by Duncan, Hal
So, to use Anders’s examples, the Klingons and the Green Men of Mars are savages of Romance, their warlike characters determined by ethnicity much as we find in Tolkien’s orcs, in all those races of Fantasy whose “swarthy” skin is evermade a signifier of inhumanity, alterity as wrongness. The same sources offer races we are far less a-okay with: the Ferengi of Star Trek; the Black Men of Burroughs’s Barsoom. Essentialised grotesques, their greed or violence (or moral degeneracy, one might say) suggests we’re more a-okay with biological determinism than anything. Sadly, it seems, the fiction of the strange can just as easily render the alterior foreign, an exotic Other readily made monstrum when the story calls for a sensational foe.
My scepticism kicks in then, I confess, at heroic fantasies of SF freeing children from their shackles of conditioning. Would it were so. The reality of the escapes we’ve found, may still find, from the bugfuck nutjobbery of our immediate environs—whether that bugfuck nutjobbery be Creationism or Clause 28—is that these are holidays as often organised to rapture us in moral bromides as to teach us to challenge them. As space cadets in brown shirts, we have learned songs of the sublime along with science and survival skills. In wild campfire tales of adventures elsewhen, told at Camp Consolation by counsellors who were themselves taught by such tales, for a fiction of scientific Rationalism, SF can be terribly Romantic.
Stitchings of Songs
rhapsody:
• Music. an instrumental composition irregular in form and suggestive of improvisation.
• an ecstatic expression of feeling or enthusiasm.
• an epic poem, or a part of such a poem, as a book of the Iliad, suitable for recitation at one time.
• a similar piece of modern literature.
• an unusually intense or irregular poem or piece of prose.
• Archaic. a miscellaneous collection; jumble.
Dictionary.com
So what do I mean when I talk of The Golden Ass, The Tempest and even The Lord of the Rings as rhapsody rather than fantasy? If the exploitation of the absurd or the abject result in comedy or tragedy, and the limitation of that use leads to the private and pathetic narratives of drama and melodrama, what do I mean when I say that the exploitation of the quirk results in rhapsody?
Well, the term is exapted from its origins in the rhapsodes of Classical Greece. Literally, rhapsody means “stitchings of songs,” referring to the repertoire of mythic, comedic and otherwise episodic tales that the rhapsode would weave into the frame of the epos or epic, the framing structure remaining constant but the selection of songs varying with each performance according to the rhapsode’s judgement of his audience’s tastes. In a superficial sense all three narratives named above share a certain stitchedness, their framing narratives containing tales told and songs sung, performances within performances and shifts in register to match the changing content’s mode. There is myth and mystery in these texts but also comic escapades, episodes of light relief. This is what the fairy-tale and chivalric romances share with picaresque and the Milesian tale. It is the freedom of form they inherit from comedy where the escalation of absurdity is repeatedly released, in contrast to tragedy’s continual building of tension. Comedies are allowed to sprawl; they defy the grip of tragedy’s (moral, social, natural, divine) order.
Where comedy may be as wildly inchoate as a Monty Python movie however, rhapsody always returns to the framing structure even if, as in the modern rhapsody, that structure is disassembled, integrated into the episodes, buried in the episodes as the framing narrative of Catch-22 (the story of the horrors of the war, the epos and tragedy in which Yossarian is Achilles and Snowden Patroclus) is buried in the absurdist chapters each devoted to the individual narrative of one of the characters. The irregularity and improvisational quality associated with rhapsody in its contemporary application in music and poetry is not absent in our application of this term to prose narratives, but neither is the quality of intensity, of ecstasy; rhapsody is held together by this intensity, the profundity of affect, the gravitas it inherits from tragedy.
What I am suggesting is essentially this rhapsody as a conceptual frame for those taproot/trunk fictions that are neither comedy nor tragedy but share features of them both in their dynamics of incredulity etc., the disruption of modalities as a driving power in the history of Western literature. Rather than accept the model of fantastic fiction as a product of the Enlightenment’s scientific worldview, an unrealist irrationalist fiction abjected by the newly invented Rationalist realist literature, and rather than ignoring this aesthetic struggle entirely so as to apply the genre labels of fantasy or science fiction willy-nilly to everything from Gulliver’s Travels all the way back to Gilgamesh, I’m suggesting we turn this model inside-out: imagine comedy and tragedy as the pillars of a gateway, a portal through which the rhapsode entered the city of New Sodom millennia ago; imagine the history of rhapsody as the long road to the heart of the city in the present day, marked out between the absurd and the monstrous, through Milesian tales and Latin novels, through the chivalric romance and the picaresque, through dramas of Calibans and Ariels, through travellers’ tales, through anecdotes and allegories, through narratives cognisant of their own strangeness long before the Enlightenment brought a scientific worldview to bear. We don’t need science to tell us what defies the laws of nature; we have our tears and laughter to tell us that; we have our open jaws and wide eyes.
This is rhapsody as the narrative form that employs the full range of quirks, as the narrative that is, through Chaucer and Cervantes, Defoe and Richardson, Fielding and Sterne, the root of the private and pathetic narratives which will eventually eschew those quirks entirely. This is rhapsody as that mode of strange fiction driven by the deep dynamics of incredulity, a mode that has carried on in the ghetto of Genre all through the era of mimetic fiction’s dominance of Literature, the rhapsody that is re-emerging in that domain right now.
The Echoes of Faith
A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world. The outcome of his thought, ceasing to be renunciatory, flowers in images. It frolics—in myths, to be sure, but myths with no other depth than that of human suffering and like it inexhaustible. Not the divine fable that amuses and blinds, but the terrestrial face, gesture, and drama in which are summed up a difficult wisdom and an ephemeral passion.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
SF has always had a love/hate relationship with Romanticism, happy to utilise its aesthetic of the sublime, but uneasy with the suspension of critical nous such rapture entails. Sense-of-wonder is a sense of incredulity tinged positive, created in the breach of possibility—the technical or historical, physical or logical alethic quirk—so to appreciate the incredible in SF is paradoxically to fancy reason capable of that which it is not—not yet. Where even critics claim for SF an alethic modality of “could have happened,” untrue because this would require technical possibility, the rapture is revealed: we fancy the fancy practicable. The denial is endemic. Our (in)credulity always already a betrayal of a wholly rationalist aesthetic—pretending the practicality of a quirk—it seems the less easy we are with the game of suspended disbelief as a game, the more we must gloss the impossible as possible, the implausible as plausible.
The rigour required to cleave to what’s actually plausible is the province of a rare few, not the core of the genre. An SF that eschews all mumbo-jumbo—a truly scientific fiction working only on the novum, with no place in it for errata, chimerae or suturae—this is a fantasia of the genre’s future, a Hard SF or Mundane SF ideal, not an accurate model of our roots. This is not to criticise it as an ideal, simply to say it’s not the picture as it stands, as it has ever stood. The wildest technical impossibilities are seldom adequate, let alone the tamer ones which have real plausibility.
Instead, freely employing the Paradigm Shift Caveat to excuse all manner of impossibilities, SF blithely accepts into its canon works which breach
not just known science but the laws of nature, works where the conceit is ultimately metaphysical. If a wormhole or FTL drive or an ability to jaunte is not glossed as magic, it remains a chimera, no more possible—or even plausible—than a teleportation spell. It requires a spurious physics in place of the established one. The difference in the text, like that between a mentalist and a magician, is only the shtick that sells the trick. The difference in the reading may be an actual plausibility we afford the chimera sold as novum, faith furtively sneaking in the back door as we swallow the pseudoscientific spiel of the illusionist. It’s a fun twist on the game, to suspend the disbelief that would remind us we are suspending disbelief, but where it is afforded more weight, a fancy of hyperspace is more credulous than that of an astral plane; this is a tautology.
An SF that applies the Paradigm Shift Caveat or some other flimflam to legitimise those wilder quirks, but scorns them when (but only when) rendered as magic, is a fantasia of the genre’s present, glossing the illusion as a feasible marvel because it pulls the bouquet of blue flowers from the sleeve of a lab coat rather than a robe. It is a divine fable, and the higher the snoot is cocked at the frolics of those who don’t buy the shtick, projecting one’s own doubly-suspended disbelief into their gameplay, the more it reveals itself as grandiose conceit, its imagined tether of possibility mere credulity. The deeper the scorn of a magic carpet as against an Analog story of teleporting sun whales, say, the more we must arch a Spocklike eyebrow at the judgement lending such credence to the latter whimsy, so requiring it that it damns the former for not accommodating this doubly-suspended disbelief.
The more a straight man identifies as homophobic, experiments show, the more likely he’s aroused by gay porn, as if that hate is a song of fierce denial roared to drown out dread desire. I can’t help wondering what scorn of magic carpets comes from a similar doublethink of denial, angst at the echoes of faith that scorn reveals when not directed at teleporting whales of the sun, whether that doubly-suspended disbelief simply isn’t a game for some, but rather an actual belief, shorn of all doubt so as to disacknowledge that it is belief—not truth—that all those marvels now impossible are nonetheless more fundamentally possible, made so by the power of unknown science, even breaches of the laws of nature admissible, so limitless that capacity is in this credo.
Like Beads on a Bracelet
We do not always reconstruct elsewhens from these quirks. Narratives characterised by such quirks do not always invite us to parse them as indexes of a coherent worldscape. The alethic quirk, incredible because it is a motif misplaced (a man in space, jaunting) or a recombination of forms (a crescent and a sun fused), may invite no such rational interpretation. Thrown into a mimetic narrative without any sense of coherent structuring, they might suggest to us only that what we’re reading is an oneiric narrative, with no worldscape to reconstruct—only a dreamscape. This is the only fictive setting offered by the movie The Science of Sleep. In its mimetic detail it points to a story taking place in the real world, but the environment it offers us is a dreamscape in which the day’s events are recombined with fancy and unreason. The instability of these types of narrative is often alienating precisely because of its illogic, regarded as “experimental” (i.e. an experiment that failed.)
In narratives better classed as ludic than oneiric, we begin to see, in the relationships of those quirks, the arbitrary rules of play, the logic of a game. So Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland offers us logic-puzzles and syllogisms made flesh; but if there is more order here than in a dreamscape there’s still no coherent worldscape. The same is true of most allegory, where the rules applied are those of analogy (e.g. Pilgrim’s Progress). Here the quirks function as vehicles of metaphor (often crude, blatant), their behaviour bound by the proposition they exist to act out in vehicle-form in order that it can be translated into tenor-form by the reader, parsed into a moral. In parable, where the quirks are played down or removed so that the text can also be read as straight mimesis (a prodigal son rather than a Vanity Fair), or in fable, where the imagery is more directly rooted in mundane reality (a talking fox, say, rather than a Slough of Despond), we start to see the beginnings of worldscape. Still, there is little of the elsewhen here, our suspension-of-disbelief requiring an acceptance of whimsical make-believe or of worthy figurative sermonising. It is not entirely surprising that allegory is not the most popular mode of contemporary narrative.
Satiric narrative takes the strategies of fable a step further though. As it attaches its moral message to a specific real-world target rather than offering it as a general axiom of righteousness, it becomes an act of mimesis in its own right, a representation of the target of its derision. The Cloud Cuckoo Lands of satire may still be rendered incoherent and fanciful by their comic exaggerations, their absurdities, but the more accurate their representation of the target underneath that absurdity, the more acute the critique they offer. It is still largely the rules of analogy around which the fictive environments of satire cohere, but as the motifs and milieus are fleshed-out as fabricated forms, the edifices of absurdity begin to slip free. Somewhere between Swift’s Lilliput and Kafka’s Castle, perhaps, satire becomes story.
Where satire lets the story take over, where the rules of analogy are replaced by the rules of narrative logic, a change takes place. Here in the diegetic narrative—the story as a told-tale, an autotelic artefact—the behaviours of the quirks and their environment must be integrated into the story as a whole. They must be coherently and comprehensively understandable as elements of the unfolding dynamics, even if this means unmooring them from the rules of direct analogy. Diegetic narrative, it should be made clear, does not necessarily involve quirks. (Not all fiction is strange.) Its motifs may be purely mundane even if they carry the symbolic meaning of theme. Where they are strange however, story’s demand for suspension of disbelief drives writer and reader toward the creation of worldscape. The strange must be excused as within a conventional framework (worldscape as mythos in its contemporary sense) or explicated as an original creation—or better still both. So we may even find, to borrow a phrase from film theory in a bad pun, the “extra”-diegetic elements of infodump and backstory.
Other strategies are evident in this fiction which some might call fantasy, others fantastika or phantasia, but which I’m referring to as rhapsody, and it’s largely these other strategies that are my reason for this naming. From the earliest tellings of tales in written history, long before the metafiction of the (post)modernists, the stitching-of-stories has been a strategy for maintaining suspension-of-disbelief by drawing the reader into the story. As Gilgamesh sits listening to Atrahasis’s embedded story of the Deluge, the reader sits at his side. As Lucius, transformed into an ass, listens to the tale of Cupid and Psyche, only one of many strung through his own story like beads on a bracelet, our awareness of the artifice of story is focused on that inner tale; we are for that moment in an exactly corresponding situation with the protagonist because we, like him, are listening to this embedded tale. These metafictional structurings—like the epistolic form of Dracula or the found-text claim of Manuscript Found in Saragossa—are not designed to distance us but rather to immerse us, to offer us sleight-of-hand subterfuges by which we might just continue to imagine this story real. As the character—Gilgamesh, Lucius, Miranda or Frodo—sits listening to a story within their story, or watching a play within their play, we are being offered a subtle mimesis: their worldscape as one which is like ours because stories are told in it, a worldscape which is, we are being told, more real because of that.
This is the fiction that I’m referring to as rhapsody, this stitching of mimetic representation, oneiric imagery, ludic rules, allegoric morals, satiric critique and diegetic story into complex quiltings of narrative. And it is in this fiction that, as those quirks become unmoored from direct relationships of meaning, the diegesis, or the layering of diegesis, becomes a syntax in which these symbols articulate new meanings. Story becomes a lan
guage with the sort of narrative grammars that John Clute discusses in his “Fantastika in the World Storm” essay, and with these quirks as motifs, semes coined in the process of narrative, we end up with a fiction that is not just mimetic, oneiric, ludic, allegoric, satiric or diegetic, but semiotic. It bears a remarkable resemblance to (post)modernism in some respects, but this may only be because if the project of Modernism was to fuse Romanticism and Rationalism, the end of that project may mean, in the end, a return to the freedom of form that existed before the ideological schisming of that original Great Debate.
A Romance with Reason
There is nothing whatsoever in science—and this should be shouted from the rooftops of every scientific institution—that makes it immune from such abuses… Some scientists will dispute this, claiming that the values of open, objective enquiry, mutual criticism and protection of learning in the accumulated wisdom of science amount to an ethical system which, if applied to the world, would make it a better place, potentially protected from future horrors. This is not wrong, just fantastically utopian. Such values are not exclusive to science; they preceded it. Science sprang from philosophy, theology and even magic. The reason it became science at all was because of the direction these disciplines took in the course of the Renaissance.
