Today marks something a bit
different than normal here on the blog. The piece below from Barry is literary analysis
and not a review. Therefore, there are spoilers present in the material below…..
PORTRAIT
IN PLASMA: MOTIFS IN THE DARK LADY
by Barry Ergang
Originally published in the fanzine Resnick at Zineth,
Vol. 1, No. 2, Summer 1991
The densest, most complex book he has written since the
superb Walpurgis III,
containing elements of science fiction, fantasy, and mystery, The Dark Lady
is perhaps Mike Resnick’s most ambitious achievement so far. Like a good poem,
it often suggests more than it actually says, thus offering the reader multiple
possible interpretations. Two dominant motifs, acquisitiveness and
contradiction, and a lesser but no less important one, artistic creation,
thread their ways through the story. An examination of them may serve to
illuminate it--and raise additional questions for the reader to contemplate.
ACQUISITIVENESS
In The Dark Lady, Resnick has created as acquisitive
a cast of characters as any this side of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,
some of them as ruthless as Fred C. Dobbs when it comes to gaining their
objectives. Tai Chong, the head of the Far London branch of Claiborne
Galleries, seeks to acquire artwork that she can sell to collectors. She is not
above receiving goods stolen by Valentine Heath, if the transaction will assure
a healthy profit. We are also given the impression that her activism on behalf
of alien rights is more for self-aggrandizement than from any sincere desire to
accomplish anything for aliens, as suggested by her conceited eagerness to
know whether her name was mentioned and her picture shown on news broadcasts
(p. 207). Living an almost reclusive life, having severed ties with
what few family members he still has, the wealthy misanthrope Malcolm
Abercrombie is fiercely determined to purchase every existing portrait of the
Dark Lady for his collection, regardless of the aesthetic value of the
painting or the cost. Valentine Heath describes himself as an opportunist,
then admits to being a thief who specializes in art, jewelry, “and a number of
other beautiful things” (p. 106). He is perhaps the most honest human in the
book, despite his profession, because he is the least hypocritical. He steals
to acquire the means to maintain his opulent lifestyle, and has no illusions
about the mass of men.
Reuben Venzia’s desire is abstract by
comparison, but no less eagerly sought for all that. Venzia wants nothing less
than the secret of life and death, the truth about the afterlife--what Heath
calls “a heavenly insurance policy” (p. 190)--and demonstrates an almost
Faustian willingness to do anything to learn it.
In the beginning, Leonardo has no desire
for personal wealth or glory. He wants only to further his education and to
bring honor to the House of Crsthionn. Among his race, the Bjornn, the desires
of the individual are subordinate to those of the community, one’s House in particular.
Viewed from the human perspective Leonardo’s eventual acquisitiveness--his
quest for the Dark Lady to determine if she is the Mother of All Things--is
innocent in that it is spiritual in nature. But from the Bjornn perspective he
has become corrupted by humans. As Kobrynski’s shack is irreversibly contaminated
when Venzia briefly opens the door during the plasma painting episode, so
Leonardo is subtly contaminated by his association with men. He admits that his
exposure to humans has opened him, however inadvertently, to a consideration
of his private wants. In the end he is forced to become a thief--the pinnacle
of acquisitiveness--to survive in a culture not his own and that he would
repudiate if he had a choice. His need to talk to the Dark Lady to learn who
and what she is and what she might want of him is a quest to satisfy personal
desires. He has learned too much of human worlds and ways, has been an
unwitting participant in acts contrary to his House’s teachings, and thus for
all his morality is impure by Bjornn standards.
What is it the
Dark Lady herself wants? We can only speculate. Perhaps she seeks rest, peace,
transcendence of a sort unknown to mortals, relief from her immortality in
painting and sculpture, and finds it only when Kobrynski recreates her image.
His method, unlike the methods of other artists, is finite and fleeting. He
does not capture her for all time, with her expression of profound sadness. His
medium creates for a flicker, then the image is gone forever. He has just
enough time to give her a smile before the portrait in plasma dissipates and
vanishes. Perhaps the gesture signifies a kind of iconoclasm, Kobrynski imbuing
the Dark Lady with the quality of human transience rather than according her
the status of goddess or myth-figure or possession. Like Leonardo, she has
always been an outsider, remote from men even as she walked among them and took
some of them as lovers. It is reasonable, therefore, to consider that she seeks
Leonardo as a fellow outsider who can understand her in ways that men cannot,
who has both the objectivity and empathy that humans are incapable of.
CONTRADICTION
“We’re all
thieves,” Valentine Heath tells Leonardo (p. 117). “I just happen to be an
honest one.”
When Leonardo
asks if the remark is not a contradiction in terms, Heath tells him, “Of
course. Whoever said that a man can’t be contradictory?”
And indeed,
contradiction is another dominant motif in The Dark Lady. Although
engaged in dishonest activities, Heath is remarkably open and straightforward
about what he is, what he does, and why he does it. He also knows that many men
who think of themselves as honest are not. Tai Chong campaigns vigorously for
alien rights but does little more than pay lip-service to the concept unless there
is something to be gained from it--i.e., personal publicity or money from
clients like Abercrombie who can use Leonardo’s services--and who knowingly
receives stolen merchandise from Heath despite the self-righteous veneer she
maintains. Abercrombie is a mass of contradictions, as Leonardo explains in
the letter to his Pattern Mother (pp. 47 and 48). When Leonardo’s own behavior
becomes contradictory--not because he wants it to but because circumstances
compel it--he cannot make the kinds of rationalizations at which humans are so
adept.
The Dark Lady
herself contradicts time, space and logic. What does she represent? Perhaps a
Circe who lures men to their deaths. Perhaps a human need to find meaning
where none exists, when we cannot accept a thing in itself. Is she the Mother
of All Things--creative energy? Or is she Death incarnate--destructive energy?
Resnick does not tell us precisely which, but the fluidity of meaning makes her
as tantalizing to the reader as she is to the characters in the novel.
The climactic
sequence reinforces the motif: Kobrynski’s paradoxical activity, creating art
with the destructive radioactive processes involved in plasma painting. The
deadly evanescent portrait in the skies above Solitaire is an image of birth,
brief life, and death: creation in destruction, destruction in creation. Is
Kobrynski’s final painting, the portrait of the Dark Lady, what she has been
searching for, the reason she will not be seen again? Her plasma image
lingers longer than Kobrynski expects it to, enabling him to make it smile,
remove her sad, seeking expression. He is the first of her replicators to
accomplish that. Submitting to her call, he walks out of his shack into the
radiation and disappears. A short while later, just before Venzia dies, he has
a vision in which he sees Kobrynski with the Dark Lady. She is smiling. It is
as if Kobrynski has irradiated her existence with something other than sorrow,
thus giving her peace, satiating her need to seek out those who “court death.”
Leonardo announces that she will never again appear.
ARTISTIC CREATION
The Dark
Lady deals, among other things, with the nature of art and the aim of the
artist, who tries to attain perfection through art. And perhaps this is yet
another meaning we can ascribe to the Dark Lady herself: that she is the
embodiment of artistic perfection that men--and sentient beings throughout the
universe--strive to achieve, and that some non-artists will do anything to
possess.
Leonardo, in
the epilogue, says that he has finally come to understand why the Dark Lady
appeared to him in a vision, and what it is he must do. Now he is the
one trying to capture he likeness as she last looked, so that both of their
odysseys will reach their ends. Does this contradict what was said above about
her never appearing again because Kobrynski finally succeeded in erasing her
sad, haunted expression and replacing it with a smile? Yes and no. Kobrynski
was human, Leonardo is an alien. Kobrynski’s portrait was transient;
Leonardo’s, we assume, will be permanent. But Leonardo’s portrait will take a
long time to complete, not merely because he is clumsy and unskilled as an
artist, but because all art takes time, patience, and unflagging
dedication.
Mike Resnick
understands this as well as anyone; he has spent more than twenty years honing
his skills as a writer. The Resnick who wrote the early potboilers could not
have written The Dark Lady. It is equally conceivable that the Resnick
of The Soul Eater could not have written it. It is a story that had to
be arrived at via maturation, the gradual accretion of technique, and control
over one’s material. The result was worth the wait, a powerful book that is not
easily forgotten. The reader is irradiated by Leonardo’s story as the plasma painting irradiates Solitaire and, like Leonardo, he is not the
same as he was when it began.
Archibald
MacLeish wrote what proves a fitting epilogue:
Beauty
is that Medusa’s head
Which
men go armed to seek and sever;
It is
most deadly when most dead,
And dead
will stare and sting forever--
Beauty
is that Medusa’s head.
Barry Ergang ©1991, 2013
Indeed, as I make no claims either for definitiveness
or exhaustiveness, the ideal is for readers to use this article as the takeoff
point for their own ideas, expanding on mine or, if disagreeing with them,
going in different directions.
All page citations are from the Tor Books edition
published in November 1987.
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