Katabasis

“Loss of identity was a terrifying prospect. Who were you without your memories, your background, your relationships, your station? What if your lot in the next life was far worse than the life you’d just lived? It didn’t matter that in theory souls enjoyed infinite lives, and infinite chances to experience things good and bad. From the subjective perspective of the soul, reincarnation was no different from death.”

The novel explores what constitutes identity and personhood and what makes life worth living. Alice’s identity—and those of the undergraduate magicians she is talking to here—is wrapped up in her intellectualism. A person like Alice, who believes their worth is contingent on their intellectual identity, puts an entity like “your station” alongside one like “your relationships.” Through her journey, she will begin to value relationships and material joys more than accolades.

“Alice, for much of her graduate career, considered Professor Grimes a necessary trial. What didn’t kill you made you stronger—or at least gave you a thicker skin. For most of her life she had been first in her class, and she saw no reason why the PhD should be any different. She only had three more years to go—and then two, then one—she only had to rub the sleep from her eyes and take a deep breath and survive every day and ignore every inconvenient truth until she had her diploma, until she was free.”

This quotation characterizes Academia as an Infernal Structure in a literal sense: Alice believes she has to suffer through the punishment of Grimes’s abuse before graduating with her PhD and getting a job, which she thinks will make her happy. This is similar to how Shades believe they must suffer through the Courts of Hell to reincarnation. This also characterizes Alice’s minimization of Grimes’s abuse.

“The only thing we know for certain is that souls in the Underworld eventually travel, in some shape or form, to the domain of Lord Yama—that is, Hades, Anubis, King of the Dead, Lord of the Underworld, Judge of Life and Death, or however else one wishes to perceive him.”

This quotation contributes to the universe’s world-building. Unlike other katabasis stories, this version of Hell is not derivative of a singular religion. The many names for Yama show that this single space is differently interpreted by many religions, none of which is more valid than another. This quotation also touches on the theme of The Mutability of Facts, Reason, and Logic. A seeming fact—like who the Lord of Hell is, and what he looks like—is in fact mutable based on one’s perception and beliefs.

“She liked becoming a person that befit the institution. With each new matriculation you had the chance to reinvent yourself, to deserve your place there. And now Alice felt, though she knew this was dangerous, an instinctive want to fit into this place.

If Hell was just another institution, then it couldn’t be so bad.”

Alice is insecure with how her identity fits into the academic institution. While she thinks Peter fits in seamlessly with the academy’s perception of a scholar, her own identity as a woman of color feels dissonant with that expectation. As such, she continually shapes her personality around the academy. Noticing the theme of Academia as Infernal Structure, Alice decides to take the same strategy into her katabasis.

“Never could she quite achieve that blissful intellectual Zen; that runner’s high of peaceful contemplation. More often she felt bereft; unsatisfied and unsatisfying, trapped in a body that needed.”

This quotation shows the effect of Grimes’s psychological abuse of Alice. It results in an existence that loathes ephemeral, material aspects of life and assumes that intellectualism and contemplation are part of a higher and more eternal plane of existence. This assumption is complicated by the theme of Ambition as Self-Damnation, as Alice will see in Hell how that mindset traps the Shades in their punishments.

“The point was that Professor Grimes hadn’t tormented just anyone. He’d tormented them. Because they were strong enough to withstand it. Because they kept the faith. Because they were special, and worth the effort, and because whatever they became when he was done with them would be so dazzling.”

To survive, Peter and Alice rationalize Grimes’s mistreatment of them, with Grimes playing upon their Ambition as Self-Damnation to manipulate them. Both of them entertain the fiction that Grimes is a unique intellect, and so his abuse of them makes them uniquely special. The institution of academia puts a premium on success, so they formulate abuse into its own accomplishment. They engage in their own “chosen one” fiction, wherein Grimes’s attention—both bad and good—makes them feel special, when in reality Grimes is simply cruel and abusive.

“There was only one possible interpretation for what she was looking at.

Peter intended to trade her soul for Professor Grimes’s.

Peter was going to trap her here in Hell.”

A key aspect of Grimes’s abuse of Alice and Peter is called toxic triangulation. This is a strategy in which an abuser will communicate strategic untruths to a third party about their victim, turning that person against the victim. Grimes does this with both Alice and Peter, making them each the third party and victim in turn. This form of coercive control establishes his power over them and turns them against one another. Due to this manipulation, Alice is primed to mistrust Peter and believes he is plotting to kill her.

“He could make you feel so important. His proximity drenched you in the sparkle. The full force of his attention was like a drug. He laughed at a joke you’d made, or he followed you around with questions on your work, and you thought, I’ve caught the nature boy. But he always pulled away, and left you wondering what you had done. Had you offended him? Said the wrong thing? Or had you simply not been enough; not been smart enough, or clever enough? Had he just gotten bored, gotten up, and wandered away?”

This impression of Peter from Alice’s third-person point of view characterizes what she perceives to be his flighty nature. In retrospect, this quotation is more complex than it seems. It is later revealed that Peter has an invisible illness, exposing how people’s perceptions of someone can create a reality entirely different from someone else’s actual lived experience.

“There were boyfriends in high school, boyfriends in college; nervous young men in button-downs smelling of aftershave who traipsed one after another in a forgettable procession of silent films, fumbling hands. Dimly she understood this kind of socializing turned into ‘going steady,’ into marriage—she just couldn’t understand how, when it all felt like an exercise in concealing your distaste. Peter did not belong to this genre. This was an entirely different type of feeling, and Alice could not consign what they had to the trash heap of romance.”

This quotation comes more than a third of the way through the novel, yet, as is characteristic of the novel’s style of slowly doling out background information, it is the first time Alice overtly acknowledges her history of having romantic feelings toward Peter. Alice’s accounting of past boyfriends makes it clear she valued her academic aspirations over her relationships: Her feelings toward Peter are characterized differently, indicating the specialness of their relationship.

“The first rule every graduate student learned was that at the base of every paradox there existed the truth. That you should never fully believe your own lie, for them you lost power over the pentagram. That magick was an act of tricking the world but not yourself. You had to hold two opposing beliefs in your head at once. You had to know your way back.”

While this quotation builds out the magical rules for this universe, it also provides characterization, plot, and thematic work. On the level of plot and character, it explains why the Kripkes have become so non-human. It also introduces tension into Alice’s characterization, as she is a narrator immersed in unreliability, half-truths, and paradoxes. Thematically, it relates to The Mutability of Facts, Reason, and Logic: It points out the limits of a mutability of fact that previously seemed limitless, establishing stakes for Alice as her journey progresses.

“It’s a problem of transitivity and rational decision-making. The setup is, suppose you have to put on a device that tortures you by degrees of tiny increments, increments so tiny that you don’t even notice them. You can only turn the dial up; you can’t turn it back down. Every day you have the option to turn the dial up by one increment, and if you do, you get ten thousand dollars. So every day, since you won’t notice the change in pain, you should obviously turn the dial up and accept the ten thousand dollars. Until one day, you’re stricken with unbearable pain, and there’s no going back. Only even then, it still remains rational to keep turning the dial up, because you won’t notice the change and because the ten thousand dollars is so attractive. How did we get to this point? What failure of decision making led us here?”

Elspeth explains the self-torturer’s paradox. Like many paradoxes in the novel, which serve as motifs tied to the theme of The Mutability of Facts, Reason, and Logic, this paradox does narrative work. It characterizes Elspeth and the clear-eyed view she takes toward academia and the theme of Academia as an Infernal Structure. It also describes the katabasis Alice is on, though Alice does not realize it yet. Like the self-torturer, Alice never feels able to make a different rational decision than the one she makes, even though her situation grows more and more dire.

“Here she belonged. Here she could utter things, could be honest about where her mind had drifted, and they wouldn’t look at her like she was mad. All her life she had bumbled through social contact like the only actor who’d forgotten to look at the script. She had been the weird one, the troubled one, the one no one wanted to sit with. But they were all the weird ones here. And here no one punished you for caring too much, thinking too deeply. Here you could jump down any rabbit hole you liked, and everyone would tunnel down with you.”

This quotation explores what is compelling about academia, in an inverse to the theme of Academia as an Infernal Structure. Though Alice insists that she is drawn to academia for the research, joy of new discovery, and the promise of a tenure-track job, in her own accounting of her past, her real joy seems to be found in her relationships with other people.

“‘I had parents. Have parents. I have siblings. I still have a life.’

‘No, right, I’m sure.’ Peter nodded. ‘But if you’re done with research, then what’s the—I mean, have you ever thought through what you might do when you get back up there?’

‘Of course,’ Elspeth said scathingly. ‘I’m going to sit outside. I’m going to have a cup of tea, Assam, with lots of milk and a swirl of honey. And a cinnamon bun. With raisins.’”

During this exchange, Peter and Alice’s characters have not grown enough for them to recognize that there is more to life than research and academic accolades, as they are still trapped in Ambition as Self-Damnation. They privilege a life of the mind. Elspeth, who has already died, realizes that the joy of life is in small, day-to-day things.

“Alice, however, was still convinced by the impossible mean—the idea that there might exist some perfect line between femininity and subjugation, wherein if she could only wear clothes that were both perfectly attractive and perfectly modest, she could both enjoy the attention that being a woman in the department got her while also commanding respect as a scholar.”

This quotation characterizes Alice’s contradictory desires: She both does and doesn’t want to be perceived as unique and traditionally “feminine.” Mentors like Grimes have coached her to be competitive against her peers, leading Alice to harbor resentment for other women and gender-based professional struggles. At the same time, she hopes her identity might earn her special attention from Grimes, an approval-seeking mentality he has groomed her into.

“It would have made everything so easy, if she’d just given Professor Grimes what he wanted. He’d have satisfied his urges. He’d have been sated, happy with her, and that might have given her some reprieve. In the tired moments after she might have asked for some guidance on her research proposal. She might have asked him to put in a good word for her when she applied for extra funding that summer.”

This quotation demonstrates the depth of Grimes’s abuse toward Alice; it is also indicative of how abusers train their victims to function. They levy the threat of their power and displeasure over their victim to get what they want. Alice thinks that giving in to Grimes’s sexual abuse would ultimately be easier than dealing with his wrath and the professional repercussions he could bring upon her. This sort of faulty logic is one that abusers instill in their victims.

“‘And that’s what I would have done to Grimes.’ Alice’s arms tightened around her chest, like a closing trap, like she could squeeze herself into nothing if she tried hard enough. ‘I would have put him back in that corpse. I would have filled it with all sorts of unnatural shit to keep it together, and kept the spell going long enough that the mechanics of his vocal chords and tongue could move, could say all the things I needed it to say. I would have kept it at my complete mercy. I wouldn’t have given Grimes a second life at all. I would have made him into my toy and pet and made him beg for release.’”

Alice’s dialogue introduces a major plot twist to the novel. It undermines the plot’s entire original premise, in which Alice and Peter were rescuing Grimes’s soul so he could help them graduate and write them recommendations. Alice’s motives are now characterized as much more complex. Her secret motivation reveals that, though she told Peter and herself one story, deep down she knew the severity of Grimes’s abuse and was deeply psychologically affected by it.

“He hated this meat sack he’d been trapped in; hated every tissue and organ that sapped his attention and energy when all he wanted to do was sit and think. He demanded so little of his body, and yet it would not even afford him this.

A horrible impulse overtook him then.

He decided he would not get help. Not this time. No doctors, no hospitals, no medications, no waiting and watching to see how he responded to various courses of treatment. No steroids, no side effects. He was exhausted by the entire cycle.”

Chapter 22 is the only chapter not in Alice’s third-person limited point of view, but Peter’s. His story provides the truth behind what Alice perceives as his flakiness and lack of care throughout their doctoral program. While Alice has perceivable identity markers, her race and gender, that prevent her from fully intellectualizing and divorcing herself from material realities, Peter has invisible ones. His Crohn’s disease makes him abhor his own materiality, driving his quest to live a life of the mind. Like Alice, the tension between these two components affects his desire to stay alive. Also like Alice, a reconciliation with the material world is a vital part of his katabasis.

“‘I don’t see reincarnation as the answer,’ said Gertrude. ‘I see reincarnation as the escape. Escape for weaker wills who cannot face their new world with resolve, who cannot understand that this is it, this is all we have.’”

At first, a Shade Alice meets briefly in the final Court, Gertrude, presents a compelling vision of Hell to Alice. However, one of the novel’s central themes is Academia as an Infernal Structure, and so Gertrude reveals herself to be just another powerful individual exploiting the influence she has over other, more vulnerable Shades. Like Grimes, Gertrude has developed a cult of personality that revolves around imposing conditions that delineate strong and weak individuals.

“Immortality here was no gift. Nothing was fleeting, precious, and so nothing was valuable. Not even thoughts, for none of their thoughts were original, but here echoes of one another, everything they would ever be capable of thinking in a golden box with the spotlight merely roving. Nothing added; no discovery, no delight. No growth here. Just withered stumps of time.”

Early in the novel, Alice prizes lasting intellectual, scholarly pursuits over fleeting material things. In the final Court of Hell, she sees an extreme version of lasting intellectualism in the Shades who have stood and pondered so much that they have turned into immortal but withered trees. Only seeing this extreme wakes Alice up to the beauty of ephemerality.

“I watch others jump, all the time, and their unravelling does not scare me, I do not look away. But still I do not jump. I cannot. Something deep within me refuses. Why is that?’ His tone grew urgent. ‘I am searching for the reason. And if I fear anything at all, it is that this reason does not exist, and that I am trapped in existence by a delusion.’”

These words are spoken by Gradus, the mysterious Shade who guides Alice through the final Court of Hell. Like Dante in the Paradiso, which is the end of his journey, at the end of her journey, Alice gets a new guide particularly suited to showing her through the final Court. None of the Shades know the criteria for being chosen for reincarnation, including Gradus. Since Gradus does eventually reincarnate, it seems likely that the humility of his uncertainty plays a part in his progress. This is supported by his name, Gradus, which is a reference to the saying gradus as Parnassum, which indicates a path toward achieving proficiency in something.

“‘If I die, I die,’ said Alice. ‘But there’s no life otherwise, I think. Life is an activity that’s got to be sustained. You have to fight for it. Otherwise it’s no life at all. That’s just it. It’s just an impulse. And we’ve both determined that’s not enough.’”

These words show Alice’s character growth. While Alice previously didn’t care if she died because the abuse she was subjected to led her to experience suicidal ideation, now she wants to live so much that she is okay risking her death to try and fight for life.

“Then Gradus was not Gradus anymore, but a shimmering glow; immaterial in a wholly different way than Shades. For Shades were imprints, persistent past, but this Spirit-Not-Gradus was undefined future, brilliant in its potential.”

Throughout Katabasis, Alice and the other Shades—including Gradus—question whether reincarnation is real, or if it is simply a facet of the theme of Academia as an Infernal Structure, to keep Shades eternally searching for knowledge. Gradus’s reincarnation proves that there is a future for souls beyond death and, by implication, beyond academia.

“‘We weren’t special for it. We weren’t—worthy of it, or handpicked for it, or anything like that, can’t you understand?’ Elspeth’s hand moved again in that lecturing staccato. Harsher this time. ‘He did not care. It was completely random. We were just there.’”

Elspeth’s words provide a key intervention in how Alice approaches her dynamic with Grimes and her perception of his character. As a form of self-preservation, Alice believed that being abused by Grimes meant she was the intellectual elite. However, this mindset also convinced her that it was worth staying in his cycle of abuse, thus touching on the theme of Ambition as Self-Damnation. Elspeth decenters this idea, assisting in helping Alice realize Grimes’s ordinariness and cruelty in the novel’s climax.