Who Goes There?

Thomas M. Disch would go down as one of the leading writers of the New Wave era, appearing regularly in New Worlds, and you may even recall I covered the serialization of his 1967 novel Camp Concentration in that magazine’s pages last year. What tends to go ignored, however, is that despite his association with New Worlds it was really Fantastic and Amazing Stories under Cele Goldsmith-Lalli’s editorship that Disch first made his name. He had made his debut in Fantastic in 1962, only 22 years old, and his early work shows a frightening intellect that would see Disch as—along with Samuel R. Delany—an enfant terrible in the ’60s. By his thirtieth birthday he had already written a few novels and enough short stories to fill multiple volumes. Today’s story, “Descending,” possibly shows early Disch at his best; I’d even argue it’s a near-perfect story—except for one thing, which we’ll get to. While ostensibly classified as SF, “Descending” is less conventional science fiction and more existential horror crossed with one of Rudyard Kipling’s machine fables. It’s a real gem of a story.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1964 issue of Fantastic, which is on the Archive. It was reprinted in the October 1992 issue of Amazing Stories, found here. Ironically “Descending” was reprinted online, but you can only access it via the Wayback Machine: it appeared in 2000 on Sci Fiction as a “classic” reprint. For For anthology reprints we have quite a few: 10th Annual Edition: The Year’s Best SF (ed. Judith Merril), Modern Science Fiction (ed. Norman Spinrad), Decade: The 1960s (ed. Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison), and A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (ed. Terry Carr and Martin H. Greenberg). Unfortunately it looks like “Descending” has not been reprinted this century thus far. Can we fix this maybe?

Enhancing Image

Something that occurred to me only now is that we don’t get a name for the protagonist here. Indeed the only named character is the man’s landlady, Mrs. Beale, who appears briefly at the beginning. The man (what else do you call him?) is unemployed, behind on rent, and only able to buy stuff on credit; this was back when credit cards were a relatively new thing. Even his credit score is bad. Immediately we’re introduced to a kind of capitalist nightmare, with the protagonist being seemingly on the precipice of financial collapse, knowing he’d have to land a job soon or else hit the streets. “He had been a grasshopper for years. The ants were on to his tricks.” He’s been avoiding ruin for a minute now, but Disch sets up at the beginning that Our Anti-Hero™ is about to have a very bad day—possibly even a reckoning. It’s an ominous, paranoid start to the story, and things only get more unnerving from there. At a little under 5,000 words this story does not waste out time, but its briskness also feeds into its allegorical nature. It helps that Disch, even at this early stage (he would’ve been only 22 or 23 when he wrote “Descending”), was a fine-tuned prose stylist.

The man takes the subway to get to Underwood’s Department Store, to get some food and a couple books while he’s at it. (“What’s a department store?” is a question zoomers would be asking, and rightfully so, while also asking, “What are malls?”) He gets some groceries, including a pheasant (raw or pre-cooked he doesn’t know), plus copies of Vanity Fair and Middlemarch, of which the former he starts reading on his escalator ride from the top floor of the department store. Worth mentioning that Vanity Fair‘s subtitle is A Novel Without a Hero, and similarly “Descending” could be considered a short story without a hero, or even without characters in the traditional sense. The man is a schmuck, sure, but past that we get to know very little about him; he’s less a flesh-and-blood person and more a stand-in for man’s anxieties in an industrialized capitalist society. It’s also while reading Vanity Fair on the escalator that he realizes that he has been on this thing for, at the very least, half an hour at this point. Probably much longer. Indeed, he calculates he’d been going from escalator to escalator, ever downward, for over an hour, going from the top floor down to the basement—and then past it. He runs the numbers and it doesn’t look good. “He was in the one-hundred-fifty-second sub-basement. That was impossible.” Indeed it would be impossible, unless you’re in a nightmare.

“Descending” is obviously horror, but past that it’s hard to categorize. I tepidly count as it as SF because the role technology plays in the narrative, although it’s worth noting that we never get an SFnal rationale for why the department store escalators go down seemingly forever. This sort of thing just happens. Like I said earlier, it would be more accurate to call this story a machine fable rather than SF—one with a very dark hue. We also never encounter anyone on the escalators, such that the protagonist is unable to seek out an explanation from some third party, nor even to verbalize his anxiety to another human; it’s just him and the surreal depth of the escalators, which seem to only go down, not up. There are stairs, but at this point it would take hours to go back up to the surface that way. Aside from a water fountain every other floor the man only has his groceries to feed on; he even eventually eats the pheasant, without cooking it or anything. Gradually the man is reduced to a kind of savage. The hours turn into days. A small comfort is that with the total lack of life in the sub-basements he can relieve himself without shame. He’s torn between using the stairs, maybe in vain, to get to the surface, and wanting to see how far down the escalators go. It occurs to him that he’ll probably die here.

“Descending” is clearly an allegory, but this also raises a problem: an allegory for what? When we talk about fables and allegories we talk about something that was written to express a certain meaning, often textual if not thinly buried in subtext. This type of work is not as common now as it would’ve been in the 19th century and earlier, having emerged from actual fables (precursors to the modern short story) and epic poetry, but still there are modern examples. Steinbeck’s The Pearl is an allegory about the inherent violence of greed. Watership Down is basically a retelling of Exodus. Animal Farm is about how the Bolsheviks had murdered the Revolution in its crib. “Descending” is not as obvious about the substance of its allegorical intent, and this is where Disch starts to taunt the reader, hanging the story’s meaning like a carrot on a stick. The protagonist compares himself at different points to works of literature, including The Divine Comedy (very likely an inspiration for this story) and Robinson Crusoe, and it’s like Disch is baiting us into making a connection that ends up being hard to articulate. It’s a story about machinery, the vanity of a down-on-his-luck man, and capitalist automation, but it’s hard to parse what Dish is saying about these things. What makes it work is that even if we are to give up on untangling the substance of the fable, the primordial fear that Disch invokes is effective such that the struggle to make sense of it stops being a concern, much like how the protagonist stops trying to make sense of it. “Because he was hungry and because he was tired and because the futility of mounting endless flights of descending escalators was, as he now considered it, a labor of Sisyphus, he returned, descended, gave in.”

There Be Spoilers Here

I do have one gripe, which is the very end. The ending is not ambiguous so much as it’s worded ambiguously. The protagonist gives up and lies down on the escalator steps, and the last sentence raises a question as to what becomes of him. “That was the last thing he remembered.” Does he die, or lose his sanity? Does someone find him eventually? The wording implies he doesn’t die, but then why “remembered”? I wish writers would be more to-the-point when writing a character’s death. The thing here is that Disch had an amazing premise and knew what to do with it for 95% of the story, but then I’m pretty sure he didn’t know quite how to end it. Given the references to Sisyphus and Dante I feel like Disch could’ve ended on a note that’s at one point less ambiguous and at the same time a lot more audacious. The man wonders if he’ll reach the center of the earth if he keeps going down, but we never see the bottom of the machinery; maybe there is no bottom, like how in Mulholland Drive there may not be a mystery, once you try getting under the surrealism and free association. “Descending” doesn’t so much end as it comes to a stop, once the protagonist finds he can no longer go on and perhaps also when Disch finds he has run out of juice. It’s a little blemish on otherwise excellent writing, probably not enough to not make me give if five stars (if I gave ratings here).

A Step Farther Out

I suspect “Descending” was published in Fantastic because it’s one of those genre-bending stories that’s hard to tame. It’s been reprinted in SF and fantasy anthologies. It also had the misfortune of being published one year prior to the first Nebulas, as I think it would’ve been a shoe-in for a nomination there. (Seemingly every third short story printed in 1965 got a Nebula nomination, but “Descending” would’ve actually been deserving of it.) Disch was on a roll at this early period, and while he doesn’t quite stick the landing here, it’s such a good performance overall that I have to give it a hearty recommendation. Sometimes I struggle to write a review for something because I unfortunately felt I was not given much to talk about, but with “Descending” I had the opposite (and much better) problem: this story was almost too dense for me to write about it. Rest assured we’ll be returning to Disch before too long.

See you next time.