"In concerts and videos, Mr. Bowie’s costumes and imagery traversed styles, eras and continents, from German Expressionism to commedia dell’arte to Japanese kimonos to space suits," the newspaper said. It called him "a constantly morphing persona" and "a person of relentless reinvention."
Why mention this is a bog about fiction?
Because from antiquity, the notion of shapeshifting, or metamorphose, has been a recurring theme of literature and one ever popular with readers. Bowie tapped into the desire men and women have to transcend ordinary existence -- to experience enhanced powers, other worlds, other genders -- early and often in his lengthy career as a musician and a performer. But instead of relying on the more traditional device of divine intervention to work the magic, he took it upon himself to bring it about.
"With a voice that dipped down to baritone and leapt into falsetto, he was complexly androgynous, an explorer of human impulses that could not be quantified," the Times obit said.
While many examples of shapeshifting involve people transformed into animals or vice versa -- the princess kisses a frog and turns it into a prince -- shapeshifting also encompasses changes in gender.
T.S. Eliot, for instance, claimed that Tiresias, a figure in Greek mythology, was the most important character in his poem "The Waste Land" although just why is not at all obvious. Tiresias lived both as a man and a woman and was eventually granted the gift of foresight as a rewarded for his travails.
This, of course, ties in with another theme of this blog: that one purpose of fiction is to look into the future.
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