The Black and the Grey: Haunted by the Inevitable in "Arrow-Odd"

For days I have been struggling to think not through but with and alongside the troubling Viking romance Arrow-Odd. It is a story that haunts, that hovers like an ephemeral ghost just out of reach, and the deeper one stretches into the story for some sort of answer, the more the tale withdraws into the darkness. Even now, this reader finds himself frozen and ensnared in its shadows. For Arrow-Odd is not a story to be dissected like an onion, peeled back like some fruit concealing grains of knowledge, however multi-valent and layered its narrative might be. It is not a story for thinking, but being, for entangling oneself in the is-ness of things, for hovering between objects like a ghost and finding one’s oikos in the rocky crags, the violent seas, and the wilds and wildernesses that don’t give a fuck about humanity. It is a story that demands its reader discard anthropocentric perspective and allow himself to be swept along the complex networks of living and dying as man, bear, giant, god, stone, tree or wind.

I chose the verb “haunts” above because Arrow-Odd is fraught with the hovering shadows and ghostly-relations born of violent forces and visceral intensities. The violence of Arrow-Odd is like the violence Deleuze reads in the paintings of Francis Bacon, it is the “violence of a sensation (and not of representation), a static or potential violence, a violence of reaction and expression” (Francis Bacon, xxix). It is the potential violence of the fate that hangs over Odd like a cloud, for after a witch foretells Odd’s supernaturally long life, his heroic fortunes, and his death by the skull of a horse, Odd coldly executes the horse – thereby securing his inevitable demise – and journeys throughout the entire imagined world, conquering and pillaging as he establishes and defends his reputation. This reputation, like his fate, is an invisible force which engenders so much of the tale’s carnage, for Odd’s earliest deeds of violence in Permia, a land of sorcery, results in the Permians’ training a magical anti-hero, Ogmund, to seek vengeance upon Odd. Odd’s reputation, fully embodied, is the parasitic enemy always at his heels, feeding on his accomplishments, weakening his resolve precisely as it engenders his story, a story always entangled with Ogmund’s. Ogmund becomes an irrepressible force of nature, a manifestation of fire and sea, blood and bone, the brutality of contact with the more-than-human world, a world that demands suffering and loss. The violence of Arrow-Odd is the violence of co-existence, of suffering with a fully sensate environment.

The sensations of suffering, painted in splashes of blood and swathes of fire, follow Odd as the brutal Viking hero navigates a world comprising improbable scales of time, space and size. Living beyond the life-expectancy of the human, Odd is ever-haunted by the impermanence of life as his friends, blood-brothers and children die off, leaving him frustratingly alive. In Arrow-Odd, time has not a winged-chariot, but a sluggish clubbed foot, and the impossibly slow crawl of time nudges Odd about impossibly vast stretches of space. Three-hundred years of adventure lead our hero from Ireland to Russia, Sweden to Greece, through heathen lands and Christendom, across oceans and into the lairs of giants. Odd even engenders a child upon a giantess, a giantess who perceives Odd to be an infant himself; this shift in perspective invites the reader to acknowledge that, from a monster’s point of view, the human is puny and vulnerable. Even the improbably long-lived and unimaginably well-traveled is nevertheless incredibly miniscule to something, because this is a tale (and a world) in which the improbable becomes the most-likely, in which stone ships bob afloat rivers, silks resist arrows, seas swell with ravenous leviathans, and gods whisper valuable advice but refuse to take up arms. Scale shifts and sways in Arrow-Odd because the world is not for human consumption, it is not an inert backdrop but an active, engaged actor comprising objects inexhaustible in their potentialities.

For Arrow-Odd illustrates the deep ecological entanglement of being, what Levi Bryant calls a “black ecology,” in which “things are characterized by a sort of mysteriousness harboring hidden powers that hold themselves in reserve, waiting to erupt under the right circumstances when they enter into the appropriate interactions with other things” (Prismatic Ecology, 292-3). Although, I would add that Arrow-Odd also explores the eruptions that result from inappropriate interactions, because networks are messy things, rarely stable, often comprising actors unable or unwilling to find accord with one another. Thus, not only Byrant’s black ecology but a “grey ecology” as well, the grey of “exhaustion, even obliteration,” that “also reminds that death is a burgeoning of life by other means” (Jeffrey Cohen, Prismatic Ecology, 270). Objects are flayed and mutilated to become new objects with new possibilities and intensities; a bear-skin becomes a magical weapon, trees are regularly hewn to become clubs, and after his face is torn off by Odd, Ogmund is born into a new identity, King Quillanus, and is inscribed with a political identity and reconciled with his life-sworn enemy. The messiness of porosity and the fragility of precarious relations erupt from a background – which was never only a background – that nourishes as it decomposes. And thus Odd, at the story’s end, returns home and digs up the skull of the horse prophesied to end his days. Beneath the skull, a poisonous serpent lies coiled and injects Odd with his fated demise. The ground, the earth, our oikos is as toxic as it is nurturing, for life and death carouse in a grey debauchery beneath the soil, in a ceaseless danse macabre that hails all and spares none.

“Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?”
(“Lobster Quadrille,” Alice in Wonderland)