by Duncan, Hal
(Their attitude is not entirely unfamiliar. We have our own realists, our own Rationalists, down in the ghetto of Genre, in the SF Café, dug into their little corner, behind a barricade of tables, muttering darkly about the death of Science Fiction.)
It had a brief boom in the 1960s, this idiom of the ascetic, this genre, but it never made the mainstream, which is and always will be populist, commercial…Genre. The League of Fusion Fry-Cooks have more than a little sympathy for those angry young men, and a smart of sadness that they failed to see the Molotov cocktail in the quirk…more so that their battleground could only be lost to the bourgeois. Because they had walked away from the mainstream in the abrogation of quirks, diverted into the sidestream of “proper literature” where taste becomes a class marker, where appreciation serves to signify status, where that sidestream is therefore reduced to a water feature in the Gardens of Literature.
It was never about the mainstream, but about the manners of the Bistro de Critique, what was à la mode today, what was “proper.” Three hundred years ago or so, two oppositional aesthetics were well-matched in their struggle for legitimacy as they clashed head-to-head. Romantic and Realist genres were the tribes of taste among the middle-class and middlebrow, back in the day, constructing modernity in a dialectic not unlike that to be found today in the SF Café. Oh, but one aesthetic was that of the vulgar proles and of “women’s fiction.”
It was infantile, unsophisticated, this aesthetic of mere storytelling, fanciful as folklore and fable, primitive as the superstitions of the savages. It was then—and remains now—the mainstream that feeds the bulk of water fountains across the city of New Sodom, but this very fact was enough to damn it in the end. A true gentleman—not a vulgar prole, not a hysterical woman, not a primitive savage, not a child—surely knew that these gushing fountains of quirk were…unseemly. Only in the Gardens of Literature might one find that shallow birdbath with a china cup from which to sip the refined liquidity of edifying art. Why, one could see just how refined it was, absent those quirks!
It was inevitable that the petit-bourgeois would latch on to the legitimacy of egalitarianism to justify what is really a scorn of the popular. Mass Market Square. The Pornographia dell’Arte. This is what they really hate, the impropriety of it all. The bourgeois were only too happy to co-opt contemporary realism, formulate and commercialise it with formal strictures on the acceptable use of quirks. Transform it to the faux reportage of the social observer, enlightened, educated, edified and edifying. So it became about the impropriety of the sensational, what art must not be if it was to be serious, worthy, intellectual. Some literati may be held accountable, but many were—and are—as much casualties of the Culture Wars as anyone; when one is raised within the rhetoric of abjection, it is often invisible, not least to those most privileged by it.
The abjection is unsustainable though; the impetus of art is always against propriety, and so the reactionaries will always be revealed, by their own words, as antagonists to art. They say the china cup is necessary, but every now and then a writer comes along to smash it with contempt, show it up for the genteel nonsense it is. And some literati nod appreciatively even as others slip a fresh cup back in place. They say the liquid in the birdbath must be pure, but every now and then a writer comes along to piss just a hint of quirk into it, maybe more than a hint. And after decades of art refined to bland banality, melodrama watered-down to mundane crises, trite epiphanies, some literati hail the tang of strange conceits even as others grumble at the taint. They say the flow of it all must be kept subtle, slow and delicate, never a spectacle. But writers who see how this is all in the name of etiquette and the status it affords will feel the heft of a sledgehammer in hand, and grin as they smash that decorative folly, let the fiction come fountaining forth in a great geyser. And if some literati flap their hands in outrage, others will dance barefoot in the mud.
And the League of Fusion Fry-Cooks will move among them, handing out hors d’oeuvres of pure quirk, peachy keen articulations conjured out of raw conceit, rich delicacies one cannot help acquire a taste for. Scotch eggs of a basilisk from a yesterday that never was. Whether they call it burger or fried chicken is irrelevant; it is the secret cuisine.
It may not remain secret for much longer.
The Order of the Blue Flower
The Rapture of Unreason
I grew up around Christians who believed in a seven day creation, preached the reality of Hell and Judgement, and railed against the lie that was evolution. They were also, for the most part, racists and homophobes… And the only difference between them and me was that I had a father who shoved a science fiction paperback into my pre-teen hands and ordered me to read it. After all, it’s pretty hard to be prejudiced against blacks and gays when you’re a-okay with Klingons and the Green Men of Mars.
Lou Anders
So the 21st of May, 2011, came and went without a whiff of the Rapture, nary a hint of Moby Douche, the Great White Fail, breaching the firmament above. No star called Wormwood fallen from the sky, turning a third of the waters to tasty absinthe. No angels treading the wine gums of the wrath of the Lord. Not a peep of New Jerusalem on the early warning radar. Instead, the next day came in New Sodom, with Benny the Rat still in the Vatican, Fred Phelps still on the streets, and Harold Camping still on the radio, still selling his shtick. The Rapture was postponed apparently, till the 21st October.
And did it come then?
I was too busy having one fuck of a fortieth birthday party to notice.
Yes, I’m cynical. Deal with it. Dawkins, Hitchens and Pullman are a little po-faced in their harrumphery for my liking, but colour me sceptical and run me up the “oh really?” flagpole, because when it comes to religion, you can keep your gestalt schizophrenia; I am not innarested in your condition. It’s that whole Enlightenment thing; I favour a worldview that’s less inclined to burn me at the fucking stake. It’s not a problem with religion per se, you understand, just bugfuck nutjobbery in general. The rapture of unreason.
I came to New Sodom from a small town in Central Scotland, see, a queer kid in exile from a childhood I can’t help glimpsing in the picture Lou Anders paints of his own upbringing—albeit backwards in a different way, a New Town housing scheme, built in the 1970s to take Glasgow’s overspill, to punt the plebs out to the suburbs, greener pastures, bluer skies and flowers. The razor-gang culture of Glasgow’s inner city, the small town mentality of an Ayrshire village, crossbred to perfection with anti-Catholic bigotry in place of racism, it was swellegant!
There wasn’t a whole lot of creationist evangelism, but racists and homophobes? My formative years were the era of the National Front, Nazi punk bands like Skrewdriver, the “Gay Plague” of AIDS, Clause 28. Good old Clause 28, outlawing the “promotion of homosexuality” in the public sector. I proposed it as a topic for our school debating society, I recall, but the teacher had to sadly veto it. A debate on Clause 28 might be construed as “promoting homosexuality,” you see; to allow pupils to argue Clause 28 could be a breach of Clause 28, a sacking offence.
(That’s some clause, that Clause 28, thought this homo Yossarian.)
Point is, religion wasn’t the driving force, but the reactionary bollocks sprang from the same source, the abrogation of ethical judgement to received moral wisdom, the bugfuck nutjobbery of the righteous. All prejudice presents itself as piety, propriety. And if today I proudly wear the title “THE…. Sodomite Hal Duncan!!” gifted to me by homophobic hatemail, I don’t know that it’s just being a bugger that makes me bolshie. It’s not just the background of bigotry as resonates with me in that opening quote from Anders. A geek and a gawk in specs, with elbow patches on my blazer, I was a teenage Spock even before sexuality kicked in, booted me out of any dream of normativity, into the evermade estranged reality of the queer.
I could almost imagine, then, that it wasn’t the day my teacher vetoed that Clause 28 debate that set me on the path to New Sodom, a blue flower pinned in my lapel
, but rather the moment a mate shoved a copy of Asimov’s I, Robot into my hand. I could almost imagine it was the logic of the Three Laws, reason and the scientific worldview, that set me against the bugfuck nutjobbery, the hysteria and hate, the rapture of unreason. I could almost imagine it was the experience of alterity accepted in Klingons and Green Men of Mars that served as antidote to the conditioning of my culture.
Almost.
The Forgotten Sibling of Comedy and Tragedy
You have literally as many forms as Proteus; and now you go all manner of ways, twisting and turning, and, like Proteus, become all manner of people at once, and at last slip away from me in the disguise of a general, in order that you may escape exhibiting your Homeric lore.
Plato, Ion
If this substitution of strange fiction and the quirk solves the problem of overload by abandoning the open definition of fantasy and the fantastic, does this mean that those terms are now free to be applied solely in the context of a closed definition? Might we now focus in on one particular type of strange fiction which utilises its alethic quirks in a specific way, calling this and only this fantasy? It is a temptation. We might now simply accept, as subsets of these strange fictions, a pair of narrative grammars driven by the numina on one hand, the monstrum on the other, the marvellous here, the monstrous there, setting fantasy up in partnership with horror.
But there is, I think, another identifiable discourse of narratives that might legitimately compete for a label of fantasy (as one can label works of Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Miller tragedy, as one can label works of Aristophanes, Shakespeare and Orton comedy), a mode of narrative that exploits the sort of quirks we think of as the fantastic, which is to say, the alethic, the incredible (as tragedy exploits the abject, as comedy exploits the absurd), but which walks the line between Clute’s Thinning and Thickening, between the marvellous and the monstrous.
If I would argue against some of the narrowly focused views of what fantasy does (e.g. Clute’s narrative grammar of fantasy), seeing these as overly restrictive (as if one were to describe all tragedy in terms Jacobean Revenge Tragedy, as if one were to describe all comedy according to a model based on Bedroom Farce), it is because I see works touted under that label navigating a middle ground we might call Twisting, applied to the novum in Clute’s schema but equally applicable to the chimera, or indeed to the erratum or sutura.
This particular mode of fiction would be that in which the incredulity engendered by any flavour of quirk is not just significant and structural but is escalated, the tension of alethic modalities developed to a crisis-point comparable with those we find in tragedy or comedy. It would be the narrative of incredulity in the same way that tragedy is the narrative of pity and terror, comedy the narrative of humour. It would underlie Clute’s grammars of horror and fantasy as, in large part, the dynamics that makes them not tragedy and comedy.
It is not difficult to discern this form of narrative in works we class as fantasy, to point to the spectaculism and sensationalism of contemporary Epic Fantasy as evidence for a narrative of incredulity. But with the term fantasy in play, the associations of that term lead us to a selection bias, an over-specification of the quirk as chimeric, bind the incredulity to metaphysicality when we might as easily be dealing with hypothetical or counterfactual conceits. This is all the more probable given the clear lineage of this mode of strange fiction, the general focus on chimeric conceits all the way back through Tolkien and Lewis, MacDonald and Morris, through the Gothic novel to the texts of chivalric romance and fairy tales (trunk texts or taproot texts). And that lineage is skewed to the marvellous.
Formally speaking, the base narrative mode should be considered a structural approach to the alethic quirk in general rather than to any one flavour of quirk. Scatological humour is not the essence of all comic narrative. Metaphysical impossibility is not the essence of all strange narratives. The incredibility I’m interested in here might be the chimera of a magic sword but it might as easily be the exotica of men with their faces in their bellies, the cryptic arcanum of a lost city of legend, the novum of a chess-playing automaton. And it might not be so simply marvellous, might not follow that path off to one side.
If we trim away the gold fruit and red leaves and blue flowers of all these different modern flavours of strangeness, trace the twigs that bear them back past their branch-points, there is a heritage for all these fictions in a form that goes back far beyond the Romantic period, one that places it on a direct par with tragedy and comedy, with a contemporaneous origin. Peake might well be a better analogue of Miller and Orton here, in a middle path for this strange fiction which would border chivalric romances but side more with Cervantes, and carry on back through Shakespeare (The Tempest) to Apuleius (The Golden Ass) as analogue of Aeschylus and Aristophanes. The picaresque of pre-Enlightenment Europe is as much a part of the discourse of this mode as the chivalric romance and the fairy tale, and in its Classical analogue of the Milesian tale we find, I would argue, an ideal figure of strange fiction in its own right, a fiction founded on the exploitation of the quirk.
Given that the term fantasy is highly arguable when we cast the net so wide, will inevitably slide sideways to stand as flipside of horror, given that I’m really talking of a mode which takes those two grammars as extremes as it tends more wholly toward the marvellous or the monstrous, I’m going to surrender the label of fantasy as I surrender the label of science fiction. Apply it as you will. To leave the whole sorry mess of turf wars behind us, as a name for this central and fundamental mode of strange fiction, I will appropriate a term with roots in the same Classical culture as tragedy and comedy, one that’s not too obscure—that’s quite familiar in the fields of poetry and music, in fact—but largely out-of-use now as regards narrative. As the forgotten sibling of comedy and tragedy then, I’m going to talk of rhapsody.
Camp Consolation
When I say “missing the point” what I mean is that (so it seems to me) Benford’s real concern is that scientific rationalism—or simply rationalism, full stop—is under constant attack from base superstition and base prejudice…When Benford disses the rise of fantasy, it seems to me his real concern is the loss of science fiction’s core message: that it can introduce the reader—particularly the young reader—to one of the core values of rationality: questioning the accepted order of things.
Gary Gibson
That quote from Anders comes from a few years back, from another cycle of the Great Debate. Picture a blogosphere of heads hitting desks as Gregory Benford testifies, brother, against a rising tide of unreason in the shape of Fantasy. Fantasy being Harry Potter, rotting the rational faculties. Anders, like Gary Gibson, stepped in to defend Benford, to cut through the turf war rhetoric, highlight a crucial point—the import of reason as antidote to prejudice. Anders presents it as impartiality towards alterity, Gibson as dubiety towards normativity, but both speak to the core of the critical nous: that it abjures the feedback loop of faith, purges the valorisation of credulity, the belief that questioning belief is wrong.
The rapture of unreason sustains the rapture of unreason. This is what makes it unreason, the inverse and inhibition of the discursive, the self-correcting.
Those core values Gibson refers to are dear to me then—analytic intellect against the onslaught of folly. When push comes to shove, that teenage Spock still stalks my little noggin, raising an eyebrow at the rapture of unreason whenever it appears—at the fervour for the End of the Enlightenment you hear, for example, in the crazytalk of those who believe Obama is a Kenyan Muslim. For all that I’ve argued in this book against tribalist Rationalism, I come to the strange fiction genres as one who identified first and foremost as a reader of SF. As a child, I loved Michael de Larrabeiti, Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, but that’s like saying I watched The Box of Delights on the BBC, hardly a true fandom. No Frodo or Fafhrd for me, no Conan or Elric, only John Carter got by my no-swords policy at one point. (He was nekkid.) Instead, Asimov led to Bra
dbury, Clarke, Dick, Ellison, Farmer, Gibson, Heinlein and so on.
Did it teach me acceptance of alterity, that SF? A little, maybes. From the Mule of the Foundation series to the Martians of Bradbury’s “Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed,” there’s much that might resonate with a kid queered by desire, finding solace in the local library, turning from Sarek on the screen to Simak and Sladek on the page. I remember how Heinlein unlocked the closet door for me with his sexual libertarianism, how Delany kicked that door wide open. It makes sense. The fiction of the strange is, by definition, the fiction of the alterior; surely it must then, by definition, render the alterior familiar.
And yet…every boy’s own adventure needs its savage enemies. We’d do well not to forget that what we’re dealing with here is category fiction born of the pulps, barefoot summer games of heroes and villains. For all we might point at what it is now, or at the deeper, wider heritage of strange fictions outwith the commercial field, from Gilgamesh on, talking of science fictions and fantasies unbound by the imperatives of juvenilia, our taproots are in the Street & Smith that published Nick Carter Weekly and Buffalo Bill Adventures alongside Astounding. It’s out of that soil this cultivar of a strange blue flower has sprung.
There’s an aesthetic inherited from that pulp, one that idealises individualism as will-to-power, appeals to emotion over reason, discards the restraint of realism to glory in the wonder of the incredible made manifest, the sublime. It’s an aesthetic which looks to the past for imagos of virtue in the cowboy or the knight, even where it renders them as spacemen. It’s the aesthetic which gives us fascism wherever its self-infatuation extends to the culture at large, the folk as hero, wherever it demonises or fetishises alterior cultures—as it so often does. It’s the aesthetic of Romanticism, and if we’ve one thing to learn from the twentieth century it’s how badly that aesthetic can go wrong.
