Coda Read

[steepholm]

I love me a ghost story coda. Their general purpose of course is to disrupt the border between the story world and our own by suggesting, explicitly or not (not being the classier option), that we can't simply shut the book and pack our fears safely away - that some may leak out.

Often codas take the form of reversion to a frame story, in which the main narrative has been related as a diverting fiction or country tale, only to have some unexpected evidence of its truth appear once all seems safely concluded. That device has probably been overused, though.

My favourite coda will probably always be the final paragraph (or really, sentence) of M.R. James's 'Casting the Runes', which has an austere minimalism that would have made John Cage proud:

Only one detail shall be added. At Karswell's sale a set of Bewick, sold with all faults, was acquired by Harrington. The page with the woodcut of the traveller and the demon was, as he had expected, mutilated. Also, after a judicious interval, Harrington repeated to Dunning something of what he had heard his brother say in his sleep: but it was not long before Dunning stopped him.

That said, I also like the far more garrulous use of the frame story in Lafcadio Hearn's retelling of 'The Romance of the Peony Lantern', under the title 'A Passional Karma'. It ought not to work, because unlike the slightly trite device of discovering some evidence that the story was true after all, it does quite the opposite - seemingly mocking the narrator for having been drawn in by the fiction. And yet, this still manages to give a creepy effect, at least to me, for reasons I can't quite formulate. Perhaps you can?

Anyway, I recommend the story, coda and all.

Comments

[asakiyume]

I hadn't heard the term "coda" for this aspect of the frame story of a ghost story, but I like it very much, and what you wrote intrigued me, so I read "A Passional Karma."

I loved the story and the frame story--I liked the Lafcadio Hearn self-insert character and the friend character talking about Shinzaburo's character and who among the story's cast was worthy (O-Yone).

I didn't have quite the same reaction to the coda; for me it felt more like it was needling the reader for what it imagines is the reader's desire for the confirming evidence of the truth of the story (oh you expected we'd see the graves? Well no! So there!) Sort of a deliberate breaking of tropes to point out [what the writer sees as] their silliness. ... And yet of course Lafcadio Hearn really loved ghost stories, so that doesn't seem right....

Maybe--getting into the spirit of your reaction to the ending--it's because the double fakeout makes it possible for us to imagine a third switch back. "It was all just a story--or was it?! No, it was. Just a story. For real." ... makes you end up thinking ... or was it?

Or maybe there's something disturbing about this story that's transcended centuries and national boundaries, a story of this powerful love that for its part transcends lifetimes ... all ending in a dingy cemetery, no actual remains of the love. Maybe the erasure is horrifying?

[steepholm]

Thank you for that - I think you nailed what I was trying to get at better than I did!