The Fable of Fan

 

On Such a Full Sea
by Chang-Rae Lee



Diane's Pick

Summary:

The story is set in an undefined, dystopian future where society is confined and stratified into 3 major categories: the open counties, the production facilities, and the charter cities. Echoes of today's fears can be seen in the aftermath of avian and swine flu pandemics, mass immigration, pollution, rationed medical care, and unrestrained capitalism.

The story follows a teenage protagonist, Fan, and the search for her abducted boyfriend Reg. She leaves the safety of B-Mor (formerly Baltimore, populated by an ethnic Chinese society which runs a "growing" facility for fish and plants) to traverse the dangerous unknown beyond the walls. After her exodus, the B-Mor community is left to mourn and wonder after her, to fill in the rest of her fable.

Analysis:

The tale of Fan is a myth, or is made into a myth by her community, and the narrator's voice takes on the collective, "we." The making of the myth itself becomes an important topic in the meta-narrative as if the speaker(s) themselves realize they are making up the story as they go.

"A tale, like the universe, they tell us, expands ceaselessly each time you examine it, until there's finally no telling exactly where it begins, or ends, or where it places you now" (61).

All that B-Mor has is a "vid" of Fan crossing the threshold and leaving the safety of the facility for the unknown. The focus on the moment of her leaving is symbolic for the story--it represents the movement into the unknown, not only for Fan but also for the community, for that is where their imagined story begins. At this point it becomes apparent that Fan has become a heroine, that her journey will fall into the broad strokes of the universal narrative. This is why she is called "one of the rank," why the cover on the book depicts no face. Probably the most well-known term for the hero's journey is found in Josheph Cambell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces where he terms it the "monomyth."

Below is my rendering of what Fan's adventure looks like within the monomyth. Several important events align with the traditional hero's journey, but there are some important differences and omissions as well.

Fan's Journey in terms of the Monomyth

Some important elements missing from Fan's heroic journey include supernatural aid, temptation, atonement with the father, and crossing the return threshold. The "Meeting with the Goddess," though I did not include it in my illustration, could be seen as Miss Cathy's doting relationship on Fan just after Mr. Leo's attempted rape.

Miss Cathy wants to adopt or "keep" her with "The Girls." However, at no point in her situations of safety does Fan ever seem to be tempted to stay--she always moves on with an impetus that is not exactly clear. "It couldn't have been just Reg she had gone to search out," the narrators say, believing that something deep and hidden propels her (61).

Fan's moment of rebirth or "apostasis" is also strange. There doesn't seem to be any great moment where she transforms. She is always, steady and the same. Two events hint at the idea of rebirth without illustrating Fan's going through it. One is the scene where girl number Six of The Girls makes a dramatic change to their wall mural--showing Fan breaking the bounds of the panel to rise up from the water into Reg's arms. The second hint is during Fan's short stay with Vik as they watch an anime film together:

...the muted colors of the anime seemed somehow especially rich and haunting, and the sequences of violence and protogenesis so strangely beautiful, that by the end, after the heroine is physically destroyed but rises again, whole in form but entirely changed, Fan felt a sudden hollowing in her chest, a flash cavern of longing that she had not yet known (261).

The fact that Fan never returns is also an important departure from the monomyth. We are left, after her rescue, to imagine where she goes, knowing that her quest may never be finished. The ending we're left with feels abrupt, yet perhaps it's fitting. We don't have to see the end; instead, we can partake in the myth-making along with B-Mor, mythmaking as we are already prone to do in the fan-fictions of novels and television shows.

Conclusion and Afterthoughts 

There is, of course, plenty more to talk about, but I think I'll stop here to see what you think. I think Lee's construction of Fan's story intentionally follows the major elements of the monomyth in order to explore themes about mythmaking as a community and the endurance of stories shadowing and intersecting our lives "where we are." I didn't even touch on the stories of other characters in the novel--stories in which we are given glimpses of the arcs--as in how Quig's story is a retelling of the myth of Eden and the Fall. I think we are meant to see these other stories intersect with Fan's, overlaying one another.

Diane's Review/Rating:

It's strangely refreshing to read a dystopian novel where the protagonist doesn't have the pressure of saving the world. This is a great novel for how closely its message brushes into our current social climate--lack of social mobility, economic recession. It's hard to ignore that this is where we could go, yet the novel is able to grasp a sweet chord of hope in the survival of the community and of story-telling. I give it five stars.
 
   

Jan's Response

“The funny thing about the tale of Fan is that much of what happened to her happened to her” (227).  It is this fact that I think so thoroughly thwarts the common story of the hero.  Heroes are the ones who act, never the ones who are continually acted upon as Fan is.  Yet, despite Fan constantly finding herself at the mercy of others, and so rarely doing much to change that, the collective narrator makes a point of telling us that Fan is not without volition in these event, in fact that she has ample volition.  Which leaves the conclusion that Fan’s inaction, once she was acted upon, is not due to a lack of volition, and in fact is the opposite: Fan’s inaction is her volition manifest.  She chooses to do nothing.

It is not that Fan chooses to do nothing throughout the entire story.  Fan chooses to go in search of Reg, when she could have chosen to stay in B-Mor.  She chooses to poison her fish tanks when she could have left them alone.  She chooses to save Eli and Pinah from drowning.  She chooses to set a fire and to distract Miss Cathy to save Four and Five.  She makes choices at moments of crisis throughout the story, but the fact remains that doing nothing was always still an option available to her, if not a terribly attractive one.

Action and inaction are important to the story, and we get to see other characters struggle with it.  While Fan is well practiced at opting to do nothing, this is a trait that young Oliver/Liwei did not possess in the slightest until he met Vik.

Oliver admired Vik’s mind, for sure, but mostly for how unruffled he was, how he let everything come to him and then made it fit into his own idiosyncratic measure.  This could never be Oliver’s way, but hanging out with Vik helped him understand the value of not always pushing and striving at full tilt, that there were situations best handled by patience or throttling back or maybe—and this had never occurred to him—by doing nothing at all.  (319)

Vik shares Fan’s inaction, although his inaction often lacks Fan’s decisiveness.  Vik is the kindred spirit that lets us know what Fan might have been like had she grown up in the Charters instead of in B-Mor.  Perhaps because of this similarity in their natures, Vik is the only character in the story to give Fan true choices.  Unlike when Quig asks Fan if she is willing to stay with Miss Cathy, which Fan clearly must if she is to ensure the survival of the compound and of Sewey, Vik offers her choices without expecting or needing her to decide one way or the other.  Vik tells her that she can leave Miss Cathy’s if she wants, he tells her that she can stay at his house for as long as she likes and leave whenever it suits her, and when he comes to save her from Liwei, he asks her “where would you like to go?” (351).

The question is an important one.  Fan has not had the liberty to choose her destination since the very night she left B-Mor and was hit by Quig’s car, perhaps since the night before Reg disappeared when she intentionally risked getting pregnant.  The freedom to choose for herself, however, is oddly thrust upon her in this moment.  She no longer has the option to do nothing.  Making a choice for herself is no longer a choice.  And this moment of forced liberty is where the collective narrator loses Fan: They cannot follow her beyond this point.  They still have the option to do nothing, to let their hair grow back or to stop painting the street art of Fan and Reg, and Fan does not.

So perhaps this moment, where there is truly no going back and no choice but to act, perhaps this is the missing moment of rebirth.  This is the point at which Fan finally becomes something much closer to a “true” hero, one who must act, and in doing so separates herself from the mythological construct of B-Mor.  B-Mor clings to their collective identity as the hive, as an “us” instead of an “I,” and although Fan has flirted with independence throughout the story, her choices have been to support rather than to lead.  But when Vik hands her the reins and she must take them up, she no longer belongs within the “us.”  She is now an “I.”  And where she leads, they cannot follow.  Not yet.

Jan's Rating: