The Dragon Griaule

Introduction

In a 2001 interview with the critic Nick Gevers, Lucius Shepard described how this book came about:

The idea for a 6,000-foot-long dragon on and in which people lived occurred to me at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in 1980. One afternoon I went out onto the Michigan State University campus, parked it under a tree, smoked a joint, and started trying to generate story ideas. ‘The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule’ was one of the ideas I came up with. I recall I wrote in my notebook the following words: ‘Big Fucking Dragon.’ Shortly thereafter I wrote, ‘Kill him with paint.’ Surely a moment that will be immortalised in the pantheon of under-the-tree-sitting moments, right up there with Newton and the apple.

And so, when Shepard began publishing stories a few years later, one of the first pieces that made his name was ‘The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule’ (1984). From the start, he was an astonishing writer. He wrote elegant and graceful sentences; his fiction embodied a range of lived experience far wider than most SF; he was able to evoke a sense of place with precision and force; he was passionate and politically committed. Most of his early stories were set near to the present in the USA or Central America, with some fantastical intrusion heightening the story. So, for instance, his superb novella ‘R&R’ (1986) takes place in a near-future Guatemala where the US is waging a war whose geometry has somehow become mystical and beyond rationality.

In this context, ‘The Man Who Painted The Dragon Griaule’ sat somewhat aside from the rest of Shepard’s work. It was told with the sort of formality associated with high fantasy, and was set ‘in a world separated from ours by the thinnest margin of possibility’. The vast dragon Griaule, stunned into immobility but not death by a wizard’s spell, dominates the Carbonales Valley and casts a baleful influence over the surroundings until the artist Meric Cattanay arrives to, as Shepard says, kill it with paint. The working-out of this premise is both detailed and unexpected. Cattanay’s vast, obsessive project comes to seem as much of a sickness as Griaule itself.

Evidently, Shepard found that there was more to be mined from this setting, since he returned to it several times more; this book collects all he has written to date about Griaule. So, for instance, ‘The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter’ (1988) takes us closer than the earlier story to perceiving Griaule’s nature. When the eponymous heroine ventures into the dragon, she discovers not merely an ecology of creatures surviving within the dragon’s body. She also, it seems, comes close to perceiving Griaule’s mind, the will emanating ‘from the cold tonnage of his brain’. ‘The Father of Stones’ (1988) also charts Griaule’s influence on the communities around him – and, indeed, the worship that has grown up to propitiate him. As one of the characters says, ‘Griaule...God! I used to feel him in the temple. Perhaps you think that’s just my imagination, but I swear it’s true. We all concentrated on him, we sang to him, we believed in him we conjured him in our thoughts, and soon we could feel him.’

One common thread in these early stories is how much agency Griaule has: how much his influence is real or imaginary. He might look like an object, an increasingly overgrown piece of the valley’s landscape. But at times, it becomes increasingly clear that he might be conscious, might after all be controlling events. The question these early stories play out is what kind of lives can be lived in the shadow of this ‘influence’.

By the time Shepard returned to this setting with ‘Liar’s House’ (2003) and ‘The Taborin Scale’ (2010), Griaule’s will has become much more pervasive. In both stories, we’re granted far more explicit insights into the dragon’s past and future, his wishes and desires. Despite Griaule’s trapped state, his personality becomes quite clear in these later stories. He is as one imagines dragons to be: cruel, arrogant, a user of others to his own ends. Yet there’s also a strange kind of poignancy to these stories as the consequences of what has gone before are played out.

The last story here, ‘The Skull’ (2012), advances in so many directions that it’s difficult to know where to start. Griaule has become a myth, a legend, a holy relic. From the earlier stories’ notional 19th-century setting, Shepard moves to the present and beyond. The history depicted in the previous stories becomes something to be argued over and disputed. Yet Griaule’s influence – real or imagined – persists in curious ways. Politics also becomes a much more explicit consideration here: the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and the powerless by the powerful, are vividly present.

At times, these linked stories look like they have the form of allegories – that Griaule might stand for, say, power or corruption, or the dead hand of the past. Certainly, you could construct readings of them that render them as allegories. I’d argue, though, that Shepard manages to keep them from being so easily reduced. Every character in these stories has some kind of relationship to Griaule – they may fear him, or worship him, or want to kill him. In a sense, these relationships offer a kind of judgment on the characters. (Shepard is a strongly moral writer.) If a character makes their living as a scalehunter, foraging from Griaule’s body, what does that tell the reader about them and their view of the world? The choices these characters make about their interactions with Griaule are as revealing as anything about them. And then, once in a while, Griaule seems to make a choice about them. The dragon’s eyes are open.

Graham Sleight