#witndfaon

[lilyjigglypuff]

- Lemony Snicket. Why is this night different from all other nights?

[theuncurrentdispatch]

At the end ATWQ, *SPOILERS* do you have any thoughts on why, in-story and writing/meaning reasons, the Associates reject Lemony at the end? Is it because he became an adult or was becoming an adult as conceptualized in the story? Or was it something else?

Whether or not Snicket became an adult is a complex question. His “apprenticeship [is] over” (4.291), but the last thing he tells anyone before disappearing is that he’s “not old enough” (4.288), an assertion laden with irony and a callback to the Bombinating Beast not attacking him in SYBIS because it’s “not old enough” (3.221) to harm anyone. By the end of ATWQ both the Beast and Snicket have aged out of this inability and Snicket has fulfilled his destiny of becoming Hangfire’s disciple. Hangfire, ATWQ’s largest-looming embodiment of adulthood, may look “peaceful” and “as if something at last was his” (4.252) during the Beast’s siege because he’s completed his true objective of passing on his legacy. In SYBIS, the “box of matches in [Snicket’s] pocket” implied his potential to turn into an adult arsonist like Hangfire, and he’s held back only by childish beliefs like “adults should[n’t] be encouraged to smoke” (3.27). In the climax of WITNDFAON, Snicket now likens Hangfire to his “teacher” (4.245) and credits him for instruction on how to “play” (4.248) the Beast statue and unleash his potential for destruction. 

I’ve always held it as a weak deus ex machina that ATWQ’s master of treachery could be defeated with a deception as plain as “what’s that behind you”. I can only justify it as the metaphorical gateway into Snicket’s “wild, lawless” place, that he commits a sort of ur-deception or “very old trick” so archetypal that, like “the old myths and superstitions” (4.246), its recounting requires the Association of Associates to recite it like a Greek chorus outside the derailed train. Snicket’s apprenticeship in Stain’d-by-the-Sea ends not just because he murders Hangfire, but because he tricks Hangfire with malicious intent, because he summons the Beast, and because he reveals previously suppressing Hangfire’s identity. Eve’s original sin wasn’t a magicked apple but the indelible knowledge that she had the ability to disobey and, what’s more, to lie about it and to implicate others. 

After Snicket’s misdeeds culminate in a literal trainwreck (in the shape of “a dead serpent” [4.259] that recalls Eden’s lech), Snicket finds that “friend or enemy, associate or stranger, [everyone shrinks] from [him]” (4.258) like he’s “a moving shadow, casting darkness over everyone” (4.286). In essence, he’s like Armstrong Feint. Note the lone cross in Seth’s opening illustration to chapter thirteen, after Snicket reflects that Hangfire was the only person “brave enough to face the beast directly” and who Snicket classifies among “heroes [and] villains” (4.252). It’s uncertain whether Snicket views himself as more “like Armstrong Feint, someone once kind and gentle who lowered himself into treachery, or more like a mysterious beast, hidden in the depths and summoned to wickedness” (4.290), but he now empathizes with both figures. Daniel Handler and I are technically Jewish, but feel free to interpret Hangfire as a Christ figure martyred by his inability to overcome humanity’s disbelief in his message, and Snicket as his reluctant disciple as he records the man’s story in a tetralogy mirroring the four gospels. 

The series ends with Snicket’s coat housing the Beast statue (and presumably the same box of matches) even as Snicket muses that “long ago, [he] had made a promise to return the statue to its rightful owner” (4.289). Snicket told Theodora in WCTBATH that the Beast “has been associated with the Mallahan family for generations” and that they’re likely the statue’s “rightful owners” (1.93-94). But Snicket doesn’t give the statue to Lady Mallahan’s only competent descendant, nor would Moxie likely want something she now knows brings with it only destruction and covetous frenzy reminiscent of the Maltese Falcon. Despite his misgivings about alienating his friends, Snicket never offers up the totem of chaos, and alongside his warped notion that he “think[s he] kept [his] promise” (4.277) to help Ellington find her father by unmasking and killing him, it’s quite possible Snicket also believes he’s fulfilled his promise to find the statue’s rightful owner: Himself. A statue only capable of chaos would “rightfully” belong to someone capable of chaos, and by tricking Hangfire with malevolent intent, Snicket has wrested ownership of the statue from Hangfire like Malfoy wrested ownership of the Elder Wand from Dumbledore. Even the Beast, raised and nourished by Hangfire, recognizes Snicket’s authority over the hand that fed him; Hangfire points uselessly at Snicket when he speaks his last words, but the Beast only obeys Snicket’s wordless pointing to leave, after looking over “[Snicket and] the statue in [his] hands” (4.254). 

As discussed in my earlier essay, Snicket never shakes the feeling that he, like Ellington, will always be an outsider to the residents of Stain’d, Associates included. Snicket’s not surprised in the climax that “the Mitchums of the world just bicker” while ignoring evil, or that Gifford and Ghede think it's “not [their] job” to intervene in a wrongful arrest. What ultimately drives Snicket from Stain’d is alienation from his friends. The Association is horrified by Hangfire’s murder because, unlike Snicket, they had only learned his identity moments before his death—And his identity is that of the absent parent, a specter that haunts each Associate. The Association relies on hope, but Snicket quietly believes that “Moxie’s mother [will] never send for her” and “Pip and Squeak's father [is] gone forever” (4.288). That said, the Association’s schism isn’t about Snicket’s deviation from the group’s strict moral code. Moxie laments that Snicket “didn’t have to feed [Hangfire] to that creature” (4.270) while simultaneously dismissing Feint’s orphaned daughter as “deserv[ing] to be in a prison cell” (4.279) for a murder Ellington didn’t commit. Snicket is ultimately as repulsed by the Associates’ hypocrisy as they are by his.

This brings Snicket to his second epiphany, that not only has his apprenticeship ended, but it’s now his responsibility to document its events. This is a postmodern concept of penance, to make amends not to the man Armstrong Feint (by, for example, rescuing his daughter) but to Feint’s story, lest he be erased a second time. Handler distinguishes between signifier and signified several times in the denouement: The town’s ink becoming “weaker and fainter” made the facts it represented appear “less certain” (4.263); Moxie equates Snicket “destroy[ing]” Hangfire to destroying a book and its “important secrets” (4.269); the Beast’s and Snicket’s actions have erased Hangfire’s meaning like “spilled ink across paper” voids the meaning of the words (4.249). Feint and his words “have vanished,” and though Snicket “wish[es]” his actions would too (4.254), he knows these actions obligate him to record his wrongdoing. Snicket ends WCTBATH with “practically none of” its events entering his official report (1.252), and this pattern persists through the second and third books. It’s only after “destroying” a man that Snicket pledges to revive Feint and his story in a fragmentary plot for the librarians. After all, “paper will put up with anything that’s written on it” (4.272), whether it’s spilled ink that destroys important secrets or words that resurrect a dead man “the way an idea moves from a book to your mind” (4.248).

[aestheticoutofnotdoingwell]

ellington feint + black

“Ellington Feint was a line in my mind running right down the middle of my life, separating the formal training of my childhood and the territory of the rest of my days. She was an axis, and at that moment and for many moments afterward, my entire world revolved around her.”

[singingaboutwishingx]

Lemony: *murders Hangfire*

Lemony: What’s the news, Moxie?

Moxie: Are you fucking kidding me? You just murdered someone! You ARE the news!

[lilyjigglypuff]

- Lemony Snicket. Why is this night different from all other nights?

[lilyjigglypuff]

- Lemony Snicket. Why is this night different from all other nights?

[lilyjigglypuff]

- Lemony Snicket. Why is this night different from all other nights?

[theuncurrentdispatch]

"Do you like what you do, Lemony Snicket?": Ethics and Adulthood in All The Wrong Questions

This essay contains spoilers from All The Wrong Questions as well as Lemony Snicket’s real name, which I know isn’t really a secret. I think people who use his real name have no sense of wonder. But since AtWQ is Snicket’s memoir, I had no other way to differentiate the author’s intent from the protagonist’s.

All the Wrong Questions shares Parks and Recreation’s liberal values in an absurdist universe, believing the world’s incompetent masses constantly undercut their own best interests and that every responsible citizen must save the population from itself. Snicket espouses that “hungry people should be fed” and commandeers Hungry’s “private property” (3.150) to feed the penniless Bellerophon brothers. Educational institutions like the press and public library consistently help the Association of Associates and are targeted by adults wanting Stain’d-by-the-Sea to remain ignorant, including ostensible helpers like Theodora and the officers Mitchum. Daniel Handler sets education in opposition to authority, with City Hall held up by “two big, crumbling pillars” (2.91) representing the library and the police station that occupy separate halves of the building (“Literature and the law don’t always get along” [13SI.149]). Handler also challenges the authoritarianism of the school system, which values obedience and conformity over independent thought. The malignant Wade Academy keeps its student body ignorant and incapable, but even the town’s public school offers nothing to the Associates, none of whom are the worse for never attending. Trapped in the confines of Wade Academy, Snicket analogizes that “people cry at silence or at violence, at a graveyard or a schoolyard” (3.174), implying violence at a school is as inevitable as a graveyard’s silence. 

Instead, Handler celebrates self-sufficient activities that the father of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes would refer to as “building character.” Like Watterson, Handler uses the guise of a child to push young readers toward activities like cooking, reading, and self-educating. Snicket constantly defines words and recommends other books (i.e. Charlotte’s Web, Wrinkle In Time, and of course, Wind in the Willows). A child’s lens also provides a safe distance to critique the hypocrisy of the adult world. Snicket describes children and adults “in entirely separate boats [that] only drift near each other when we [children] need a ride from someone” (1.114). Of course, Snicket himself gets his rides from the Bellerophon children, who are making up for their own parents’ absence. Handler’s protagonists are all kids who have vowed to atone for what “everyone’s parents did”-- that is, “nothing” (3.205)--  by feeding and transporting each other while attempting to inform and redeem their town. Symbolizing a new generation’s climate anxieties, Cleo Knight hopes to save Stain’d-by-the-Sea and her parents’ legacy by replacing octopus ink (a thin metaphor for fossil fuels and their environmental damage) with the ethically generated renewable resource of invisible ink. 

In Snicket’s world, children are victimized not only by the absence of adults, but by their presence. The only child in town with two physically and emotionally present parents is Stew Mitchum, who seems to be wicked not in spite of this but as a direct result. Stew watches his parents argue like a “shark [...] circles a tank while schoolchildren tap on the glass,” patiently awaiting the day he will “no longer be trapped [... but] will be in the open water, right where you’ll be swimming” (2.88). This is why Snicket chose to apprentice for the least capable chaperone, one whose first name is implied to be “Solitude” (4.289). The more absent the adult, the more autonomy provided the child. The wickedness of aging is most apparent in the town’s largest-looming threats, Hangfire and the Bombinating Beast. The Beast refrains from attacking Ellington and Snicket only because, as Hangfire’s daughter instinctively knows, “it’s not old enough” (3.221) to hurt people yet. Hangfire’s ability to “imitate the voice of anyone” speaks to a base childhood fear that adults are not who they say they are or “might not [even have] a real voice” (3.138) or identity anymore. Snicket, as a child character written by an adult, has a complex relationship with these villains and the dual apprehensions that “every adult [does] something terrible sooner or later [...] and every child [...] becomes an adult” (2.176). Snicket has “a box of matches in [his] pocket” but lies about it to Hangfire because he “[doesn’t] think adults should be encouraged to smoke” (3.27). Snicket literally carries the hidden potential to turn into a wicked fire-wielding adult like Hangfire, but is held back by a youthful idealism about resisting bad habits.

Nevertheless, Snicket ultimately turns to “a wild, lawless place” on a divisive “night [...] different from all other nights” (4.247). The titular question of Snicket’s final chronicle is itself a reference to the Jewish tradition of Ma Nishtana and is typically asked by the youngest member of a Seder so adults can “fulfill the [...] obligation to tell the story to one's children [and …] pique a child's curiosity,” just as Handler (who was raised Jewish) strives to pique curiosity in his young readers. Snicket saves Stain’d-by-the-Sea from Hangfire, but Hangfire posthumously claims Snicket’s integrity, having lured him out of a morally sound childhood. Snicket’s last words before walking away from his friends and colleagues are “I’m not old enough” (4.288), a callback to Ellington’s explanation for why the Beast didn’t attack them. Snicket’s claim is wrought with irony and denial, as he and the Beast had both just exhibited the “wild, lawless” nature of adulthood by killing Armstrong Feint. (You can read my dissection of the ending here.)

This is why Snicket reflects on Ellington as a “line [...] right down the middle of my life, separating the formal training of my childhood and the territory of the rest of my days” (4.161), a fact Handler had foreshadowed from her introduction. Snicket’s first impression of the femme fatale includes the distinctive line “green eyes she had” (1.131), a reference to Bernard Cornwell’s The Winter King when Arthur first sets eyes on the beautiful and dangerous Guinevere: “Green eyes, she had, with a kind of cruelty deep inside them. [...] If you can master me, that look seemed to say, then you can master whatever else this wicked world might bring” (Cornwell 183). Ellington and S. Theodora Markson are the town’s only other outsiders, which is why the two share “Solitude” as a musical motif and first name respectively. Snicket befriends several locals, but only Ellington can commiserate over something as specific and foreign as “blueberries picked in a field at the height of summer, miles and miles and miles from anywhere this train will go” (4.158). Snicket defends Ellington to the Associates because their xenophobic mistrust recalls his own cold reception in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, where locals like the officers Mitchum are only too eager to connect “the arrival of two strangers” and “the town experienc[ing] a crime” (1.90).

The critical difference that makes Snicket and Ellington opposite sides of the same lonely coin is Ellington’s resolve to put family before “anything and everything” (1.140) while Snicket feels obligated to help the town before his sister. Finally embracing Ellington’s code of “anything and everything” forces Snicket to relinquish the idealistic “training of his childhood,” including his promise to reunite Ellington with her father, and the ironic result is Armstrong Feint’s murder. Ellington’s wild, lawless philosophy effectively ends Snicket’s apprenticeship and childhood, bringing him to the literal “territory of the rest of his days,” the Clusterous Forest that swallows him up in the story’s final pages.