Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

by Duncan, Hal

  There is more though. In such a story, we will surely see the monstrum coming. From early on, most likely, an epistemic modality will emerge: will happen. Where by all rights, we should expect no worse than the whipping of the pathetic narrative, say, in this story, we will sense the inevitable doom of the protagonist, be driven on through the narrative by the inexorability of their fate. The omens are likely to be liminal, diffuse, but I wonder if we can’t also talk then of an epistemic quirk, a prefigura. However we parse it, though, this story is a quite other creature from the pathetic narrative, one powered by the monstrous.

  To give it its formal name, of course, this narrative is tragic.

  The comic and the tragic go hand-in-hand, the pity and terror of the latter what the absurd would inspire if we didn’t laugh at these wildly outrageous events. Like the comic narrative, the tragic narrative is built from the irrational, the incredible, just not in the way that makes us break out into belly-laughs; in its use of the monstrum bound in pathos, tragedy offers us not the absurd but the abject.

  The whole vocabulary of early tragedy—moira, hubris, ate, nemesis—defines a system (a social, natural, divine order), the activities that isolate and separate out an individual from that system, and the (automatic) response. The tragic hero is that member of society (that part of us) who becomes distinct from it, ceases to be a part of it and is denied, rejected, an object of revulsion. The tragic act is that action which is a potential human behaviour (again, part of us) but one forbidden as beyond all morality, rejected as an inhuman act.

  So, the earliest Greek tragedy gives us the abject in the shape of Prometheus, divine rebel whose theft of fire is a crime against Olympus itself, an act that severs him from his community, renders him anathema. His punishment is an enaction of his abjection—an exile, a binding and a torture, a monstrum wrapped in pathos. Pentheus, in The Bacchae, similarly singles himself out, breaches the divine order by refusing to recognise Dionysus and is not simply destroyed for it but monstrously so, in abject shame.

  Even in a more contemporary tragedy like The Crucible a similar theme emerges, with John Proctor already on the verge of abjection at the start of the play and Abigail Williams testing the boundaries, dabbling in the witchcraft (abjected paganism) of Tituba (member of an abjected race), out in the forest at night (two entire aspects of the natural world—the wilderness, the night—abjected as exteriorities, alterities). As Abigail and the girls become latter-day Furies, bringing their “pointy reckoning” to Salem, Proctor’s stance against the hysteria is hubris just as his adultery is ate, calling down his own nemesis. At the end, like Prometheus he is defiant even in his abjection, refusing to surrender his autonomy, his identity, by signing a false confession:

  PROCTOR [with a cry of his soul]: Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!

  Arthur Miller, The Crucible

  This narrative of abjection is clearly relatable to the aesthetic of horror in its focus on the monstrum, albeit the monstrum of tragedy is seldom uncanny, as we might more often find in a work we classify as horror. From Aeschylus to Arthur Miller, Prometheus Bound to The Crucible, the structure of tragedy involves gradually ramping up the wrongness until we reach a crisis of abjection, the apotheosis of the hero’s destruction. The tragic hero’s heroism may in no small part be born of our recognition that the abject is in actuality a part of us, that our abhorrence of it is not entirely just—hence the pathos. There is a part of us—the part of us abjected in the tragic hero—that roars out with Prometheus against the gods, that stands with Proctor on the gallows and will not submit.

  The tragic narrative of the rhyme above is a crude caricature of a tragedy, but in it we go from Mother Goose to Medea in four easy steps. The first line establishes the set-up of normality. The second introduces the monstrum in the disruption of social normality—the old woman has too many children to cope with—and in a fully fleshed-out tragedy we would expect more to be made of this. We might well see the children as a brood of bastards running wild, the community around responding with condemnation, the old woman trying and failing to control them. The third line sets up a conflict between the old woman’s desire to support her children and her inability to do so; imagine this as the third act of a play and you can picture the slow build towards the character’s tragic fall as her attempts to deal with this double-bind fail time and time again, if they do not, in fact, exacerbate the situation. And all the while, we can imagine, a village culture increasing the moral pressure on her, the pressure to do something about it. Finally, in the fourth we are given a climax worthy of Aeschylus, in a tragically irrational solution: infanticide. We can imagine a moment of Medean madness, a woman with her children’s blood on her hands, screaming at the villagers who have driven her to this: Done, done, done! Done and undone!

  That we know this kind of story could play out in the real world, that we know (e.g. female) infanticide is a very real problem in the world, does not mean that this private narrative remains mundane. The mundane has been shattered by the irrational, the abject, the monstrous, in the difference between a whipping and a decapitation. If the comic turns on a response of “No way!” the pathetic might turn on a similar sentiment, but it’s one distinctly different in the affect invoked. We might say “No way,” to the first narrative, but we’re only voicing an empathic denial; we know all too well that the world is full of starvation and whippings. With the tragic however, this denial is forceful, powered by a sense that surely to God, surely to God, this could not have happened, must not have happened: No fucking way!

  The Strange in the Mundane

  If tragedy cuts a sharp silhouette with its apotheosis of misfortune, its distinct dynamics of modalities, this is not to say the pathetic narrative is an equally clear-cut mode. No fiction can entirely eschew the quirks of the strange if it wants to have any narrative drive whatsoever; the best it can do is exile the alethic quirks and confine itself to boulomaic quirks of more muted import, should and should not, rather than must and must not. And it is an aesthetic extreme to do so, one that cuts against the grain when the whole point of narrative is the dynamics. So, the utterly mundane being far from a default, we can discern dimmer examples of the strange in many of the private narratives that pass for realism, the mimetic weft of the mundane ruptured, by some quirk or other.

  Between the tragic and the pathetic—in the fusion of the two—we find for example the mode of melodrama, deeply domestic whether set at the working-class kitchen-sink or in the middle-class drawing-room, but pushing the misery beyond starvation (even if it’s just being starved of love), and whippings (even if it is just verbal whippings of dysfunctional relationships) and into decapitation (or emasculation, or incineration, even if these are purely of the psychological / metaphoric variety).

  Melodrama will lower the scale of monstrosity so our state of shock is not quite so heightened, our suspension-of-disbelief not quite so tested, but even at the level of miserabilist British TV soap operas, we find the monstrum lurking. Abusive husbands end up as bodies under the patio. Blackmailers get beaten to death with pokers. Pathetic victims become tragic heroes, destroying their own innocence in attempts to overcome the villainy the fictive world throws at them. Domestic melodramas, even those which wear the respectable name of drama or novel, are rife with heroes, villains and Oliver-Twists-of-fate. American soaps have even gone as far as alien abduction and cursed jewels.

  More respectable narratives can be scarce less strange. Thomas Hardy’s work is full of impossible coincidences that assist in this or that poor character’s destruction, c.f. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Ibsen’s Ghosts contains no real spectres but is steeped in the miasma of moral transgression (syphilis visited upon an innocent son; how much more miasmatic could this be?). These are borderline tragedy, powered by the sa
me feeling of dread in places, pulling back from the ghosts and witches, omens and portents, poisoned blades and pokers up the arse, but still testing our credulity, not least with the bleakness of their vision.

  We can see all of these modes emerging here and there through the history of the novel as private narrative, sometimes boldly, sometimes liminally. Looking to such works as Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Richardson’s Pamela and most anything by Dickens, indeed, we might well trace the absurd, the tragic and the pathetic as three threads of a discourse through which the novel itself ultimately takes shape, not in an eschewal of the strange but in an ever more refined synthesis of its hues and flavours.

  Pick a start point at Rabelais’s Gargantua, say, as a prime example of the absurd at its broadest as literary device (compare the structure of the great “arse-wiping” scene to the “Yorkshiremen” sketch above). Leap to de Sade, who seized on the monstrous as the core of the moral melodrama which, in the novel form, tragedy had become. Skip back to Don Quixote; is it comedy or tragedy, or both? I don’t know, but this is a discourse we’re jumping around in, an interplay that ends up, perhaps, in Catch-22, where we are entirely unsure whether to laugh or cry in the face of the grotesque absurdity and abject horror of war.

  In the twentieth century, out of this interplay, a cruel mode of the strange emerges that takes us back more properly to the question of possibility, to the alethic quirk rather than the monstrum so powerful it elicits denial of possibility. It’s the other way around indeed, where the illogic is so disruptive, so unsettlingly surreal, that the absurd becomes monstrous. Part of the monstrosity though lies in a profound identification of the absurd with the mundane, in a sense that we’re not so much seeing the mimetic weft of realism ruptured as we’re seeing reality’s true face, Burroughs’s naked lunch, Blier’s buffet froid, laid out before us.

  There’s a neat little serving of this in Lindsay Anderson’s If…, where it’s hard to tell at times whether the strangeness is simply the actual irrationality of life at a public school in the early ’60s or whether it is…something more. Too wrong to be laughable, but too low-key an aspect of reality to be monstrous, tragic, the surreal is neither an irruption of the irrational into the rational world nor an encounter with that which has been expelled as irrational…not quite. It is less an exterior(ised) insanity which we laugh at or recoil from, and more a recombination of the rational world into dissonant juxtapositions.

  The effect is unsettling but subtly so. When Malcolm McDowell and Christine Noonan begin their mock cat-fight in the café their behaviour strikes us as unusual but it is really just a combination of flirting and fighting. When the naked woman wanders through the boy’s dormitory while they’re out on their military exercise, it is unexplained but not inexplicable; what is strange is simply that combination of images, the suturing at odds with logic, the sense that this would not happen. We get a mounting sense of dissonance, that things are just a little bizarre. We can rationalise it as satire, as representation and exaggeration of all the actual absurdity to be fond in such a bastion of the English class system, but there’s another wrongness here. And then McDowell uses a mixture of live ammunition and blanks during the exercise to make the reverend think he is going to be shot. And we cut to the headmaster’s office, where the Crusaders have been summoned to apologise to the reverend. As the headmaster pontificates about their misbehaviour, he walks across the room to an over-sized writing bureau and pulls open a large drawer. The reverend, lying in that drawer like a corpse in a coffin, sits up to hear the apologies of the Crusaders. And in that one simple image, the mundane becomes the strange, and the satirical and becomes the surreal.

  And now, if this sortie through the pathetic and the tragic has led us astray from the home turf of the alethic quirk as breach of possibility, we surely find ourselves once again in the realm of strange fiction, in the SF Café of the New Wave, in the strangeness of Bellona and Cornelius and Disch’s “Descending.”

  The Solidity of the Stuff

  Ask anyone in the SF Café what science is, and many will tell you it’s a method, an approach, but just as many will, in all probability, describe it as products rather than process, as stuff. Maybe they’ll describe it as a domain of knowledge, as the facts and principles accrued within that domain. Maybe they’ll point to the theories and experiments, the sundry instances of the scientific method in action. Or maybe they’ll just hold up some technological doohickey forged in the application of those theoretical principles and experimental procedures.

  —Hey, man, check out my new iRobot! Now that’s what I call science!

  There’s always been a tendency for the science in Science Fiction to focus on the latter, on the gadgetry and gimcracks, but this is not really surprising. The futurological fantasias that the label got slapped on were largely structured round conceits that this or that technical impossibility had been rendered possible in some fictive elsewhere and/or elsewhen, in Outer Space and/or the Future. The literary device that Darko Suvin terms the novum, the unit of novelty written into the narrative for the protagonist (and by proxy the reader) to confront, is essentially a fancy of a techne that does not exist (not yet, not quite). It is the imaginary technique which does what cannot actually be done, not here and now.

  It’s only natural for that mechanism to be figurated in the fiction as a mechanism in the concrete sense: the impetus to Romantic adventure creating a pressure for that conceit to function as a MacGuffin, a Maltese Falcon-style plot device…well, a physical object is much easier to fight over; and even where conceits are offered as more than just the basis of “let’s pretend” fun, where there’s an intellectual game of playing through the “what if” scenario in action, where working the conceit has become an end in and of itself, anchoring that conceit in an object offers the reader a focal point. The solidity of stuff is useful, and so writers of Science Fiction turned to robots and aliens the way another writer might turn to, say, cigarettes and scalpels.

  Still, even where we’re dealing firmly with imaginary artefacts of future science, the substitution of speculative for science is more accurate, since the novum is not known science, no more than the alethic quirk used in alternate history (or Alt History) is known history. If one is to claim any intellectual(ist) integrity in this enterprise, there’s no place for pandering pretences that our conceits are actual possibilities; this is pure wish-fulfilment. The strange fictions I’m dealing with here are characterised by the liberties they take with the domains of knowledge they play in.

  We can imagine a scientific fiction which does not employ the novum, one which instead utilises actual science the way war fiction utilises war, the way historical fiction uses history; but this just isn’t what we point to when we say science fiction. A more accurate term, given the novum’s kinship with the erratum of alternate history might be alternate science. We’re not dealing with facts but with conceits. A cloned alien brain in a robotic body is not science but fancy, however arguable we consider its hypothetical possibility. It’s a conjecture, a speculation that tickles our “Cool!” response precisely because it breaches the mundane reality of what is technically possible. And since the incorporation of erratum-based alternate history within the field is a given (c.f. The Man in the High Castle), calling it all speculative fiction to allow for that other flavour of quirk actually kinda makes more sense, no?

  But the substitution of speculative for science also reflects a logical development of the novum itself, from the concrete to the abstract, from the mechanisms of unobtainium, handwavium and spuriotronic cogs, gears and circuits to the mechanisms of individuals and societies. The Campbellian closed definition of Science Fiction explicitly excluded “sociology, psychology, and parapsychology” as “not true sciences,” but if the most instantly recognisable nova of the fictions were physical objects—Heinlein’s dilating door, Bradbury’s nursery with viewscreens for walls—the writers were often just as interested in the invented social structures tha
t went with them. The group marriages of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the “firemen” of Fahrenheit 451—ironically, if science fiction can be said to actually use real science, it is the soft sciences it employs more than anything, attempting to apply real principles of psychology and sociology to model the impact of a conceit on humanity, how we would respond to what could not actually happen.

  To talk of speculative fiction rather than science fiction is to shift the focus from the solidity of the stuff to the impact of that stuff on humanity, from the mechanics of gadgets and gimcracks to the dynamics of psyches and societies. If we might tend to think of science in terms of its products, speculation is explicitly a process, and so the word serves as a banner of intent. This is about working the conceit, it says. And again, it seems a natural evolution for this approach to turn inwards.

  Working the conceit had become a core concern of Science Fiction with its Rationalist hat on, and even with Campbell dismissing the soft sciences, the field was quite open to conceits wherein humanity was not just confronted with concrete nova but directly altered by them, not just biologically (Frederik Pohl’s Man Plus), but also psychologically (Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human), intellectually (Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon), linguistically (Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17). Through conceits of biological evolution and chemical augmentation, writers side-stepped Campbell’s strictures (which weren’t exactly the Word of God anyway, not in a field where Horace Gold was publishing Bester’s tales of ESPers and jaunting), and got their teeth into science as soft as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The questions being asked in those four books—all sitting on my shelf in those Gollancz Classics editions from the 1980s as core members of the canon—are questions of identity, of the relationships of human beings to themselves, to each other, and to the world around them.