[bookclub] Dad and the grey man (long)

[Second April <dns361@merle.acns.nwu.edu>]

The following is a "firestarter" post about Stephen Granade's game Losing
Your Grip, under the auspices of the IF Book Club. The Book Club is
organized by Lucian P. Smith; for more information, visit
the web page at http://www.textfire.com/bookclub/. (With no period at the
end.)

Central to figuring out what's going on in Losing Your Grip is the problem
of the grey man and your father--how are they connected, why do you see so
much of them, why are they important to you? These are my conjectures
about these characters and their roles, and, by extension, about what the
game as a whole meant.

It's important, first, to remember that the grey man is entirely new to
you--you hadn't met him before your odyssey began--and you manage to kill
him off entirely before the journey's done. Moreover, he appears on the
scene only after you deal with the sludge, though he doesn't say anything
at that point--but directly after you see him, you pick up the needle
sphere and get this, in your father's voice: ""Well.  Interesting stunt
you've pulled, coming to where I now live. I trust you'll stay for my
avalanche." The two events are separate but closely linked, leading me to
believe that the grey man is closely related to your associations with
your father.

The grey man also appears in Fit 2, both versions, though the script is
nearly identical: he asks you "don't you know why you're here?", and
suggests, sneering, that you're there to either "help idiots like [the old
woman" or "help a fellow student." At the start of the fit, though, you're
informed that you're there (in the hospital or at college) against your
will-- your father has decreed that you're to be a doctor, and this is a
step along the way. The grey man intrudes on you fairly early in the fit
to remind you of why you're there, and in that sense serves as a sort of
stand-in for your father--a caricature, almost, a figure that taunts you
about your inadequacy ("you weren't successful the first time"). Again, a
close link with your father--here, the grey man is the enforcer for your
father's wishes, a presence reminding you of your ongoing confrontation
with your father.

The final and most important appearance of the grey man is at the end of
Fit 3, when he destroys the faeries' hideaway, and tries to kill you--most
important because this, so to speak, is where push comes to shove: rather
than you and the grey man glowering at each other, this is the showdown.
Either he wins and your internal odyssey stops, or you win and you don't
hear any more from the grey man--you put him to rest, in a sense. Again,
this is on the heels of a traumatic confrontation with your father--
you've managed to hurt him, physically at least. There's a third party
involved, though: your imagination/creativity/escape- fantasy-life,
allegorized in the form of the faeries; in this particular scene, you get
away from your father for a while and immerse yourself in the
imaginative/fantasy world, but something, the grey man, comes crashing
back it to obliterate the happy fantasy and drag you back to real life. At
least, it tries.

The third fit is so important because the symbolic connections are closest
to the surface here--perhaps the theory is that you've gone far enough
back into your past that you can get at where things started to go wrong.
The grey man isn't your father, but he's your image of your father--the
hateful, sneering, pushy caricature of your father that you've substituted
for your father. Everything he does is an exaggeration of your father--
your father has no time for your fantasies, so the grey man takes it a
step farther by actually destroying them. Your father pushes you to
succeed, so the grey man harshly mocks you when you don't. Your father
tries to punish you, so the grey man tries to kill you. While the game
forces you to put your image of your father to rest, to a some extent, it
doesn't force you to put aside the anger that produced the image--you can
still clench your fist at the end, of course. But you can't kid
yourself--it's apparent by the end that he's not really a monster. The
ending is set up by the third fit, where your father and the grey man are
almost side by side--the grey man tells you that your father "sent" him,
which is actually true from your perspective, and by dealing with one you
make an implicit commitment to deal with the other. It's also important
that, as far as I can tell, you have to open the cage to get to the final
hospital scene, suggesting that the faeries stand in not only for your
imagination and creativity but also for your sense of compassion--and,
even, your ability to see things as they really are, see your father as he
really is.

Colors are central to Grip: against greyness stand all sorts of vivid
colors. In both versions of the fourth fit, colors are important--the
colored pieces, the colored strands--and since you're delving into your
own personality to bring it back into balance, it makes sense that you're
unearthing the colors of your buried self to displace the grey. (I.e.,
it's with the aid of your newfound balance, and recognition of the colors
you hadn't been acknowledging or using, that you can confront the
greyness-- the anger and fear surrounding your association with your
father.) The "plain" of the final fit seems to be the same as the muddy
field of the first fit, except that the rain is now gone-- but in the
color scheme, it's just full of greys and browns. ("A few twisted shrubs
and bushes, leafless and gaunt, cling to the cracked ground, ekeing out
enough sustenance to maintain a shadowy half-life.  Light filtering
through the roiling clouds above gives the entire scene an unhealthy grey
tinge.") Remember, also, that the game started in a sea of mud--brown
(washed away by snow--the hospital and your medical treatment? the ward is
certainly described as white often enough), and required you to fight off
another brown-black deluge in the sludge. The building itself is white,
but streaked with brown from the mud and the rain (presumably, your anger
and conflicting emotions, or whatever has come between you and your
father). So while you've put aside the caricature at the end and learned
to face your father rather than a distortion of him, you're still in the
middle of the gray and brown--all the negative associations.

It's easy to miss what happens in the final scene--I know I did the first
time around. You get to witness the impact of refusing to let go of the
pent-up vitriol: by the act of clenching his fist, your father kills the
dog, and you feel the force of his anger when he clenches his fist again.
Likewise, if you choose to clench your own fist, you see the "pulse" that
hits him with just as much force. The only way for both of you to survive
the confrontation is for you to relax your hand--if you don't do anything,
the force of his clenching kills you, but if you relax your hand, it
"passes through you," and your father "slumps, as if something vital has
been drained from him." Your refusal to keep fighting makes your father
unable to hurt you--at least, hurt you as much as he'd like--and thereby
takes away his power over you, and you're finally free to hear what he was
really trying to tell you from his hospital bed. In a sense, by relaxing
your fist, you tell him that you're not going to play the game (remember
the chessboard--it suggests the adversarial nature of what goes on between
you) anymore--and when you see that "something vital has been drained"
from him, you're seeing that he's lost his power over you.

Why the strings, at the end? To give you a sense of complicity, I think,
and to remind you that your father's abuse was a product as well as a
cause of your anger and alienation. Without that, it might be possible to
think that this is a story of an abuser and an abused; with it, it's more
about a poisoned relationship, and the implication is that you contributed
to its breakdown, even if not knowingly.

Are there loose ends here? Definitely. Some that might be worth tying up
but which I'm not going to address in any detail are the dog
(wish-fulfillment, perhaps--the happier childhood and relationship that
you didn't have--though how wish-fulfillment manages to transport
objects/tools between phases of your internal odyssey isn't quite clear to
me), Frankie and the head (one and the same, or at least strongly linked,
I think, given the mustache--Frankie seems to represent your powers of
introspection, and burying the head suggests that you've tried to avoid
introspection insofar as it might bring up something messy and
complicated, i.e., the sludge, when you really start poking around, i.e.,
getting the lights back on in the dark corners-- though who Sam is I can't
fathom), music (bagpipes and church music in Fit 3, the radio in Fit 1,
all the banners, Erin's headphones), and the non-sound sound thing in Fit
3. But the point of Grip, to my eye, is straightening out your
relationship with Dad, and acknowledging the great extent to which you're
responsible for the problems by (a) inventing a sort of shadow- dad and
(b) provoking and manipulating your father rather than trying to
understand.

Duncan Stevens
dns361@merle.acns.nwu.edu

But buy me a singer to sing one song--
Song about nothing--song about sheep--
Over and over, all day long;
Patch me again my thread-bare sleep.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay