City of Dancing Gargoyles and the Decentering of Humanity
Tara Campbell’s City of Dancing Gargoyles is dystopian, but not in a grim way, or at least not only a grim way. It’s about two sentient gargoyles (among others) who traverse a futuristic American Southwest, in which each city has been overtaken by objects or animals that have suddenly become sentient—like those gargoyles!
I want to look at the novel's opening. We are introduced to this world in such an interesting way.
What is the point of a creature created for rain when there is no more rain?
"Do you remember?" M asks, shoving another clawful of sand away, and I say yes without needing to ask what. I remember them well, the days when we didn't have to dig. When water came to us.
With the next sweep of his claw, M uncovers a fat, black beetle. I snatch it up and carefully bite off half before placing the rest into his mouth. We roll the tiny burst of vitality on our tongues until every last molecule of liquid seeps into our stone, then exhale the rest in puffs of iridescent dust.
Refreshed, I begin digging again.
“We used to just…” He gestures with his front paws, miming the torrents of rainwater we would simply allow to pass through us.
“I know,” I say, now also imagining a storm, water first trickling, then gushing down through my body, then the skies opening up with so much rain, water wells up behind me and overflows, spilling down my sides and over my head. Soaking in.
These are gargoyles! But I’m interested in the time it takes me to realize that. The opening question makes very clear the fact of drought: “no more rain.” This matters.
But otherwise, it’s a bit unusual. Who is talking? We don’t know yet that this will be a first-person narration and so it might be a rhetorical question posed by an objective voice. When the “I” appears in the next sentence, we understand the question is the thought of a character, but still don’t know for certain—though we might suspect—that the narrator is one of these “creatures created for rain.” But what are creatures created for rain?
Our attention moves to what is happening with the characters in the scene. The default for most readers when beginning a story is that a first-person narrator is probably, at least loosely, human. If it can narrate, we assume sentience and we assume language. And while that doesn’t always mean human, it usually does. This also applies to any character with dialogue, like M.
Now, I know that some would take the title of the book or the promotional matter into account, but I’m a reader who fears spoilers and so I avoid jacket copy. And also, couldn’t the title be metaphoric?
At any rate, the first two paragraphs don’t confirm sentient gargoyles. Even the “claw” reads to me as metaphorical, since I’ve many times known fingernails to be described that way.
So when I reach the sentences, “M uncovers a fat, black beetle. I snatch it up and carefully bite off half before placing the rest into his mouth,” it’s shocking. It’s also evidence of how awful the drought must be. People are not only eating bugs, but the bugs are scarce, and so they are carefully sharing them.
And this is wonderful, because it’s a mistake that leads to a truth. The drought is that bad. But I might not understand that if I only saw stone statues eating a beetle.
Then, of course, “liquid seeps into our stone.” Pretty soon we get “front paws” and learn the characters’ history of allowing rainwater to pass through their bodies. At this point, I put it together. Gargoyles!
So why not lead with that? Another author might have given us a clearer picture of who our main characters are—announced them, so to speak. I should also stress that it was only four sentences that I was imaging humans—not long at all.
But I love this very brief moment of disorientation before it becomes clear these are gargoyles—it’s a little shake to tell the reader we're in a strange place and things will not be as we expect.
And yet, for all the unsettling, the existence of the sentient gargoyles is matter of fact. They just are.
We don’t begin by learning how these creatures came to be. Rather, it’s a casual afternoon of eating bugs. This is important because use beginning with "once upon a time gargoyles came to life" would necessarily center humanity's learning about that event.
Making gargoyles our main characters and letting them open the book is already pretty radical. They are literal gargoyles! They are monsters made of stone. They are also made in the form of animals that humans particularly fear—a snake, a lion. These characters are about as opposite of human as you can be. And they get to be the stars. They simply exist as if they always were, with no human-centering attention to a time before they remember.
I’m particularly grateful for that framing as I realize it took my misapprehending them as humans for the seriousness of the drought to sink in.
I then realize that the disorientation itself is an aspect of the decentering of human beings. These gargoyles aren’t worried about explaining themselves to a human reader; they’re just trying to survive.
How they introduce themselves has everything to do with that. Consider that there’s no reason for them to turn to a human viewer and explain things. Neither does it make a lot of sense for two characters to describe for each other what is obviously true to both of them. However, it does make sense for them to reminiscence with each other about their shared past, in ways that might let clues filter in more slowly.
And it makes perfect sense for it to take the human who is eavesdropping on them from the sidelines (me) to need an extra moment to figure things out.