Honeycomb by Joanne M. Harris, illustrated by Charles Vess | Being a review of the book and an explication of its importance to me

Honeycomb by Joanne M. Harris, illustrated by Charles Vess | Being a review of the book and an explication of its importance to me

Part 1: the Review

*Spoilers*

“There is a story the bees used to tell, which makes it hard to disbelieve…”

“When the Nine Worlds were still very young,” goes the first sentence of Joanne M. Harris’s Honeycomb, “there were no stories. There was only Dream, the river that runs through all the Worlds, reflecting the hearts and desires of the Folk on its journey towards Pandæmonium.”

Honeycomb is an apt title for this book, in which the structure of the multiverse is likened to a honeycomb. Like its insect architectural namesake, Honeycomb has a strong organic structure capable of holding nectar derived from the pollen of many different flowers. Some are standalone episodes which share themes or settings. For instance, a barnyard provides the setting for several political fables, such as “The Troublesome Piglet,” which are scattered throughout the book.

Honeycomb is mythic in its deference to tradition, and mythopoeic in its creative swerves. The book begins in the deep reaches of time and concerns itself with origins and endings. And in the origins of the world of Honeycomb are also the origins of its conflict: the Honeycomb Queen and the Hallowe’en Queen are a primal dyad from whose actions, conflict, desire, disappointment, and hope arise.

However, the temporality of Honeycomb has some of the cyclical quality of the natural world, which makes sense, considering that the Silken Folk, Harris’s name for what another author might call the fae or fairies, are insects—and only partially anthropomorphized ones at that. I love this choice, because insects are other enough to humans for their hybrids to occupy an uncanny valley. And shouldn’t fairies be uncanny?

The larger arc of Honeycomb concerns the growth and education of the Lacewing King from childish amorality to adult immorality. The Lacewing King’s early theft of the Spider Queen’s “coronet of a thousand eyes,” which calls to mind Innana’s theft of the sacred mes from Enki in Sumerian mythology or Hermes’s theft of Apollo’s cattle in Greek mythology, sends him on a long journey to the far reaches of story that will, eventually, humble and humanize him.

As such, Honeycomb operates according to what I think of as a Shahrazadian poetics, both in the sense that it features nested stories that can often be read as discrete units while also making up part of a larger narrative arc, and in the sense that the Lacewing King, like the murderous King Shahrayar from the Thousand and One Nights, is being reformed by his progress through story.

But Shahrazadian healing through story is not the only archetype found in Honeycomb. The Harlequin is a dangerous trickster figure, and both the Spider Queen’s web and the loom of the Spider Moth, on which he creates a portal between worlds, recall the weaving of Arachne and Penelope. And I couldn’t fail to mention Anansi in this company! These are my own associations, and they are personal and unsystematic, so other readers will perceive other myths and mythic tropes in Honeycomb—a pleasurable pastime for those of us who enjoy it.

It isn’t only traditional myths that Honeycomb brings to mind: in film, the story of the Night Train makes me think of Night on the Galactic Railroad, or the train from Spirited Away. And the story arc involving the land of the dead was reminiscent of Silva Moreno-Garcia’s mixture of 1920s century Mexico and Mayan gods in Gods of Jade and Shadow. Maybe I’m just a sucker for a visit to the underworld?

One of the thematic through-lines of Honeycomb is the significance of perception, which I associate to its Shahrazadian poetics, as well. From the earliest to the latest stories, perception has stakes. The midwife who attends to the birth of the Lacewing King accidentally becomes able to see the Silken Folk but has her eye plucked out for her troubles. The jellyfish Moon Queen of Undersea falls unrequitedly in love with the moon above, which she perceives as a distant jellyfish floating in a distant sea. And the bitter enmity between the Dragonfly Queen and the Queen Below the Water is resolved when the latter is revealed as the larval stage of the former.

An earlier appearance of the Barefoot Princess

I was particularly moved by the narrative arc begun by the story, “Dreams of the Barefoot Princess,” which features a sweet lesbian love story between the Engine Driver and the Barefoot Princess, whose actions catalyze the final movement of the larger arc of Honeycomb.

The Princess smiled. “All right,” she said. “I’m going to tell you a story.”

“A story?” repeated the Driver.

“That’s how we find our way into Dream. That’s how the bees have always found their way. Because, what else is a story but a dream that has been shared with the world?”

And as the Barefoot Princess spoke, the cloud of bees began to dance. It was the ancient dance of the honeybee, leading its folk to the nectar. It was a complicated dance, and the Princess watched in awe as they twisted and turned in the rapturous air, making a kind of spiral.

This moment also affirm’s Honeycomb’s place on my growing list of stories about the importance of dreaming (SD Chrostowska’s The Eyelid, Jackie Wang’s The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void, my friend Poupeh Missaghi’s trans(re)lating house one). Dreaming is something I’ve always cleaved towards, it feels increasingly significant as time goes on: both for its own sake as an atelic activity, and as a space in which to heal or exercise political imagination.

Part 2: the Explication

I picked up this book at Book Moon, right before I left Northampton for a week to teach (and be transformed) in Black Mountain, North Carolina. It’s a beautiful object, wrapped in blue and gold, and Vess’s illustrations grace the cover and endpapers as well as the interior of the book. This is all to say that Vess’s cover illustration acted as a visual cue that this book contains something that is for you, something that you urgently need.

I missed Chocolat at the time, which is probably how I would have first encountered Joanne Harris, but I remember how I first encountered Vess. Charles Vess illustrated Stardust by Neil Gaiman, a book that, like Honeycomb, satisfies the old rules[1] of fairy tales without being hobbled by them. Stardust came out in 1999. I was fifteen, raging with hormones. My family was moving from one city in Texas to another. At the time these cities represented different realities, but in retrospect, they feel more like different points on a continuum within the same reality.

Fifteen: still a child, really, but experiencing the stirrings of first love and my first conscious thoughts about being trans. The part of myself that was and is continuous with my early childhood is my love for reading, my impatience with school, and my wish to be left alone in the realm of story, a place, or rather, a collection of places (cf. Alberto Manguel’s Dictionary of Imaginary Places) whose rules make deep intuitive sense to me. Indeed, part of why romance was a refuge was because I could perceive in it (or project onto it) the rules of Romance.

In the next few years, I would find my way to poetry, both as genre and as subculture, but sci fi and fantasy, myth, and fairy tale, have remained both a through-line in my reading (and dreaming) life, and a place I go in times of stress or sadness. And I don’t think I’ll have finished my life’s work as a writer until I add something to this canon.

How does one apprentice oneself to the mythopoeic? It’s something I’ve slowly circled back around to. When I was still living in Oakland and starting to get more comfortable giving poetry readings, I noticed that I really enjoyed bantering between poems. Something about having a crowd there allowed me to improvise. I’d also been giving tarot readings for years, and I liked that aspect of tarot readings that felt like collaborative storytelling. I had this game that I loved called “Once Upon a Time” and I had the notion to use it as a way to facilitate live storytelling. I first tried this back in 2016 and it worked really well, and my friend Julian amazingly recorded it.

Almost immediately afterwards, I went on a tour/move across the country where I tried to recapture the magic of this first performance, but never quite did…I think because of leaving the place I had spent the last decade and experiencing some personal upheaval made it difficult to drop into the space of story. Despite this, I haven’t given up on this approach. As with many things in my life, it has hummed along in a subterranean fashion, waiting to reemerge into the daylight, as it always does in banter, and as it has recently in stand up and in guided meditations.

Harris’s acknowledgments are interesting in this regard. She writes:

Ten years ago, I started writing little stories on Twitter. I don’t know why I did this, except that Twitter seemed to me to be a place for stories, and because I felt those stories were for telling, not for writing. Some stories take life from the fact that they have an audience right there, ready to comment and react, and Twitter gave me that audience.

This is…not really my experience of Twitter, but the relationality of it feels very familiar. In the subject-verb-object structure of English, the storyteller tells the story to the listener, but I have a feeling that Harris might agree that the truth is somewhere between the storyteller telling the story and the listener calling it forth. The shared context is crucial, too: Twitter, the hearth, the hillside at the YMCA Blue Ridge (first home of Black Mountain College).

The class I was teaching at School of the Alternative in Black Mountain was called Book Magic. In it, I experimented with something I’ve never tried before: guided meditations, inspired by the model of Eliza Swann in her brilliant class on Alchemical Imagination. Book Magic consisted of three themed sessions: Descent, Cocoons of Becoming, and Disobedience, or, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. During the first meditation, I guided participants to fall into the earth (the specific patch of it they were laying on) , into a cave, navigating a water-carved path downward to a chamber where they would discover a book that was just for them, and to spend some time perusing its pages.

Since I was leading the meditation, I was in that place familiar to teachers and guides, at the edge of the circle looking in, facilitating absorption, but unable to fully surrender to it, due to the exigencies of my role. However, that dream book or secret book, the one that’s just for me, might well be Honeycomb, which I found before my travels and followed me, talismanic, to Black Mountain, where Harris’s talent for dreaming and storytelling stimulated those faculties in me. And those faculties allowed me to help facilitate dreaming for others. Like Honeycomb, my pedagogy starts and ends in dream.

Part of the reading experiences is of course what’s happening around the book. I’ve increasingly been drawn to sound and story as healing modalities. One of my favorite rituals has always been readings, in which the patterned speech of the poet co-regulates the room. I like how it feels both to experience and to facilitate that hypnagogic state, and after a long time of just enjoying it, I started to get curious. I got a chance to talk about this a bit with K Prevallet at a recent Belladonna* retreat, who combines poetry with somatic work, but it’s not just her. In my HD Book reading group and in Alchemical Imagination we’ve talked about the sleep temples of ancient Egypt and Greece.

Even if not attended by the historical, mythic, and occult trappings that appeal to me many creative writers and writing teachers in my close circles are moving towards dreaming and healing work as we consider our roles in what Deepa Iyer of the Building Movement Project calls the Social Change Ecosystem. I’m curious about why that is for other people, but for me, this moment in history feels apocalyptic, and I’m looking for a way to be of genuine use to my communities—and wanting for that role to be informed by my tastes and talents.

So, dreaming. As the Princess explains to the Engine Driver, story is our path into dream, and Joanne M. Harris’s Honeycomb is not only a skillfully woven series of stories, but a master class in storytelling, one which I’m thrilled to report is still in session, not only through the stack of her previous books I’m now committed to reading, but also on ko-fi.

[1] What rules? Well, I have perused with interest Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, and I’ve trusted Marina Warner, Jack Zipes, and Maria Tatar as guides. I think that mythopoeic writing is often unembarrassed about believing in and espousing love and beauty while also being conversant with the woes of the world, such as the cruelty of hierarchy, with which it has a paradoxical relationship. Mythopoeic writing has a definite investment in honor, generosity, cleverness, and everything that makes up a kind of spiritual nobility, while also privileging the small, the unseen, and the unseeable. The way mythopoeic writing represents the imperceptible through imagination sometimes gives me the feeling that its exponents have the project of repairing perception by insisting on an animist orientation in which the world is alive, conscious, enchanted.