It is important to note that the primary place and the other place are not abstractions. They are actual sites. The primary place is the room with the spinning wheel and the other place is the clearing at the end of the forest. We see a small house, a burning fire, and we know we are beyond civilization because we are in a territory where the animals are in charge, where “the fox and the hare bid each other goodnight.” It is no longer the world of order and reason. The Queen’s messenger is the conduit between these two worlds. As such, he provides a way for her to gain her rightful place as a mother.

Something is missing and it is our human desire, our need to create order, to finish the unfinished, to find out what happened, that draws us into these improbable events…

There are many moments in this story when we are asked to suspend disbelief and we do so willingly. Why? The narrative gap. Something is missing and it is our human desire, our need to create order, to finish the unfinished, to find out what happened, that draws us into these improbable events and keeps us there till we are satisfied. The narrative gap is the supporting information we never get. We never know how Rumpelstiltskin hears the miller’s daughter’s cry for help or indeed, how he is able to spin the straw into gold. We never find out what caused the messenger to follow the path to the end of the forest. We know only the outcomes, but how these major events came about, the story does not bother to tell us. After all, it is a fairy tale and it is repetition that creates credulity. My mother read it to me out of an edition of Grimm’s that she had as a child and I read it to my children from the same book. Right there — three generations learning to accept what is not being explained, to respect the irrational.

In contemporary fiction, narrative gaps work the same way. They present something in an incomplete fashion, and that invites us to enter into the story to complete it. However, in fiction that attempts to create an illusion of reality, the narrative gaps can’t be quite so large. But interestingly, as we will see in the next examples, the other place the story takes us to can be just as removed from the rational world as it is in Rumpelstiltskin. In fact, I am going to posit that for it to function as a true other place, that is, a place that exerts pressure on the quotidian, it must have a quality of the strange, the unknown, the unfamiliar.

This is what the other place provides. If the final other place in our lives is death, then perhaps the other places we encounter on the way to that eventuality prepare us for it. They can include sexual passion, childbirth, illness, art, literature, music, and the world of our dreams. It is the place where the assymetrical, the unreasonable, the chaotic are in power.

The Known World
BY Edward P. Jones
(Amistad, 2003)

I first noticed the other place when I was reading Edward P. Jones’ masterful work, The Known World.^[3] It has a densely woven narrative fabric with a fluid story line that jumps effortlessly from one time period to another. Its focus is a group of people living in the 1850’s on a Virginia plantation owned by Henry Townsend, a slave owner who is himself the son of slaves who purchased their freedom. The Townsend plantation is the primary place and the people living there are the primary characters, but as the narrative moves from one person to another, and forward and backward through time, it introduces us to many different people, of different races. Yet within this ranging, as the various strands are woven into the curious story of an educated, slave-owning black man, there is a burr in the cloth, an other place that doesn’t fit in. It stays with us and continues to tease even after closing the book.

This other place appeared in the sub-story of Counsel Skiffington, a white plantation owner who lost his entire family and all of his slaves to small pox. Deranged by grief, he mounted his horse and rode away from his ruined plantation. After months of wandering, he came to a clearing where there was a house and a barn. The narrator sets the scene: “The land seemed incapable of growing anything but sorrow, yet, as Counsel looked about, he could see that some effort had been made to farm. And in a few spots he saw some success, though he did not make out what was growing. The crops were about three feet high.” ^[4]

This is curious. Back in those agrarian times, how could a man who once grew crops himself in a similar climate, come across a mature plant he did not recognize? Things get stranger: The house is one large room inhabited by a family, a boy about twelve, and the parents, but the boy is clearly the one in charge. After Counsel steps in, the boy tells his mother “to close the damn door.” The father offers him a chair at the table, but it has “one leg shorter than the others and Counsel found it necessary to balance himself the whole time.” The mother gives him a plate of stew but “Counsel was too hungry to ask what the meat was,” and the reader remembers the animal pelts drying on the porch that Counsel didn’t recognize. “Biscuits too,” the boy says. “Don’t forget the goddamn biscuits.”^[5]