"The Prospect Cards"

I first read Don Tumasonis' "The Prospect Cards" several years ago and have thought about it off and on ever since--perhaps because, even though the story is set in the twentieth century between the wars, so much of it resonates with recognizable nineteenth-century tropes from imperial adventure tales.  "It's 'The Man Who Would Be King'!" I exclaimed, the first time I read it, but that's only partially right: while the set-up definitely echoes Kipling's story (skeevy Englishmen assume that they can trade on their cultural superiority in order to fleece an exotic Caucasian tribe, discover that that is not the case), it also evokes more generally tales of manly English explorers seeking wealth and adventure in mysterious, hidden locations.  Think, for example, of H. Rider Haggard.   Being an Englishman in this particular village, however, turns out not to be advantageous...

"The Prospect Cards" is a fragmentary narrative presented in the form of an antiquarian book catalog.  The text, our anti-hero's diary, is written on the back of a series of postcards, with the photographs on the front directly or indirectly illuminating some aspect of the story, sometimes with darkly comical visual puns.  As a rule, the postcards begin and end in the middle of sentences, sometimes in the middle of words; connections and key events are nowhere present in the text, leaving the reader uneasily flummoxed about why these two characters are being pressed to death, why this other character has been impaled on a stake, or why our narrator has been chosen to undergo a really unpleasant operation on his nether regions.  That is to say, the characters, who set off on what is initially advertised as a stereotypical quest in search of unimaginable and even mystical treasure--"'What would you think if I told you that from here, in less than one day’s sail and a following week’s march, there is to be found something of such value, which if the knowledge of it became common, would" (Card 1)--are not represented as doing anything under their own steam once they enter the village.  The postcard form relegates their actions, criminal or otherwise, to narrative gaps, leaving the record of adventure a record instead of torture, punishment, and general abjection that they must passively withstand to the best of their ability (which is often, as it turns out, not that great).   If anyone in the tale feels an urge to be the next Allan Quatermaine, the narrative structure precludes that from happening.  Moreover, the catalog descriptions, which we are told only cover the inscribed postcards,  have nothing to say about the narrative beyond reassembling and transcribing it; instead, they counterpoint the text with scholarly, tonally flat observations about the postcard images in a way that nevertheless highlights their odd cultural otherness.  Much as the narrative is a collage, so too is this culture: one puzzled character points out that the locals have had some contact with modernity, as exemplified by the presence of contemporary technology, but they "pick and choose" (Card 6), while the narrator finds that one of the local priests attended the Sorbonne (Card 7); more dramatically, the catalog finds that the language, architecture, art, and dress all show a bewildering array of influences, a mix-up both national and temporal.  Hence, "A naos or church, on a large stepped platform, in an almost impossible mélange of styles, with elements of a Greek temple of the Corinthian order mixed in with Byzantine features and other heterogeneous effects to combine in an unusual, if not harmonious, whole" (Card 5), which co-exists with coins that look like they were struck in the fifth century (Card 8), Arabic and Cyrillic texts, a "Romanesque interior" (Card 19), and so forth.  This mashup suggests that that this isolated village has somehow absorbed the runoff from every other known powerful civilization, but it also perhaps hints, a bit more wickedly, at the kind of fantastic historical mixes one tends to find in representations of "exotic" cultures.  That this one defies description is not, however, a sign that our English heroes will have their way.

Indeed, Englishness fares not at all well, especially English masculinity.  Our narrator makes his first mistake, in fact, when he succumbs to the pleasure of being with "fellow countrymen – of the right sort, mind you – in this god-forsaken backwater at a time when our fortunes, bluntly put, had taken a turn much for the worse" (Card 1).  He and his companion accede willingly to the others' plans partly on the ground that one of them had been a competitive rower (Card 1).   The trouble begins, then, because our narrator believes that apparent gentility is proof of trustworthiness.  Alas for all concerned, the plot that unfolds (haltingly) usually involves the collapse of their pose as manly Englishmen.  Although the missionary goes out in a glorious display of muscular Christianity, "singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” in a manly, booming voice that brought tears to my eyes" (Card 9), the disappointed narrator notes "I am ashamed to say" what his fellow adventurer Harrison does on the verge of death (Card 9).  The narrator's sentimentality at the missionary's brave death is the last gasp of patriotic pride.  He is initially impressed by Calquon smoking "as cool as if he were walking down Regent Street to Piccadilly" (Card 11)--no mean feat, as he is impaled at the time--but this fine example of keeping a stiff upper lip quickly evanesces in the face of his imminent fate.  Shortly after this, the narrator wisely decides to abandon his Quatermaine-style pretensions altogether, but his last surviving companion, Forsythe, argues instead that "we were obliged by the sacred memory of our companions to carry on" (Card 13), an invocation of devoted brotherhood so self-interested that even the narrator cringes.  The rhetoric of male bonding, especially of the heroic "band" variety (think the guys in Dracula), falls apart under the weight of sheer greed.  Under the circumstances, it's not surprising at all--if anything, it's the logical end point--that the narrator finds himself undergoing some especially nasty ritual surgery under circumstances that parody fantasies of conquering the exotic female object of desire.  Yes, there are three beautiful women there, but it's too bad about the whole having-a-dagger-for-a-tongue bit.  (The result is conveyed in one of those visual puns on the postcard...)  When he does voluntarily have sex with a woman, it's the missionary's widow (so much for the Angel in the House), and she seduces him, leading somehow (given aforementioned ritual surgery) to a monstrous insta-pregnancy and birth that makes a mockery of English virility.   In the end, the only conquering that ensues involves the missionary's pre-adolescent daughter. who rises to become a high-ranking priestess in the local religion and, it would appear, ensures our narrator's gruesome end; much as this mysterious culture has absorbed influences from all other civilizations, it too absorbs and transforms the English.  And there's the end of glorious adventure, on the brink of the British empire's end itself.