Jo's Story

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 25 June 2014.

Makes sense to me. There's no need to show visions; they can be described, or we can just show the repercussions of the experiences.

Jo's story is useful as a frame.

My one reservation about making the moment before ECT the frame is that it seems to shift the question of whether Arthur is a mystic or a madman too heavily in the direction of madness.

Graham Greene

Actually, it's more that that's the central problem.

If the whole story gets swept into a madman's hallucination, any healing that happens for Jo, Will, and Arthur becomes just as absurd as the voyage into the volcano, and postmodernism triumphs over Catholicism.

I don't want a neat package in the end despite my Apollonian leanings.

But I do want something like the end of The Power and the Glory, where God clearly wins but the victory doesn't look like the sort of victory people try to impose on the world. The mess we create for ourselves is still a mess, but there is a clear source of hope and redemption when you pull back the veil of human chaos.

If the frame is Jo, that gives us a type of objective narrator on the epic front and a type of chorus and foil on the dramatic front. I'm open to a lot of ideas right now, but I'd guess another advantage is that the story could still take the multiple untrustworthy narrators approach if she goes around interviewing various people about their experiences.