There are demons and poltergeists, d\u00f6ppelgangers and dybbuks in every culture\u2019s psyche, the writer tells me. And she should know. Taking on the theme of immortality \u2013 did I mention that I live forever? \u2013 was a bold step where several writers have gone before. The Japanese are mal for it. Hollywood loves a gory ghostly blockbuster. And being, you know, Jewish, she was reluctant to mix it up in the telling of my tale. Don\u2019t worry, I told her, out here in the Pleroma, the muses shapeshift without warning, Tiresius doesn\u2019t know if he\u2019s Arthur or Martha, Jesus is Osiris on a Tuesday, Apollo sleeps with his daughters; it\u2019s a mess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But, she\u2019s taken it on, she\u2019s got me and the muses whether she likes it or not. The other night she was watching a film with her ex-academic husband, who is filling her head with all this foreign nonsense, and a dybbuk in the form of a dead fianc\u00e9 possessed a new bridegroom on his wedding day to convincing cinematographic effect. It\u2019s all been done. But, in truth, I think I\u2019m already playing d\u00f6ppelganger to her demons. I\u2019m not quite sure where this is going. We\u2019ve still got time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maybe I\u2019m my writer\u2019s dybbuk, taking over her body and soul until the work is done. No wonder the Sandy Headmen forbade graven images. But then again, as Goethe, the secret word-painter, always told me, character develops itself in the steam of life.26<\/sup><\/strong> She had to have had that life experience. And morphed it into my vita nueva.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even though she can insert me into time, running the risk of anachronistic incorrectness, I like to think that I\u2019m the opposite. I\u2019m the new age, baby, rear-engineered through history to take a look at being a woman, a muso, an other through different eyes. It\u2019s what the writer knows, but she has her work cut out for her in suspending disbelief. After all, you can\u2019t have a cellphone in a simlah, fly under the Renaissance radar, sport a sari in a synagogue; it\u2019s difficult keeping the epochs apart and occasionally criticism hits her like a low body blow. To say nothing of the self-doubt when she reaches out for the controls and finds fifteen versions of the same episode, wondering how to transport me from Languedoc to London in the space of three pages. I\u2019ve forbidden the word count; it only makes her hysterical. And I\u2019ve told her, believe me, I\u2019ll let you know if it works or not. She has to learn to trust me. She\u2019s getting better, though. With seven months to go, she\u2019s seeing it as a third pregnancy of a twenty-seven month gestation; she\u2019s got a bit of a thing about numbers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She is that I am: Wanda B. Lazarus, the Wandering Jewess. A dead ringer for the archetype of the trickster, the outcast, the lowlife, the whore and the embodiment of feminine autonomy that goes back to the invention of the modern novel. And prior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By consciously channeling the Picaresque genre into her character, attitude and plotlines, the writer now has a course to follow, a map, even. This discovery, fusing archetype, thematic and genre with her MA work of fiction, has infused her writing with a purpose, she could almost say, vision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The writer realised that she could make all this shit up. But only if the story rang true, if the historical and cultural elements had resonance in my voice. Of course it would take about two hundred years to make all the links in my story link up as historical fact, but what\u2019s a little imagination between friends? The writer must tell my stories; we\u2019ll fill in the facts later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The strategy for the novel is now burned into her mind; the picara as a symbol of autonomous feminine, the muses tasking me to retrieve the music of the spheres, the tale of the Wandering Jew. Any tale must audition for the part; any historical fragment must be placed seamlessly into the frame. The Wanda sightings abound.28<\/sup><\/strong> And of course, the writer is compelled to piece together fact and fiction, self and other constructing experience and imagination from the fragments to create a full picture, The Gypsy Girl Mosaic made manifest. One of the great qualities of the Picara is chaos. But, in order to give birth to me and know my essence, the novel requires a scaffold upon which to drape its wild imaginings. Or, as I put it to my good friend Nietzche, with whom I exchanged impassioned letters and a few chaste gropings: \u201cYou need, a touch of tummel, Freddie, to get a little jiggy with it.\u2019 He worked on it a bit and gave it a Teutonic twist. It loses something in translation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are demons and poltergeists, d\u00f6ppelgangers and dybbuks in every culture\u2019s psyche, the writer tells me. And she should know. Taking on the theme of immortality \u2013 did I mention that I live forever? \u2013 was a bold step where several writers have gone before. The Japanese are mal for it. Hollywood loves a gory […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":80,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynnjoffe.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/309"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynnjoffe.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynnjoffe.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynnjoffe.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynnjoffe.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=309"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lynnjoffe.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310,"href":"https:\/\/lynnjoffe.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/309\/revisions\/310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynnjoffe.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}