On Rip Van Winkle
- On Rip Van Winkle
preface
This work is the outcome of a series of transformations that began one night when I happened to be reflecting on a theological topic: what it really means to imagine a God who inhabits the hypothetical eternal heavens and has little relation to the world of becoming, our world. It struck me that Irving's Rip Van Winkle stood in a similar relation to his world, so initially I set out to think through some of the comparisons between them. But as I reread the story and was led down a rabbit hole of other adaptations (including a fabulous Claymation retelling from 1978), I found that what I was really drawn toward about the tale was its strangeness, the sense of complete unfamiliarity the character experiences when for largely magical reasons he reenters a world that no longer answers to his social or political identity.
The form of this piece draws inspiration from Irving, who in his time managed to synthesize essay and folktale to create his own brand of short story. Here I attempt to fuse short story and lyric essay. At one extreme I found that the discreteness of the paragraphs in a lyric essay allowed each reflection to "breathe," so much so that in one draft I had imagined each one as part of an installation in an aurally distributed space with a projected backdrop of black-and-white cinematic images of the elderly Rip. I worked from this extreme to the present form as it exists on the page, which required it to have a more narrative backbone.
On a personal note, I was thinking a lot while writing this about America's seemingly endless campaign of wars and the place Irving must have been in after his family's trading company lost everything in the Revolutionary War. He had declared bankruptcy and was living with his sister and her husband in England in 1818 when it is said that he composed the story in a single night (Jones 168–69). An American transplanted to England, drawing inspiration from German folktales, writing about the Catskills he [End Page 583] had never really experienced: perhaps it is unsurprising his story should turn out so wonderfully weird.
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Note: In what follows, all italicized expressions occur in Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," first published in The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., in 1819.
on rip van winkle
1
Shadows of English writers might have seemed to see a crown, power unquestioned, overextended on the far continent you call home. Spirits native to the Catskills might have wandered this way as the dawn's first rays, to find you locked in a room, plagued by writer's block, with a handful of blank pages (the farmhand's up already, cleaning stables, the expat lord's still rich in dreams). To be homesick is to be lost, and to be lost is to be eternally forgotten, these thoughts may have dripped down as candlewax before you heard some voice calling a name, like the voice of childhood as it crawls out of darkness, before everything becomes strange.
2
Begin this way: as a simple good-natured fellow who from an opening between the trees overlooks all the lower country of his future, who prefers to whistle life away. Learn to bear burdens with the simplest gestures. When challenged emerge as the living image of a pietà, shrugging your shoulders, declining your head, casting up your eyes, saying nothing. With consummate indeterminacy express either resignation or joy, or some mean between them when the name of intolerance or violence or impatience is mentioned, or the name of the one who henpecks, Dame Winkle. All the same, you can barely manage your own farm.
3
The original face of Rip lacks the aspect of seriousness at play, the melancholy party of pleasure observed in the ghosts of the crew of the Half Moon, whose sounds of ninepin bowling ring out from the mountain like distant peals of thunder. Serious faces, blue from death and drowning and mercantile deeds, faces carved from habit, were uncanny, as far from the [End Page 584] face of a...
