by Duncan, Hal
The librarian takes another scan of her surroundings, orients herself from another angle of vision. She’s out on the street now. This could not be, but if you can sip the miso soup you couldn’t get that day in North Carolina, you can do anything.
With Faces in Their Bellies
The counter-argument born of the open definition would be that the fantastic is a technique in the text itself, and that the Greek term for that technique, phantasia, is perfectly applicable now as it was then. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, all distinguished out those phenomena of imagination, dreams and visions in which perception somehow blends with judgement (is, we might say, recombined by it, Hume’s “missing shade of blue” constructed in the colourspace between other directly experienced shades). So, elsewhere in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy we read that “in the Graeco-Roman world […] phantasia was a technical term in the study of poetic techniques for representing these stories, and ancient literary criticism for the first time drew a clear distinction between the possible and the ‘mythic’ or ‘fabulous.’”
If we now utilise a sort of conceptual temporal dislocation as a rationalisation for the impossibilities, the examples offered earlier with regards to metaphysical dislocations clearly suggest that those pre-Enlightenment writers were utilising spatial dislocation in exactly the same manner, displacing the impossible events to an elsewhere rather than an elsewhen, some remote land beyond the known world (rather than known history or known science) where things might work differently—where people might be gigantic or minuscule, might even have their faces in their bellies. From Herodotus and Apollonius on, through Marco Polo, the legends of Prester John and suchlike, we can see phantasia in the traveller’s tale. Exploiting the incredible in the shape of the exotic, these are unquestionably strange fiction.
Pornographia dell’Arte
The librarian taps a smoke off Kid Pulp, offers a light.
Kid Pulp is working the same corner as per usual, busking and hustling, offering wild songs and ten-dollar blowjobs, dancing in a red leather miniskirt or denim cut-offs, selling limber feats as pole dance peep shows improvised with lampposts and blindfolds. The strumpet stripling slinks round a pimp, a bookstore buyer in fur coat and gold rings, diamonds in his grin bought with monies made by mining star dreck. Prissy passers-by who took a wrong turn from uptown gasp as punters splash out cash for the harlequin’s masque, a Pornographia dell’Arte that might well end in blood and tears instead of spunk these days.
This is the vision through the librarian’s mayashades, of course, filtered through the figurative, view skewed towards the sordid. It’s how society sees the sensational, painted lurid by the streetlight’s glow, painted lurid with boulomaic and deontic modalities, quirks of desire and duty. We seldom see what is, too busy projecting onto it what should or should not be.
Kid Pulp, fully paid-up member of the League of Fusion Fry-Cooks, will have none of that should not be. Kid Pulp was suckled at the cock/paps of a dam/sire known as Romance, does not deny the Babylon that spawned not just Kid Pulp but all of New Sodom. No defensive twitch when this harlot/hustler’s heritage is thrown back in Kid Pulp’s face by those brought up on the right side of the tracks. No shame, no sham of fierce certainty that Kid Pulp is not that kind of girl. Or boy. No shoving that parental shame into a closet, starving it to a skeleton for the sake of prim decorum. A whirl, a twirl, and the sparkly logo on Kid Pulp’s crop top comes clear, the brand name of SF.
Dressed in such gaudy duds of glossy packaging, Kid Pulp figures, why get your knickers in a twist when the literati sneer? The sideshow sells well when it’s painted pretty colours and comes cheap on the street-corners, so we shill ourselves as Sci-Fi, wear the label in a wild and willing deal with the devil. Through the single-setting mayashades that most don’t even know they’re wearing, it sure looks like we’re just following the family trade (rough trade, that is,) as we stand out there beneath the streetlight, touting cheap thrills to sad johns.
—Show you a good time, if ya want it, honey. A tasty treat. Fresh, juicy meat.
It all began, you know, with self-righteous prigs reviling whores and faggots, proles and primitives, as slave to base sensation. With Romance as an unmarried mother, ill-gotten with child by the entire mob of the mass market, whore with a bastard in her hysterical womb, kicked out by the bushy-bearded patriarchs, no mercy but the workhouse or the madhouse. (It would be nice if a less sexist figuration of Romance could be found here, but it would be a denial of the semiotics at play, which is sexist; the discourse of the sensational is inextricable from the discourse of the hysterical.) Her recent history is starvation and desperation, the brothel trucks and army whorehouses of the Culture Wars. Kid Pulp was born of the Joy Division of fiction, and I don’t mean the fucking band.
Kid Pulp is not a hooker/hustler because of some moral degeneracy, is not fallen, just a fall guy. Bastard offspring of Romance and Frankenstein’s mob, Kid Pulp grew up hustling that sweet ass, knows it’s hard to scrape a living any other way, knows other ways are more degrading in the end. The propriety of polite company finds quirks a little uncouth, see, the cocks and cunts of narrative. The sensational is the sensual, and the sensual is the sexual, shockingly gauche. The secret cuisine is a naked lunch to the petit-bourgeoisie: genre fiction; pulp fiction; penny dreadfuls; dime novels; sensation novels; Gothic; Romance. The Pornographia dell’Arte is a pandering Grand Guignol of all emotions.
So Kid Pulp got real, faced the facts. You made your bed, says Kid Pulp, now you’ve got to spread your legs on it, bite the pillow and think of England. Kid Pulp is New Sodom out of Babylon, our Woman of the Ghetto, our Boy for Sale. Elsewhen, Kid Pulp would have been a faggot whore priestess prince black madonna in scarlet and purple drag, offering entry into sacred mysteries of flesh and spirit, eros and logos. Elsewhen, Kid Pulp would have been none of this, more than the idealised and demonised metaphors emergent from a history of abstraction and abjection. So those snooty literati see a slapper in these Bacchic revels? So fuck? Deal with it.
Kudos comes at a price, Kid Pulp knows: ditch the miniskirt and cut-offs, move uptown; or join the fucking revolution.
A Strange Fiction of Antiquity
There are other techniques we could identify, and other genres which might be made explicable in terms of quirks or analogues thereof. One might well look at the occult-history novel in these terms. Like comic, tragic or strange fiction, The Da Vinci Code or The Name of the Rose exploit a sense of the incredible which challenges our suspension-of-disbelief. Where these other modes utilise the absurd, the abject, the surreal or the quirk, the occult-history uses the arcane. Like tragedy and comedy there is no dislocation to a non-existent elsewhen; rather it is the links between historic events that are used to weave large scale patterns of conspiracy, to build these up to a point of collapse, at critical mass, into a sense of (incredible) lost (hidden, ancient) truths beyond imagining. The arcanum of occult-history bears a remarkable resemblance to the errata, nova and chimerae already detailed. A novum, indeed, which gains its novelty from its being previously unknown, may even be an arcanum, which gains its mystery from the fact it is a pointer to further and greater unknowns. The monolith in 2001, for example, is both.
One might even look at the occult-history’s relative, the mystery novel, where the events are not strictly speaking incredible at all—they do not challenge our subjunctivity level—but are intriguing. Like a mundane tragedy we have at least one event, a crime, that “should not have happened” and, while the mystery novel remains on one level a pathetic narrative, in the “could have happened” subjunctivity level, rather than going full-steam for terror and destruction, offence to the laws of God and Man, how often are the clues it throws at the reader quirks, things which don’t fit, which “should not have happened” (the enigma of the object-out-place) or which in combination “could not have happened” (the contradiction of different versions of events)?
And how much of the very purpose of the book
is to reconcile those clues into the solution of just how this “could have happened,” just how it “did happen”? If epistemic modalities are unresolved until that point, perhaps we can speak of driving quirks in the absentings and obfuscations: the lacunae of “what did and/or did not happen”; the limina of “what might and/or might not have happened.” The quirk of a corpse in a locked room as an alethic irresolution: the cryptica of “what could and/or could not have happened.”
The cryptic is modern perhaps, but the monstrum and numina, the absurd, the arcane, the exotic—these are “genre devices” of a strange fiction of antiquity, one that existed long before the Enlightenment, albeit one that was reshaped radically in that era. If the strange fiction we know now (by whatever name) emerged out of a reconfiguration substantial enough that we might wish to retain a distinction between phantasia and fantasy, I’m not convinced we should be looking at the texts of one as the “taproots” of the other. A better visual metaphor, I think, might be to understand that pre-Enlightenment period in which realism and fantasy were allied as the “trunk” and what came afterwards as a splitting into two great branches, the mimetic and the semiotic.
The Idiom of the Ascetic
In the Bistro de Critique, Orwell and Huxley serve dystopia, a taster of the secret cuisine that remains unseen. They’re spared the sneers, suited up in pinstripes—no red leather miniskirts or denim cut-offs here. No turning tricks each night, sating sense-of-wonder-lust, ten dollars a pop. No formulae here for churning out pot-boilers by the pound. No pimps hawking hackwork product in Mass Market Square. They are members of the League of Fusion Fry-Cooks—they and others like them; but these chefs of the quirk were spared that whole grotesque and glittering scene, the garish spectacle of sensation that turned Sci-Fi into a slight.
Brooding in the ghetto for nigh on half a century, bitter at the literati, clansmen stalk the dark. Beware, the unwitting wanderer from uptown who says the wrong thing in the ghetto. The tribes of taste are seasoned warriors of the flame, and they know insult when they hear it.
They howl at midnight on the streets of Genre. The works they love are reviled while worthy (wearisome) “mainstream” fiction garners all accolades, as if the idiom of the ascetic were the only way to tell the truth. Worse, much of it is no longer “mainstream,” not mundane but strange, miso soup for the soul. Still, the literati laud Ishiguro’s dish by its supposed distinction from SF, constructing the root cause of failure ultimately, in any novel, as not eschewing the essential nature of one’s genre. As if to work in an idiom other than the ascetic could only mean to be bound by formal strictures. As if they are still working in the idiom of the ascetic simply by not being trite. The writers themselves speak in these terms. The secret cuisine is so secret even some of its greatest chefs don’t know they’re practising it, don’t know it exists, how it works. And so they buy into that same grand folly, abjuring the very idioms their best works are in. With this, they win the kudos of the literati, lose out on all the infamy and fun.
—No SF novel ever won the Booker, growls a prowling clansman on his way into the SF Café.
The librarian swings a shotgun from inside her longcoat, blasts the bullshit axiom from the air. Screw the Booker, she thinks. She’d rather have a hookah.
She stands in the doorway of the SF Café, past and future glimmering in her mayashades. She sees Kid Pulp working uptown in the theatres, other harlot/hustler harlequins crashing gallery openings and cocktail parties, noising up the regulars at the Bistro de Critique, hustling a little ass now and then to pay the rent, or dancing—prancing, entrancing maniacs blowing flutes instead of johns. For all the abjurations, every Ishiguro is another sleeper agent of the League of Fusion Fry-Cooks slipped in to open up the bistro’s back door, let the slumdogs in, slavering and savage.
But that’s tomorrow. She looks round, sees them here now, more and more by the day, her fellow agents, talking the Pornographia dell’Arte in the SF Café or on some corner of Mass Market Square. They talk of the kudos and cash success stories of twentieth-century literature, the canon of writers that includes Joyce alongside Hemingway, Faulkner alongside Steinbeck, writers such as Rushdie, Bulgakov, Carter, Calvino, García Márquez, Pynchon, Vonnegut, and so on. They talk of modern classics that don’t sit any better in the contemporary realist’s tower block than in the SF flophouse. They talk of that scene, the flavours of the month, the lists and prizes, the slow assimilation of contemporary realism, its descent into formulation. They know formulation when they see it, living in the ghetto. They talk of a spotlight wearing thin for the idiom of the ascetic. Kelly Link was in Time magazine a whiles back, they say, Top Five Books of the Year.
Change is in the air. There are always choices, chances.
The secret cuisine cannot be contained.
Breaking the Deadlock
Ultimately, as sympathetic as I am to the open definition of fantasy, the tendency of this definition towards an argument that “it’s all fantasy” and the inevitable misreading of that assertion as “it’s all Fantasy” makes it about as useful as a taxonomy that classes every colour on the palette as a shade of blue. The similarities in the way chimerae, nova and errata are utilised does not mean the latter two are “really just” instances of the former, no more than all fiction is fantasy simply because it’s fabricated, no more than all writing is fiction because it’s fabricated. Follow this path and we end up saying that mathematics, physics, chemistry, language itself, are all subsets of fantasy—they’re just complex artifices of the human imagination, after all, representing reality in the form of abstracted symbolic patterns. This is a blurring of the term fantasy which renders it so vague as to be useless.
It’s for this reason above all others that I prefer to replace this overloaded terminology of fantasy and the fantastic as applied to the open definition with that of strange fiction, to strip away the accreted associations and start from first principles, try and model the field as a fiction of quirks, examine how these work, how the acts of mimesis, those sentences which present themselves as representations of an ersatz actuality, are interrupted by acts of semiosis, sentences that remind us that the representation is an artifice, that the events described “could not have happened.” And that would be the closed definition, focusing in on the alethic. In the open definition, all flavours of modality are in the field of vision.
I’m less concerned with fighting a side in that debate than I am with breaking the deadlock by identifying the exact point(s) of contention, so for me the term strange offers a fresh slate and a territorial neutrality. It nixes those associations. It carries no further proposition, explicit or implicit, about the nature of the quirks it is founded on, the semiotic “contents” by which we can characterise this type of work. Or rather, to be more accurate, it carries no implications as to how we respond to these quirks. It simply says that they breach our expectations that the narrative will function as a representation of an ersatz reality modelled closely on our own. A vocabulary of strange fiction and quirks offers a distance from those conflicting connotations that are introduced whenever we talk of the content of the field in terms of SF and fantasy.
(There is, of course, the old tried and tested weird, but in its origin in ideas of fate, in its application to the uncanny and supernatural rather than just the queer or unusual, and in its associations with the religious and fictional conventions of certain chimerae—e.g. ghosts and vampires—we risk narrowing the focus to the excused metaphysical, rendering it no better a fit than fantasy. The history of this word within the commercial genre also establishes it as a sub-generic term, calling up associations with particular pulp writers like Lovecraft or magazines like Weird Tales. This is one reason why I’m wary of the term New Weird, over and above the fact of that New tacitly acknowledging that the label is sub-generic and commercial, placing this fiction in relation to the New Wave as another Movement within the genre.)
We need a term which can be applied beyond the commercial
strictures of genres and movements, one we can apply analytically to those works published before or outside the marketing labels, such that the application is not political and subjective but rather critical and objective. With its etymological roots in the Latin extraneous, meaning “of external origin,” and its modern application to the foreign, the alien, the queer, the other, strange is an eminently suitable term, with much less conceptual baggage, as much a description of the set of narratives to be examined—strange fictions, fictions which are strange—as a naming of an aesthetic form.
And, of course, it abbreviates neatly to the old familiar SF.
A Water Feature in the Gardens of Literature
The librarian heads out across Mass Market Square, towards the subway, checking in with the League of Fusion Fry-Cooks over her aether uplink, telling them all about the Bistro de Critique’s strange visitor from twenty years into tomorrow, how he told of a Dynamism sweeping in to overturn the tables. Her contact listens with great interest.
Here is a secret of the secret cuisine. The “mainstream” of literature is only what is in the main stream, and this is not the contemporary realism of the kitchen sink. That idiom had a brief boom in the 1960s, as angry young men roared for realism in the name of relevance, no frills, no nonsense. It was an egalitarian agenda, born in a backlash against elitist artifices of the modernists, eschewing the strange and sensationalist quirks, seeing deceit in all conceit—but in an honest and passionate dream of telling stories of the common man for the common man. They saw the unreal as irrelevant, the incredible as mere fancy; they could not parse the strange to its meaning.
