Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

by Duncan, Hal

  Sod it. Let’s just go with the flow and watch the show. Check it out. There’s a new head there, trying to play pack leader, assert its taxonomic dominance as an umbrella term for the entire discourse of genres. Why, if it isn’t Princess Rexatroyd Speculative Frou-Frou Fiction the Third!

  And, man, Sci-Fi and Science Fiction are both going for it big time!

  Ooh, that’s nasty.

  The Spelunkers of Speculative Fiction

  The Scalpel and the Cigarette

  In fact, one good working definition of science fiction may be the literature which, growing with science and technology, evaluates it and relates it meaningfully to the rest of human existence.

  H. Bruce Franklin

  When you watch enough of the daily dogfights down in the SF Café, you can get a bit jaded with it all. It’s science fiction versus Science Fiction versus Sci-Fi versus science fiction versus Fantasy versus fantasy—and all of these labels simply tags on one collar of a single Hydra-headed hound, our rabid Cerberus unbound, trying to rip its own throat(s) open. And all too often it’s the same fight underneath it all; clear away the rhetoric, and you find Romanticism and Rationalism going at it yet again, the ideal of the sublime versus the ideal of the logical.

  There was a time when they were partners, and they still tag-team now and then, to be sure, but the old alliance of fantasia and futurology, that Rationalist Romance of Science Fiction? Its spectre may still haunt our favourite…well, haunt, but the coherence of a Campbellian closed definition has been shattered. Where we might once have pinned the term science fiction to a generic form in which fantasia and futurology were partners, the term now applies to a discourse far better characterised by the conflicts of these two than by their alliance. And the dialectic of Romanticism and Rationalism is so engrained in the discourse, in fact, we sometimes talk as if no other aesthetics even exist, as if there is only this binary choice: the sword or the spectacles.

  The reality is more gnarly though: while Romanticism and Rationalism square up against each other in mutual hostility, Passion against Reason, the hero’s sword against the scribe’s spectacles, there are aesthetics which refuse to play that game, twistier approaches, strategies that set Reason against reason as the aesthetic of the logical finds itself up against the aesthetic of the absurd, Passion against passion as the aesthetic of the sublime comes up against the aesthetic of the ephemeral.

  The absurd and the ephemeral: the fifth columns of intellectualism and sensationalism respectively, out to rip them apart from the inside.

  The aesthetic of the absurd we find in Kafka or Pinter is not the sensationalism of the wild Romantics. It is Rationalism turned against itself, in a cold-blooded murder/suicide pact of logic. No tawdry melodramas play in the operating theatre of cruelty; there are no frilly cuffs here, just surgical gloves. Where Romanticism wields the strange, the impossible, as a sword in a hero’s hand, for the writer of the surreal it is a scalpel with which to vivisect the living psyche.

  The aesthetic of the ephemeral we find in Joyce or Whittemore is not the intellectualism of the Rationalists. It is Romanticism turned against itself, an ecstatic dissolution of the sublime. No dreary social realist tomes are read under the Moorish wall; there is no critique here, only a kiss. Where Rationalism scries the mundane, the real, with a scribe’s spectacles, for the writer of the moment, it is to be felt as the cigarette in your hand, lit by a friend at a funeral reception.

  The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as they say, and it’s no different here in the SF Café. Those dogfights can take an interesting turn when the sensational sword and the intellectual scalpel pair up against the spectacles of Rationalism, or when intellectual spectacles and sensational cigarette pair up against the sword of Romanticism. The two warring clans, the Campbells and MacDonalds of Science Fiction and Fantasy, can find strange bedfellows in the black sheep of each other’s families. For those who want to fit everything into a neat dichotomy of Reason versus Passion, these twistier aesthetics fuck with that, often fighting on the wrong side, goddammit, ruining taxonomic purity. Though the cigarette stands for the potential wonder in an ephemeral moment of smoking, its rejection of the spectacular for the domestic can set it as hard against sensationalism as the most dogmatic Rationalist, locked to the mundane as source of the numinae that fire off affective epiphany. Meanwhile, the scalpel is wielded by writers who believe in Gödel, not gods, who adopt an inhuman dispassion in their scrutiny of unreason, but as they employ in their experiments quirks that breach not just the laws of nature but the strictures of logic, this sets them as hard against intellectualism as the most fervent Romantic.

  So, the intellectualists may find themselves fighting side-by-side with writers of the moment who might hold little faith in Reason, who might have minimal real respect for all those mechanistic protocols of cold logic, but who despise the grand glamours of Fantasy for displacing passion onto projected follies.

  So, the sensationalists may find themselves fighting back-to-back with writers of the surreal who might see little glory in Passion, who might have minimal real interest in the grand emotional dynamics of the sublime, but who disdain the totalising meta-narratives of Science Fiction for wilful disregard of disorder.

  But this is only the start of the recombination of aesthetics. If you look around the SF Café what you see is actually a whole host of writers and readers with a cigarette in one hand and a scalpel in the other. Thing is, these two aesthetics, the absurd and ephemeral, are not opposed to each other, do not cast themselves as opponents locked in mortal combat. They’re almost as well paired as private narrative’s common fusion of the logical and ephemeral in the mundane, the domestic—the observer/critic aesthetic at the heart of various modes of Realism and formulated into the Genre of Literary Fiction, with its slice-of-life character studies leading to epiphany as resolution.

  So, with one writer, the ephemeral may become a key concern as they spurn the displaced passion of Romanticism, while with another the absurd might be employed to undermine the inflexible (un)reason of Rationalism; neither strategy entails a rejection of the other, though, so those two writers need not see each other as their hated foe. They may well be the same writer, the sort of obstinate, opinionated, downright thrawn motherfucker who looks at the aesthetic of the sublime and the aesthetic of the logical—and the whole tawdry turf war they’ve had going for two centuries or more—and sees them both as failing to do justice to the passion and the reason they idealise.

  And that’s where it gets really interesting, I think.

  If I Bring Back the Ashtray…

  It’s those thrawn motherfuckers I see when I look at this field of strange fictions. Sure, there’s the Campbellian closed definition, Science Fiction that was, in essence, a sort of Rationalist Romanticism. And now there’s the schism between those two aesthetics that plays out in endless teacup tempests. But looking into that gaping rift reveals the true core of the field as pulp modernism, even from its earliest days. In many of the canonical novels or short stories of this field of strange fictions, what we see is not futurological fantasia, not an adventure with the sublime bound within a logical rationale, but rather writers striving to balance the sublime with the ephemeral and/or to violate the logical with the absurd.

  For all my bias in that direction, I’m not talking about the New Wave here, mind—Ballard’s catastrophes of the banal logical-ephemeral (i.e. mundane, domestic) world riven by the irrational or Moorcock’s non-linear narratives of Jerry Cornelius degrading the Modern Pulp hero to a spotty adolescent in a London flat. Not yet, at least. I’m talking about Bradbury’s “The Veldt,” published in 1950, a tale as domestic as you can get and one where the irrational irrupts out of a viewscreen with all the scientific rigour of Freddy Krueger. It eats the main characters.

  Yes, down in the SF Café, in the ghetto of Genre, there is, always has been, and probably always will be an audience looking for more of the same, where the same is basically a Campbellian S
cience Fiction. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But in this so-called literature of ideas, born from the fusion of the intellectual and the sensational, futurology and fantasia, originality has been a counter-imperative to formulation from the start, novel or stories prized for having their own killer concept as a Unique Selling Point. And that means—has always meant—a sort of evolutionary pressure for novels or stories in this idiom to offer not more of the same but something different, a pressure that doesn’t sit well with any closed definition.

  For all the fiction designed to cosset the reader in conventions, that pressure within the field supported—indeed commercially demanded—a more exploratory fiction, one which sought to challenge the reader with subversions and outright breaches of those same conventions, which strove to serve as more (or simply other) than just consolatory fantasia and/or compelling futurology. The aesthetics of the ephemeral (as in Bradbury) and of the absurd (as in Vonnegut) are only to be expected as emergent features of a genre focused on the sublime and the logical where transcends the genre has been code for what we want to read since forever. I seem to recall hearing somewhere that the cover of an early edition of Bester’s The Demolished Man sports that plaudit in its copy. Or possibly The Stars My Destination. Admittedly this is a titbit snatched from a faulty memory of a casual conversation that took place in the SF Café sometime…well, more than a minute ago. Anyway, over the decades, writers pushed the envelope continuously in a quest for novelty, carrying on into new territories, constantly challenging and overturning Genre clichés, turning their tricks to satire (c.f. Frederik Pohl & Cyril Kornbluth or John Sladek), to semiotics (Samuel R. Delany), to whatever idiosyncratic interest they wanted to explore.

  For a prime example of how orthodox this unorthodoxy is, how inadequate a simple closed definition in terms of fantasia and futurology is, we need only look at the fiction of Philip K. Dick, particularly the later works, where the ephemeral (c.f. kipple) and the absurd are often far more important than any sense of either the sublime or the logical. Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke may have been the Big Three who ruled the pantheon of pros back in the day. Hell, even for a kid coming to science fiction in the early ’80s it was those three who benchmarked my entry-level experience of the field—Asimov’s I, Robot the first proper SF book I read, Heinlein the first writer I obsessively collected, Clarke’s 2061 the book that revealed to me the Law of Diminishing Returns. But Dick is the Dionysus to their Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, and it’s his wild rites many are pointing to when they use that overloaded term science fiction. See The Transmigration of Timothy Archer or VALIS for so-called science fiction which is certainly not Science Fiction, neither Romanticist nor Rationalist at all, not remotely. On the back of my copy of VALIS, a simple quote from the book reads, “If I bring back the ashtray, can I have my prefrontal?” That’s the cigarette and the scalpel in action right there.

  If this fiction focuses on science at all, it is to use it as a metaphor, a mechanism through which to explore humanity and modernity. The questions that concerned Dick were not scientific but philosophical: what it is to be real; what it is to be human. Science, for Dick, is only one of the many forces which reshape the world into the strangeness of what might as well be a waking dream. Where Thomas Disch pointed accusingly at the fantasia of the futurology when he titled his book of essays The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, he’s talking pipe-dreams and daydreams. Dick is an emblem of the actual dreamstuff we might well find ourselves dealing with at times, in his 1960s suburban worldscapes ruptured by breakdowns of reality itself. This is the oneiric, the psychotic.

  Dick’s dreams aren’t fantasias of the marvellous, but freaky visions of finding the kiosk you were buying a hot dog from replaced by a slip of paper with the word “kiosk” on it. Disch’s own “Descending” is a similar blend of the domestic and the absurd (the absurd being potentially far from comic), as are many of Ellison’s short stories, “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” for example. There’s a whole Twilight Zone-style of fictions traceable back to (and through?) Bradbury, I’d say. For sure, a Science Fiction partisan dedicated to dreary taxonomies might dismiss most of those as being “really horror,” but Dick’s fiction is as often as not more strange than uncanny, not frightening so much as just plain nutso.

  Dick’s animatronic presidents and AI suitcases, ersatz realities and conspiracies are less about tapping into some logical/sublime novum-as-numina—speculation? sense-of-wonder? yeah, right, whatever—than they are about the paranoia and neurosis of being PKD in the late twentieth century, the era of McCarthy and Nixon, the Communist Witch-Hunt and the Sexual Revolution, Vietnam and Watergate…and serious drugs of course. A Scanner Darkly wears the thinnest scramble suit disguise of Science Fiction.

  And Dick was far from alone, in the SF Café, in following the cultural shift from Rocket Age rapture through the Cuban Missile Crisis of the soul towards a Cold War détente of the banal and the bizarre. It was in this context, where the concerns were less the material aspects of technology and more the abstract potentials of modernity for good or ill—if not the strange actualities of modernity itself, the futureshock of living in the present—that the term speculative fiction began to be taken up.

  Note the absence of capitals, by the way.

  The Extremities of Unreason

  Absurdity is not the only strangeness that gnaws at any pat boundary between the mundane and the strange, quite capable of worming its way into the private narrative with only the soft sutura of illogical behaviour, with events that don’t rupture the epistemic modality (staying on the level of Holden Caulfield rather than Jett Rink, to use Lake’s example). In looking at the Yorkshiremen sketch above, I noted a link to the old nursery rhyme “There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.” To illustrate the true extent of the strange born from the clash of narrative modalities, far beyond the incredible and the marvellous/monstrous of so-called genre fiction, let’s take that rhyme and rewrite it. First we’ll excise the fanciful conceit and blatant impossibility (the quirk) of her living in a shoe, flensing the irrationality, to get a private narrative, a narrative of the mundane:

  There was an old woman who lived in Peru.

  She had so many children she didn’t know what to do.

  She gave them some broth without any bread.

  She whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.

  Not that poverty and child abuse are somehow so endemic in Peru that this narrative is vastly more probable set there than anywhere else. I’m just grabbing a random place-name that rhymes and scans. So, now let’s add a little strangeness into the mix:

  There was an old woman who lived in Peru.

  She had so many children she didn’t know what to do.

  She gave them some broth without any bread.

  She drugged them all soundly and cut off their heads.

  The two versions each represent a different mode of private narrative, one remaining in the simple alethic modality of “could have happened,” the other complexifying it with something similar to the comic “would not have happened,” but with the opposite effect.

  We can imagine the first rhyme fleshed to an actual story: set in a developing country with a high level of poverty (or a Scottish housing scheme, a US inner city, whatever), cleaving to the mundane in a grim series of events that are ultimately all too common, too everyday, it’s a tale of the despair born of such poverty, the degradation of misery, the slow corrosion of a mother’s spirit, her ultimate surrender to violence; driven by the pathos at heart of any kitchen-sink drama, any domestic narrative, in a formal sense we might say this narrative is pathetic.

  The second narrative is, or we can imagine it as, another story: the events are not dissimilar, but this is a tale which pushes us beyond the realm of rational behaviour in that last line, confronting the extremities of unreason. It inspires not just pathos but something deeper and darker, transcending the merely miserable and becoming terrible. At the heart of this story is
a profound transgression of the most basic laws of human behaviour: the monstrum of infanticide with its boulomaic modality: must not happen.

  It’s a quirk of desire/dread we’re faced with rather than impossibility, “should not” rather than “could not.” As far as rupturing reality goes, it all “could have happened.” But as should becomes must, that must becomes hued with incredulity. The moral rupturing of murder is hardly the metaphysical rupturing of magic; there is a point however where some crimes are deemed so obscene as to be reckoned “against the laws of nature,” not just wrong but unnatural, breaches of the natural order, the divine order even. We might well refuse to accept the very possibility: for all that an action is entirely possible, it does not change the sense of conviction, the alethic modality of “could not have happened…surely, surely could not have happened” that tints the monstrum in such a tale, inherited from the Greek concept of miasma, the stain of bloodshed, e.g., in infanticide, parricide or matricide. The very word obscene has its origin in such denial, in the monstra going unrendered in Greek drama, taking place off-stage.