inadvertently, into means toward the dragon's ends.
The beauty and subversion of the dragon stories is that Shepard always goes for the emotional experiences in which we WANT to surrender to fate, most notably love, and has Griaule twist these most basic human foundations for his dragonly purposes. Here, Taborin's greatest desire is to have a family to care for, and Griaule gives him a parody of what he wants in the form of the blasted threesome of Taborin, the prostitute, and the battered little girl whom they both come to love.
Shepard suggests that all families are just that: a gathering of weather-beaten souls brought together by genetics, chance, historic forces, or what-have-you and that humans, desperate for love and meaning, make themselves into families in order to survive a little longer in the harsh world and find at least some temporary individual meaning in love and self-sacrifice. These basic urges (we feel we are "fated" to fall in love with our "soul mate," say, or that, whatever moral reasoning we may employ, we have an existential urge to rescue the young from the depredations of evil people) are ultimately revealed as the powerful tools the dragon uses to get us to work its will. It's at these emotional touchpoints with fate that humans are at their most malleable, putty in the hands of fate - but without these emotions and desires, without love, hope, altruism, humans are nothing more than dust moving through a dusty world.
But Shepard gives us a bit of dark hope in this morass of gloom. The dragon NEEDS us to think its thoughts and work its will. So while we can't escape becoming means to an end, the harder we struggle to remain an end in ourselves, to make our individuality matter and mean something in the universe, the better tools we become for fate. It's by resisting the urge to go along, by fighting against an inevitable smaller fate, that we most completely serve the larger purposes of the universe. Whether those purposes are good or ill, we can never know -- probably ill, Shepard suggests. But the dragon stories remind us that the purpose is there. We live in a teleological universe that perversely refuses to reveal what principle it serves, but makes liberal use of us toward its own ends, nonetheless.
In "The Taborin Scale," we get a glimpse of Griaule's ultimate plan, or at least the method he is using to spread his influence. In a manner similar to Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" (with which this story shares several thematic similarities), it's an existential experiment for Griaule. The humans on the jungle plain serve as a sort of "test" group for the dragon to comprehend human drama under the most extreme and cut-off circumstances. We inevitably fall into family groups, some workable, some destructive. Taborin, who has had a loveless, childless marriage before, finally gets his greatest desire - a wife who sort of loves him and a child who is sort of his - and, in the end, he proves himself worthy of this love. This worthiness, Shepard suggests, may not mean squat in the larger universe - it probably doesn't -- but it does mean something, and it has to be enough -- because these moments of doing the right thing in small ways, of showing and receiving the love of others, however mixed-up and tainted by self-interest and sexual desire, are the only meaning in life that we're ever going to get.
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