Under the Wing is a collection of short stories by Daniel Garner, who collaborates with his wife, Michelle Garner, under the nom de plume O.G. Rose. (As I understand it, they operate kind of like Lennon and McCartney, in that each piece is primarily written by one of them or the other, but they edit each other’s work and always publish as a team under the combined name.) The opening story, “Heroes,” is available to read online as a kind of teaser for the book, which has given me the wonderful opportunity to write not just a review/preview but an actual analysis of the story, since I can count on you, the reader, to read the text first – it’s a quick read – and then return here for my thoughts on it. So then I don’t have to worry about spoilers or summarize plot points, and you don’t have to take my word about what actually goes on in the story.
Full disclosure: I know Daniel and Michelle. Daniel has interviewed me about metamodernism for the O.G. Rose podcast, and I’ve participated in various other discussions with both of them. When I bought Under the Wing, I had no expectations that the stories would be particularly metamodern. As it turns out, many of them (though not all) gave me the metamodern feels, especially the one I’ve chosen to discuss today.
OK, so assuming you’ve read the story by now, here are my thoughts.
To me, the overall structure of the story is a sort of unusual version of a double frame, a device that I’ve previously identified as a metamodern aesthetic method. Perhaps we can call it a “sideways” double-frame (more on that later). The double-frame, as I’ve employed the concept (borrowed from the theorist Raoul Eshelman), is a literary device in which a deeply human narrative is embedded within a fantasy world-building narrative. The prime example of the double-frame structure that Eshelman provides in his book Performatism is Yan Martel’s novel Life of Pi (2001), which involves a shipwreck survival story that can be understood either as a fantastical tale with magical realism elements or a much more mundane version.
For Eshelman, an effective double-frame narrative compels a reader to choose the fantastical interpretation – the one that is captivating enough to have made the read worthwhile. This forcing of readers to choose the fantastical outer-frame narrative has a specific purpose. It protects the reader from the postmodern tendency to relativize and dilute potential emotional meaning – the dilution postmodernism frequently perpetrates by contextualizing any given artwork within the larger system of other existing artworks and cultural signals in our real world.
Back to “Heroes.” Reading it, one is confronted with the question of whether Eve is delusional or if there is a magical reality in which she really is a superhero, genuinely saving humanity from the supervillains she talks about tracking at school. If “Heroes” were a classic double frame, the story would give the reader a lot of reasons to latch on to the magical interpretation, thus cutting off and protecting the reader’s understanding of the characters’ emotional experience from external (postmodern) contextualization. As this narrative develops, however, it seems more clear – though not entirely so – that there is nothing super-natural going on, only mental illness. And, sadly, the final scene probably confirms such an interpretation.
So, you might reasonably object, how is this a double frame at all? Well, I only claimed that it was a “sideways” double frame, and sort of, at that. What I mean is: What we end up discovering in the final scene is that for Eve, at least, the fantasy frame has been in place all along. Even while she immersed herself in a five-year stretch of domestic bliss with Tom – during which she seems to have mostly suppressed her self-identification as someone extraordinary – a part of her has maintained the narrative structure in which she is a superhero battling evil, Tom is really the supervillain The Bookworm, and their romantic relationship is a temporary game.
In this case, then, the outer frame is Eve’s own fantastical story – as she has authored that story for herself. Even though we, the readers, probably do not buy into Eve’s fantastical version, within her own confused, tragic life, she wills the double frame into being and fully brings it together in our final scene, in a manner that I found strangely courageous. I know it’s weird to speak of a murder-suicide as courageous, but through a metamodern lens, it kind of is! To explain, I’ll start at the beginning of the story and work my way back to its denouement.
Let’s start with the very beginning: the story’s title, “Heroes.” Is there a connection to the David Bowie song of the same name? If you’re not familiar with the song, listen here.
To me, Bowie’s anthem evokes the feeling of a romantic couple who, in spite of various flaws and impossible circumstances, assert – if even “just for one day” – their existential significance. In a kind of proto-metamodern way (it’s from 1977), the narrative of the song, propelled by the driving anthemic musical setting, plants a flag in defense of the interiority of the singer and his beloved. I feel like this effect (actually “affect” works equally well here) is what Eve is pushing for in the O.G. Rose story. It’s as if Eve is compelled to shape her life, with the Bookworm/Tom by her side, into something worthy of the elevation that fiction (or a David Bowie song) provides. She wants to be a character in an epic story, so she strives to become the author of such a story, with her real life serving as the page it’s written on.
Although Tom becomes Eve’s beloved and the central figure in her life, at the beginning of the story he is seemingly her nemesis, named by her The Bookworm – the villain in her real-life superhero comic-book drama. Given that Eve herself seems not to shy away from an intellectual identity, it’s initially odd that “bookworm” would be a negative epithet for her. My reading, however, is that Tom’s major crime is being her match in the brains department. She sets him up as an opponent in a way that is both protection from intimacy and – more spicily – a big flirt gesture.
Once Eve and Tom break the ice in the school library, it quickly becomes clear that they have a soulmates thing going on. (Perhaps Tom is short for “Atom,” which could be a stand-in for Adam… Adam and Eve?) The narrative then jumps ahead five years to a time when Eve and Tom have been living together for some time and are each making progress in their careers and education – admirable yet boring compared to the adrenaline rush of Eve’s earlier self-narration. But we should not forget Eve’s apparent original intentions as she sought Tom in the library. She had a knife. So, one perspective on the story is that it is a tale of a narrowly averted school murder tragedy.
Averted, or more accurately, delayed for five years. The narrator, as a bit of an aside, reveals to us that (for Eve) “undercover missions” typically last five years. (Now that I have David Bowie on my mind, I can’t help but think of another of his songs, the one whose title is, in fact, “Five Years.”) So, from one perspective, Eve and Tom’s entire relationship and marriage made up merely an undercover mission, during which Eve suppressed her superhero identity.
In any case, at the end of those five years, Eve kills Tom with a knife to his torso and then kills herself the same way. Remarkably, Tom’s love for Eve is his primary driving force even in these last dire moments: he uses his final words to urge her to run from him, presumably to distance herself from the crime. Eve seems to snap out of whatever mentality she had going that led her to stab Tom, and makes a futile attempt to stop his bleeding. Accepting that that effort will not succeed, she uses the knife against herself.
I feel that a metamodern reading of the story allows one to see more than tragedy in its conclusion. There is a sense that the interiority of Eve and Tom’s relationship (if you think of the relationship itself as an entity that can have interiority) was more about the epicness of their story together than the longevity of the quotidian version of their lives. Each individual, though, attempted to take care of the other in their last moments: Tom by urging Eve to run from the scene, Eve by attempting to undo the mortal injury she’d inflicted on Tom. Their stories come to completion at once, as one. Though the detail isn’t provided, it’s implicit that after Eve stabs herself she’s likely to fall on top of Tom, and their bodies will be found entwined like that. The last line of the story: “All he ever wanted was a life with her.” In dying with his beloved, he gets his wish. And she gets hers, if her wish was to be a metamodern hero of sorts, with a life transformed into narrative.
As I’ve mentioned, this article is not intended as a review of “Heroes” or of Under the Wing, the story collection it belongs to. It’s an analysis for people who’ve read the story. That having been said, I do heartily recommend the book. Among all of the stories in Under the Wing, “Heroes” is the most metamodern to me, but most of them have at least a bit of the scent of metamodernism. Several of them are similar to “Heroes” in that they play with various genre-fiction conventions and tropes in fresh ways that go beyond the standard expectations of those genres. If you lean towards literary fiction, but enjoy having some superhero, sci-fi, Western and/or dystopian spices thrown into the soup, or if you’re a genre-fiction fan who prefers reading authors who invest in the depth and complexity of their characters, Under the Wing is for you. After enjoying Under the Wing, you may find yourself compelled to explore the larger O.G. Rose empire, which you will discover includes not only fiction, but many philosophical explorations in both book and video-conversation format. Although I expect that an interview of Daniel and Michelle Garner would reveal interesting connections between the fiction and the philosophical work, the fiction definitely stands on its own, and more important, explores the human condition in those ways in which fiction excels over philosophy. It’s a collection that deserves a place on your shelf!
