Wunderworlds: using there-and-back-agains to craft intimacy with our characters

– Ijon Tichy (Stanisław Lem, Peace on Earth)

Stories are fossils, Stephen King says, pre-existing things authors are granted the right to excavate. (You’ll find this on pg 188 of On Writing.) When the process of excavation begins, we are looking down, alongside the character, strange bones before us. When the story is over, if the excavation was successful, we find ourselves looking at the character, this person with whom we have journeyed. After the best excavations, the thought that it’s over – The End – will bring tears to our eyes. 

The stories that have moved me most – Narnia, Huck Finn, Harry Potter, bighearted Murakami stories like Super Frog, Miyazaki’s movies, Sanderson’s Cosmere, Pirandello’s Six Characters, Shusaku Endo’s novels, the peerless Alice, all of Dostoevsky and Flann O’Brien, Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Sapkowski’s The Witcher, Lem’s Ijon Tichy, King’s Dark Tower, Amos Tutuola’s wanderings, the soft light of Banana Yoshimoto – all have something in common: I feel tied, intimately so, to the protagonists.

In their vibrant life they have brought me life. Their courage, their empathy, their weaknesses, their defeats. In moments of utter darkness, they have been my companions and my hope. There is great mystery in that, mystery bordering on the miraculous, mystery glittering like a doorway to a place not lonely. 

I long to create connections like that – characters that thread themselves into us. (And if you’re here on Story Street, I’m guessing you yearn for the same.) This essay explores the craft of intimacy. I focus on the intimacy forged by strange journeys, on trips to Elsewhere; I feel closest to characters after a weird trip together, whether that is to hell or to upside-down Tokyo or down the Mississippi on a raft. 

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A note on the words used

In the spirit of Wonderland – where there are no rules and they are all adhered to with extreme prejudice – I will establish the vocabularial rules in order that they may be immediately broken. I am using four terms throughout this paper almost interchangeably. 

First, there is Alice’s Wonderland. It’s so big and well-known now that it encompasses almost any strange place a character can wander off to.

Second, there is a wonderworld, which is essentially my way of saying ‘Wonderland’ – the Elsewhere of strange parallel places, realms alongside or interspersed with a character’s reality. There is anguish in it, but it can also be quite a wonderful place. (For more on the anguish of wonderlands, check out Charles Baxter’s essay Wonderlands in the book of the same name.)

Third, there are underworlds – my term for realms that are like wonderworlds, but with dead people. Introducing dead people into a place fundamentally changes that place, and there are plenty of examples of wonderworlds where the dead are emphatically not welcome – thus the need to (sometimes) differentiate the terms.

Finally, I use wunderworld most frequently – a conflation of wonderworld and underworld, because the two have significant overlaps and don’t always need to be differentiated.

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WHAT and WHERE are wunderworlds? 

Wunderworlds are places outside a character’s ‘normal’ ‘reality’. Characters leave their own place to go to wunderworlds. Sometimes the crossing is dramatic, sometimes it is not. Sometimes the characters embark on a long journey; sometimes it is just for a few moments, one scene only, and they’re back in a ‘half-twinkling’, as Amos Tutuola might say.

Wunderworlds are Elsewhere. There is an element of otherworldliness to them – but even as I suggest that vague rule, Banana Yoshimoto shreds it, for a ‘real’ city or neighborhood can certainly be a wunderworld. In her Moshi Moshi, even though Shimokitazawa is a very real neighborhood in the very real Tokyo, for the protagonist, the place of Shimokitazawa is wondrous, new, other, radiant. Though here, Shimokitazawa is Elsewhere. (Yoshimoto generally accomplishes this by first ‘groundworking’ worldly, mundane details, then launching from those into glimmering interiority – with sincere poetry, she weaves both the bridge and the border.)

In my usage of the terms, I think of wonderworld as a place ‘next door’ and underworld as a place ‘downstairs’. In terms of craft, this influences interactions with beings in those places, for the characters in wonderworlds or underworlds share that directional sense. Underworld in particular defines itself against the world of the living, the world ‘above’. ‘My child, how did you come to the undergloom while you are still alive?’ Odysseus’ mother asks him. ‘It is hard for the living to reach these shores’. (That’s from the Stanley Lombardo translation – I’m a big fan of his style.)

This is far from a hard-and-fast rule; Alice falls down into Wonderland and Dante crosses through a wood and then climbs up at the start of the Inferno. (I readily admit that I’m oversimplifying underworld = downstairs in service of my own definition; Tartarus which may or may not be Hades is downstairs, but so are Elysium and Asphodel – the good and okay and bad places are all right next to each other! But I don’t think that co-locating does any structural damage to my ‘underworld as downstairs’ rule-of-thumb; I still find ‘next-door’ and ‘downstairs’ generally helpful.)

The creatures of Wonderland don’t seem to think of Alice’s place as anywhere special, if they think of Alice’s place at all; this unconcern can be a differentiating feature of wonderlands. Meanwhile Dante’s shades still define themselves by their connection to the world of the living – their earthly sins, affiliations and rivalries.

(Note: there is an important difference here craft-wise — if our character goes to an underworld, they’re probably going to run into a departed person who is dear to them. If they don’t interact with that person, then the absence of that person still influences the journey – this is the case for Sakumi, who doesn’t directly interact with her departed sister in Yoshimoto’s Amrita.)

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Wunderlands as vehicles for intimate portraits of characters

We are presented with several unique opportunities when we begin to excavate the story of a character who passes through a wunderworld. There are too many directions to go – we could speak of millions of stories. Do Raskolnikov’s fevered imaginings not create an underworld? We’re not going to talk about Hayao Miyazaki? Comic books?

When we talk about wunderworlds, the possibilities explode – scratching the surface causes two new surfaces to spring up, surfaces which hide exponentially multiplying depths. So the opportunity cost here is great; I present you with great losses in exchange for the three wunderworld opportunities I offer.

The ultimate aim is to use these elements to forge intimacy with a character. The thing haunting me is this: how are we pulled so firmly into a character’s camp as they make strange journeys? (As one of my Harvard Extension professors said, it is an intimate thing to travel through the dreams of another!)

What is the magic behind the intimate connection we feel with wandering characters? Why did special characters move me and so many others when we were kids – and even now as adults? That is a question with a million answers; I’ll suggest the following three.  

First: wunderworld conspires to implicate itself in everything, shaping itself around the protagonist. Baxter touches on this in his Wonderlands essay, saying the ‘spiritual contents’ of the characters are ‘smeared’ upon the ‘fictional and poetic landscape’. (I should note that his definition of Wonderland is more dark and unsettled and anguished than mine; I think the ‘conspiring’ of wunderworlds can also be for a character’s healing – or, even better, for a joke.)

This is the beginning of intimacy. This conspiring in the shape of a character tells us about the character, making the world into a set of murals, each painted with protagonist motivations and fears and hopes and cowardlinesses. The scenery is covered with graffiti, every rock and tree and tunnel and cave.

Second: wunderworlds fracture characters, allowing them to accompany themselves. These accompanying character-as-characters forge intimacy by allowing the reader to see the character in a way that is likely impossible outside of wunderworlds. (And – major craft element here – pulling a character’s soul or mind or fear out and using it as a moralizing or debauched or cowardly companion is pure comedy!)

Third: wunderworlds present absurdities that force unique responses. They inherently force a character to encounter people and things and scenes that are not part of the character’s ‘normal reality’ – and we as readers get to see how the character responds. We relate, we laugh, we are moved – as we see these characters respond to wunderworldly absurdity, we may just find a friend for life. (Who isn’t immediately on to Alice’s side when she says, ‘Curiouser and curiouser!’)

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I – Wunderworlds conspire, shaping themselves after the character 

There stands Minos the Terrible… when the ill-born soul comes before him it confesses completely, and Minos, that connoisseur of sin, sees what its just place in Hell should be and winds his tail around himself as many times as the number of the circle he assigns.

– Dante, Canto V of Inferno (Stanley Lombardo’s translation)

“Yes, you will go out with joy, you will be led forth in peace. As you come, the mountains and hills will burst out into song, and all the trees in the countryside will clap their hands.”

‭– Yesha’yahu ‭55‬:‭12‬, Complete Jewish Bible (CJB)‬‬

In wunderworlds, the setting is implicated, intimately involved in the emotional turmoil of the characters. ( Baxter writes wonderfully about emotional turmoil – anguish – being illustrated externally in Wonderland.) Setting draws close, intimately crafting itself around the character – reflecting anguish as personalized as the sentence of Minos, shared joy as exuberant as Isaiah’s applauding trees.

This is not only true of wunderworlds, of course, but it is especially true of wunderworlds. In wunderworld, every atom of the setting seems to be alive – no setting is settled. The scenery is attentive as the characters journey through. When the stages of wunderworld are this involved and encompassing, this attentive to the protagonists, the reader gets an intimate portrait of the character, drawn out broad and grand on the world at large.

This is a unique opportunity for an author to allow setting and scenery to dramatically – even melodramatically – echo a character’s internal state. And the reader is not thrown off, for the reader knows what to expect, the reader knows the rules; in Wonderland, it is alright for Alice to cry so many tears that she even creates the setting: a great pool of salty tears into which many other creatures soon fall and flail.

This may happen in any story, but in wunderlands a writer can exaggerate, can fling paint with reckless abandon, pasting mirrors all over everything – mountains and skies and seas and trees.

In Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, the narrator (an accomplice to a murder/robbery) goes to retrieve a box of stolen gold cleverly stashed away in the victim’s home – but in a series of strange events, he finds himself in the abandoned home with the murdered man before him, now apparently quite alive. The story that follows is his wandering through this strange underworld that he knows and does not know.

Early on, the narrator walks through a scene where the world is in a state of absolute beauty – and yet in the beauty he feels a suspicion, a dread, for ‘everything seemed almost too pleasant, too perfect, too finely made’. The country has arranged itself in a way he can’t help but find personally perfect, and yet something itches at his mind – the box! ‘All the doubts and perplexities which strewed my mind could not stop me from feeling happy and heart-light and full of an appetite for going about my business and finding the hiding-place of the black box.’

He believes he’s happy, but the box is not salvation – it is his anguish, his sin. There are few things more intimate than sin – and more intimate still is the knowledge of sin’s location, of hidden things, of the precise buttons to press to cause guilt to bubble up to the forefront of another’s mind.

In underworlds, this intimate knowledge is made manifest for the reader; Minos reveals all, standing before us with his coiled tail. We don’t need a long conversation with another character, with a conscience; the setting is a billboard of intimate shame. The glamoured setting wants something from the narrator; the reader benefits from watching this process happen in real time before us. The intimately crafted scenery flows seamlessly into a reminder of his sin – underworld’s favorite burden.

The narrator thinks the box is his security, unaware that what is actually surfacing in his tormented mind is the symbol of his crime. Beneath beautiful obfuscations – clearly unnatural – sin peeks out, glittering, refusing to be forgotten even as it shuns the light. The setting crafts its trap intimately, concealing and revealing at once.

In Stanisław Lem’s Peace on Earth, Ijon Tichy finds himself under scrutiny by various intelligence agencies as he trains for a mission to the possibly hostile, robot-controlled moon. Stifled by his top-secret training, Ijon becomes fed up – he demands, for one evening, to be free of the confines of confidential living. The reluctant director of security grants Ijon a pass off-base.

On the way to the nearby town, Ijon sees someone who looks just like Marilyn Monroe (his ‘secret’ crush), her car broken down on the roadside. Ijon offers to take her to town. They drop into a charming Italian place, their glasses clink – and then everything erupts into chaos. The waiters, the other patrons, the bartender, the Marilyn lookalike – everyone is shooting, there are explosions, the bottle of wine Ijon was set to share shatters on the ground.

When the battle (a kidnapping / assassination attempt) calms, Ijon hears the security director, from beneath a disguise, ask, ‘Was it worth fighting for that pass, Mr Tichy?’

For Ijon Tichy, shadowy forces know him – and thus we as the readers do, too. We learn what Ijon Tichy finds irresistible – his most intimate temptations. The scenery conspires with the agents it hides. Wunderworld knows Ijon’s tastes in food and wine; it knows he has a crush on Marilyn Monroe and prepares an agent to match her looks.

Traps – a common feature of wunderworlds – require an intimate knowledge of their prey. Such deliberate stage-setting is a valuable tool to provide the reader intimacy with the character – we know what Ijon will fall for, and we know his flaws better than ever before, because we watch him fall. (Also – it is never not amusing to learn a character’s secret crush.)

A night in the ‘real world’ is all Ijon wanted – and here Peace on Earth is an excellent example of a wunderworld that is the ‘real world’ – a ‘real world’ conspiring to become wunderworld all around a protagonist. No matter where Ijon goes, Wonderland awaits. UN bases, the robot-controlled moon, the mental asylum where he later hides, out-of-the-way Italian restaurants, department stores where he will buy a new typewriter – the scene is ever prepared.

Every aspect of the scenery, every background character is, in wunderworld, active – they are placed there for the character, and the reader thus learns more about the character from everything we can see in the involved world. The world itself seems to be haunted by the character, echoes of whom are found everywhere one looks.

The conspiring world does not lead only to horror or humor – it can also be a platform for poetic, tender characterization.

In Amrita, Banana Yoshimoto crafts a wunderworld that involves itself in intimate healing. While protagonist Sakumi is recovering from an injury that has caused her to forget her past, her brother Yoshio, a shy kid struggling with alienation at school, awakens to a world next door. Together, the siblings sporadically experience wunderworld – culminating in healing and integration for them both.

Sakumi’s generous, vulnerable, gentle understanding of wunderworld’s role helps the reader feel gentle toward her; through her eyes, we see wunderworld guiding her toward self-understanding. ‘So much had been upset in our lives,’ Sakumi reflects, ‘with everyone rushing in opposite directions—back and forth, left and right—that when the light began to shine through the distant waters I knew something had happened. I knew I was saved.’

Wunderworld, in Sakumi’s eyes, is seen not as menacing or ominous (even though there are times when the dead are near, and it becomes a sort of underworld). Wunderworld welcomes Sakumi through doorways made of things that make her heart sing. Often these are mundane, like the movie My Neighbour Totoro or songs or novels. Through these doorways, Sakumi finds scenes of wonder, quietly perfect for each stage of her journey.

Wunderworld, in Amrita, is radiant. By crafting wunderworld in this way, by making it a place accessible even through novels or songs, Banana Yoshimoto changes how we the reader see our own world. We enter Sakumi’s wunderworld – and we leave with hints about our own.

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II – Accompanying oneself through wunderworld – a party of one with a chorus of voices

For this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people.

‭– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

In wunderworld, internal voices and conflicts spring out from characters, shards of self emerging as characters in their own right. (We shouldn’t be surprised this, or by anything wunderworld conjures up, but of course we will be – because wunderworld is a conspiring world, it knows us intimately – it knows exactly what will surprise us!)

Wunderworld presents these character-as-characters as yet another dynamic opportunity for an intimate look at the protagonist. (Even in Alice this idea is present, if not realized; early on, Alice talks with herself – one Alice incriminating and accusatory, the other consoling and conciliatory. Neither ha-satan-Alice nor paraclete-Alice actually emerge in this wonderfully funny little exchange – but would we have been surprised if they had?) 

In wunderworld, where there are no rules and they’re always broken, we as readers will not cry foul when the narrator in The Third Policeman finds that his soul has distinguished itself enough to interact with the narrator – even earning itself a name, Joe. (The narrator remains nameless.)

The conversations between the narrator and Joe are often limited to the two of them together, but they are not conflated; Joe is his own character, undeniably so – and this is the source of endless amusement. (If Joe doesn’t make you laugh, and you’re reasonably sure you’re a human, you ought to be worried whether you have a Joe.)

For reasons of joy and pleasure, I’ll tell you how Joe lands in the picture. O’Brien’s narrator enters the underworld and right away encounters the man he has killed, Old Man Mathers – in the ‘real’ world, the narrator has crawled into the departed Mather’s house (through an improbably long and dark tunnel – a telltale entrance to underworld).

As this suddenly alive Mathers tells a marvelous and winding story about the nature of reality, the narrator hears a voice commenting on the strange scene before him – and he understands it to be the voice of his very own personal soul. He names him Joe. The lengthy speech of the dead-but-now-not-dead Mathers pleases Joe greatly – prompting him to frequently remark, ‘This is very wholesome stuff, every word a sermon in itself. Listen very carefully.’

Ijon Tichy also finds himself in a self-divided conundrum in Peace on Earth. During his secret mission to the moon, he encounters mysterious robots – who callotomize Ijon, dividing his right brain from his left. Ijon’s logical right side narrates the story and studies his situation; Ijon’s left side, meanwhile, winks lewdly and rejects clothes it doesn’t like and tears paper out of the machine as Ijon types.

Ijon’s left side is an enigma, vacillating between enemy and ally. By allowing us to split characters into companions for themselves, wunderland presents us with an opportunity for play and fun so vast and rich and delicious that to ignore it is very nearly to embrace utter and profound sinfulness.

What a range of options wunderland provides us here – whether the accompanying self be the soul or the conscience or one side of the brain or a cerebral secretary, the sheer possibility of it all is so fair that even speaking of it makes us picture Emily Dickenson swooning. We can do whatever we like and the reader will laugh and the protagonist, that cheeky glowworm, will worm that little bit farther into our hearts. The shard of the protagonist – soul, conscience, etc. – may be a moralizer (delightful); may spiritually object to decidedly common things of the world (splendid); may detest things the character longs for (wondrous) while longing for things the character detests (excellent).

These split characters may simply remain mysteries, haunting the story from the fringes. Amrita features a split in Sakumi’s character – a her-before and her-after. The her-before is distant; a chasm separates them. Sakumi knows she is not who she was, and the difference is enough for her to consider the two parts of herself cleaved in two. And yet, when integration comes – the integration toward which Yoshimoto’s wunderworld conspires – the two Sakumis are cleaved together. She is healed – and the split character Yoshimoto treated poetically, the Sakumi of the past who was apparently irretrievably lost, becomes part of the emotional climax as we see the (re)integration of Sakumi with her prior, forgotten self. Her character subtly changes – there is a little more sparkle to her, a little more bubbliness, she is, maybe, a bit more shallow. And yet we are pleased. The two that should not be two are one again. 

With characters split into several members of the party, almost anything we do as writers – jokes, poetic reflections, internal conflicts, clever tricks, good-natured or not-so-good-natured teasing – builds intimacy with the character that we see from brand new, improbable angles – and by working to integrate these shattered shards, the reader feels even more intimate toward the character. Character building, in this case, is taken into our hands – and intimacy grows.

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III – Wunderworld’s absurdity creates space for intimate character responses

Curioser and curioser!

– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

In Amrita, Sakumi’s brother Yoshio claims a UFO is about to appear. He’s been acting weird, claiming gods are appearing to him, claiming he is witnessing the future – and Sakumi doesn’t quite believe him. She decides to believe him just enough to see if this UFO will really appear.

From an old shrine at the top of a hill, the two siblings see the sky split by a brilliant, radiant UFO. Yoshio is validated; the wonderland he claims to see – a claim doubted by his skeptical mother – is proven to exist, and he is connected to it. Sakumi believes him – and this faith in Yoshio initiates Sakumi’s own acceptance of wonderworld.

When it comes to the things of wunderworld – all the absurdity, all the conspiring scenery, all the cloven characters – the purpose is merely to reveal character. (Or it can be; Wonderland does what it likes.)

In Amrita, the UFO is not explained; the characters virtually never mention it again. When the UFO soars above them in a flash of ‘brilliant’ light, a ‘light so pure, full of genuine beauty’, Yoshimoto first gives us an insight into Sakumi’s vision of the world – an empathetic, poetic vision that draws us to her as a character. Then, Yoshimoto shows us Sakumi’s empathy – for, though a UFO has just appeared, Sakumi’s first concern is Yoshio, who is withdrawn rather than thrilled. ‘I simply wanted him to be surprised and moved by the wonderful spectacle of that night’, Sakumi says.

We are drawn again to Sakumi – this time, to her compassion. Yoshio is dismayed, because now it’s confirmed – wonderland really is happening to him. For Sakumi, the experience is one of joy and delight; for Yoshio, it is one of anguish. (For Lem and O’Brien, the character responses to the absurd are often lough-out-loud funny – which also reveals character.)

The ultimate thing is not the wild plot point, but the character, the character responding.

The utter freedom here!

Yoshimoto shows us that authors can drop in a UFO and then briskly move on – because the UFO, or whatever absurd thing wunderworld presents and then never returns to, has done its job. Wunderworld doesn’t worry about tying up loose threads. How many creatures does Alice meet – how many people does Dante run into without ever returning to them?

Things can happen and they aren’t explained. Strange characters come and go. Readers understand the rules: wunderworld owes us no explanation. Wunderworld is concerned ultimately – intimately – with only one thing: the person walking through it. 

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IV – Returning (νοστος, nostos)

‘I escaped,’ I said. 

He gave me long searching glances. 

‘Are you sure?’ he asked. 

– Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman

The fear in wunderworld is that one can never go home. You cannot return. But as I’ve learned more about these realms, even as I’ve conflated wonderworlds and underworlds, they have started to separate, to distinguish themselves; two images I’ve superimposed as ‘wunderworlds’ divide and become distinct. One red, one blue; one a sun, one a moon. There are overlaps, for wonderworld, underworld and ‘reality’ mix, intermingle. One step journeys across three lands. But when it comes to nostos, to returning, one key difference emerges. 

From an underworld, the threat of never returning is a legitimate one; look no further than The Third Policeman. (And the abiding sentence of Minos is certainly intimate – and eternal.)

But a wonderworld is different. A wonderworld in the truer sense – the Amrita sense that I am coming to embrace – sees wonderworld as a true place of wonder, ever near – ever here. A good place, not a fearful one – for if there is anguish, that is the influence of an underworld seeping through. A wonderworld saves, involving itself, sweeping in, accompanying.

There is a ‘never return’ element for wonderworlds – but it is not that you will be trapped in wonderworld forever; it is that you will bring wonderworld with you forever. When the journey concludes, the character finds a new way of seeing, a wonderworld way of seeing reality; the character can walk in any realm and carry the wonder with them. The way they see has changed, and it can’t go back to before. Banana Yoshimoto’s characters go on strange journeys – and when they return, they see the gentle moon and the soft clouded sky and the sparkling city lights drawing near to them. Outside wonderland, they see wonderland. 

And that, perhaps, is where the intimacy power of wonderworld lies. For these journeys show us something startling – they do something startling in us. When we look up from the pages of a wonderworld story, we see the world around us anew. The wonderworld is in us – even after The End, the wonderworlds don’t leave. And the stories have shown us doorways profound and mundane: dreams and My Neighbour Totoro and books and sunsets and beautiful songs. 

After walking through wonderworld, walking alongside a beloved character, the way we see changes. The world around us conspires – and if downstairs can conspire for ill, here-and-next-door can conspire for good. All the fragments of our personal selves, seen in the wonderworld way, reveal themselves to be one party after all – one united, integrated community that cleaves together, not apart. And even when the world seems absurd, that very absurdity blasts out a bubble of space around us, a space of agency where we have the freedom to laugh, to wax poetic, to break every mask of manners that the non-wondrous world foists upon us. The freedom to choose, and the freedom to live.

The world is large and strange and the turning wheel of fate is too big for our two hands to turn it – but in the wonderworld way of seeing, joy and dignity and hope are possible even as that burning wheel turns, even as the anguish of the underworld rears its desiccated sneering mask and reaches out to snare us. For after a trip through wonderworld, after walking alongside this character who has become dear to us, this character who has shown us how to be brave, how to climb with courage into darknesses and stand up to tyrants, we take heart even as the fog of underworld mists around us, seeking to suffocate and cloy – for the eyes of wonderworld see through the cloying fog the curious glitter of doorways that the underworld tries to hide.

But we can see them now – we can always see them. And we know what to do with doorways.

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