Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing
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Small Beer Press
www.lcrw.net
Copyright ©2007 by Small Beer Press
First published in 2007, 2007
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NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
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CONTENTS
Introduction
What We Know About the Lost
Post Hoc
The Shoe in SHOES’ Window
Pallas at Noon
Willow Pattern
Black Feather
A Drop of Raspberry
The Utter Proximity of God
Alternate Anxieties
Burning Beard:
Rats
Climbing Redemption Mountain
Timothy
Hunger
A Map of the Everywhere
Emblemata
When It Rains, You'd Better
Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom
A Dirge for Prester John
Afterword: The Spaces Between
Contributors
Acknowledgements
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Interfictions
an anthology of
interstitial writing
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Edited by Delia Sherman
and Theodora Goss
Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing. Copyright © 2007 by the Interstitial Arts Foundation. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously. All rights reserved. Not reproducible without written permission.
Interstitial Arts Foundation
P.O. Box 35862
Boston, ma 02135
www.interstitialarts.org
info@interstitialarts.org
Distributed to the trade by Small Beer Press through Consortium.
Printed on Recycled Paper in Canada by Transcontinental Printing. Text set in ITC Esprit.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available on request.
ISBN-13: 978-1-931520-24-9
First edition: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
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Cover art © 2007 by Connie Toebe.
"Introduction” Copyright © 2007 by Heinz Insu Fenkl. Previously published in a longer form as “The Interstitial DMZ": www.interstitialarts.org/why/theinterstitialdmz1.html.
"What We Know About the Lost Families of—House” Copyright © 2007 by Christopher Barzak.
"Post Hoc” Copyright © 2007 by Leslie What.
"The Shoe in SHOES’ Window” Copyright © 2007 by Anna Tambour.
"Pallas at Noon” Copyright © 2007 by Joy Marchand.
"Willow Pattern” Copyright © 2007 by Jon Singer.
"Black Feather” Copyright © 2007 by K. Tempest Bradford.
"A Drop of Raspberry” Copyright © 2007 by Csilla Kleinheincz. Translation from the Hungarian Copyright © 2007 by Noémi Szelényi.
"The Utter Proximity of God” Copyright © 2007 by Michael J. DeLuca.
"Alternate Anxieties” Copyright © 2007 by Karen Jordan Allen.
"Burning Beard” Copyright © 2007 by Rachel Pollack.
"Rats” Copyright © 2007 by Veronica Schanoes.
"Climbing Redemption Mountain” Copyright © 2007 by Mikal Trimm.
"Timothy” Copyright © 2007 by Colin Greenland.
"Hunger” Copyright © 2007 by Vandana Singh. Also appears in The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories by Vandana Singh, Zubaan (New Delhi, India 2007: www.zubaanbooks.com).
"A Map of the Everywhere” Copyright © 2007 by Matthew Cheney.
"Emblemata” Copyright © 2007 by Léa Silhol. Translation from the French Copyright © 2007 by Sarah Smith.
"When It Rains, You'd Better Get Out of Ulga” Copyright © 2007 by Adrián Ferrero. Translation from the French Copyright © 2007 by Edo Mor.
"Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom” Copyright © 2007 by Holly Phillips.
"A Dirge for Prester John” Copyright © 2007 by Catherynne M. Valente.
"Afterword: The Spaces Between” Copyright © 2007 by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss.
For Terri Windling, artist,
inspiration, and fellow
IAF founder.—DS
For Kelly Link, who inspires so
many of us to make our stories
stranger and more real.—TG
Introduction
Heinz Insu Fenkl
I. An Introduction
I worked on my first book for twenty-three years, from the time I was twelve to the time I turned thirty-five. I am not an especially slow writer; this was writing that had deep meaning for me, writing that was at the beginning of a life-long series of interlinked works. In 1996, this book, Memories of My Ghost Brother, was published as a novel.
But Memories of My Ghost Brother is not a novel. It is the story of my childhood in Korea, drawn from life but told in such a way that there is a clear aesthetic consciousness behind it.
The decision to call it a novel—and not a memoir—was made by the publisher's marketing department, not by me.
I had told my editor that given the current state of literary theory, I was comfortable calling my work either thing—a novel (because of its literary style, its use of tropes, its collaging of time and character) or a memoir (because nearly everything in it is true, in the factual sense, within the realm of flexibility for that form). I had just come out of a PhD program in Cultural Anthropology, having spent the last several years heavily engaged with the theory of ethnographic writing. Memories of My Ghost Brother was what I had written in response to, and in implicit criticism of, both ethnographic and theoretical works I had been reading. It was what I was compelled to finish instead of my dissertation monograph.
Nearly a decade after its initial publication, there is now another publisher that would like to repackage Memories of My Ghost Brother as a memoir.
I have directly experienced the power of binary oppositions in the world of publishing. As an academic with a background in a wide range of theoretical approaches, including semiotics and structuralism, it is no surprise to me; but as a first-time “novelist,” this experience was both disillusioning and educational. It gave me that proverbial eye-opening look behind the scenes, and as I began to work later with small presses, I learned things that helped me become a more realistic academic. For me as the writer of an autobiographical narrative that pushed the envelope in both directions, the problem of categories was: memoir or novel (fact or fiction)? I approached it head-on by labeling my work “autoethnography."
In an essay I called “an autoethonographic recursion,” I looked at my own writing as if I were an anthropologist looking at a text, and this exercise helped me put to rest a tangle of theoretical and writerly problems. I had been familiar with various theoretical approaches to texts, which examine their “liminality” or “hybridity,” often applying terms with the prefixes “inter” or “trans” ("intertextuality” and “transnationality,” for example), but these approaches all rely on an implicit notion of dichotomy combined with the idea of moving from one state to another or combining (intersecting) one thing with another.
In the world of publishing, this way of thinking presents itself as a series of either/or decisions: Fact or Fiction, Fantasy or Science Fict
ion, Genre or Mainstream, Mystery or History? I present these categorical problems as dilemmas of a sort, but in many cases the possibilities are not initially limited only to two; and yet, when a particular work is hard to classify, its final label is then often compared to or contrasted with a series of other possibilities, one at a time.
The result may be that an either/or decision (which implicitly negates neither/nor) produces a thing that then follows an and/or logic—and then transcends it, perhaps by ignoring it altogether.
II. The Interstices
An interstice is not an intersection. (That is why a concept like hybridity, by itself, is not adequate to the idea of the Interstitial.) The word “interstice” comes from the Latin roots “inter” (between) and “sistere” (to stand). Literally, it means to “stand between” or “stand in the middle.” It generally refers to a space between things: a chink in a fence, a gap in the clouds, a DMZ between nations at war, the potentially infinite space between two musical notes, a form of writing that defies genre classification.
An interstitial thing falls between categories, and so one might think of “interstitial” as coterminous with “liminal” (from the Latin “limen,” meaning threshold, or “limes,” referring to boundary—the word “limit” comes from the same root). Liminality is a concept made prominent (in Anthropology) by Victor Turner, who used it to refer to that strange “betwixt and between” state initiates go through in rites of passage. Liminality is a suspended state, but there is an underlying idea that it is also transitional.
In the field of Cultural Studies, the figure most identified with the idea of liminality is Homi K. Bhabha, who deals with various boundaries and borders, concepts directly relevant to the issue of Interfictions. In his introduction to The Location of Culture, he writes: “It is in the emergence of the interstices—the overlap and displacement of domains of difference—that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated.” Bhabha is writing about nations, cultures, and marginalized peoples, but what he says is just as applicable to the world of literature. In place of “nationness” we can think “genre” (or, more widely, “marketing category") and the parallels are quite clear. Imagine the “domains of difference” being the vaguely-articulated features that distinguish the category “Fantasy” from “Mainstream Fiction” and the ideas of “community interest” and “cultural value” become apparent. And this is not an inappropriate application of Bhabha's ideas—we are still dealing with domains of discourse and the relationship among centralized power, the margins, and minority groups. In the realm of discourse, the dynamics are remarkably parallel.
In the world of genre literature, there are few venues that seek “to authorize cultural hybridities” (as Bhabha puts it) except perhaps some recent e-zines and web resources. Science Fiction Eye comes to mind as a forum for genre discourse, but its circulation was small, and one could argue that even with its elite readership and contributorship, its general impact was minimal. And yet we are clearly in one of those moments of historical transformation.
III. In the Interstitial DMZ
There is a major difference between liminality and interstitiality. Unlike the liminal, the Interstitial is not implicitly transitory—that is to say, it is not on its way toward becoming something else. The liminal state in a rite of passage precedes the final phase, which is reintegration, but an interstitial work does not require reintegration—it already has its own being in a willfully transgressive or noncategorical way. Interstitial works maintain a consciousness of the boundaries they have crossed or disengaged with; they present a clear awareness of the kinds of subtexts which might be their closest classifiable counterparts.
The problem with an interstitial work is in its relationship with the audience—both its initial audience (which we may construe, for economy's sake, as the publisher) and its eventual audience, the readers. The relationship between reader and text, as we all know, is integral because each separate reader of the same text creates a unique work in his or her mind. Our general agreements about the plot or theme of a work are essentially the same as our agreements about the “real” world, which is actually determined by cultural consensus. Interstitial works have a special relationship with the reader because they have a higher degree of indeterminacy (or one could say a greater range of potentialities) than a typical work.
For example, if an interstitial novel is determined to be Fantasy by its publisher, a reader, having the parameters of initial engagement with the text predetermined, might experience it as a Fantasy novel exhibiting odd dissonances or interesting novelties in relation to that genre.
Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds is a novel that did well in its genre classification, winning the World Fantasy Award in 1985. Fantasy readers found the work uniquely vivid and full of a sharp and lively humor. The backdrop, a “China that never was,” proved the novel feature, and all of the representations of that mythic China (a collage of different historical periods and literary sensibilities) were what made the book unique in the genre. But read outside the genre by a reader unfamiliar with the built-in expectations of Fantasy, say, a reader of Mystery novels, Bridge of Birds presents an updated twist on an old tradition started by the Dutch diplomat Robert Van Gulik, with the Judge Dee series, set in T'ang Dynasty China. Yet another category of reader—say, one with background in Asian Studies—might appreciate Hughart's mixing of history and fiction, something Van Gulik's could not do as brilliantly after the initial Judge Dee novel (which happened to be a translation of an eighteenth-century Chinese novel set against a T'ang Dynasty backdrop).
Bridge of Birds spawned two sequels, but then Hughart quietly disappeared from the Fantasy radar, having worn out the quality that made his mythic China a novelty in that genre. Hughart's is a case of initial success as a result of forceful classification into a genre, but the eventual outcome is negative.
One might say that what I've described is merely the sad reality of the publishing business. But Hughart's case shows the problems of initial perception and the eventual effects of forceful classification based on a publisher's (mis)perception of a text. Playing devil's advocate, one might argue that Hughart had his chance with readers, that he simply represents a cases of a text that lost its potential readership to other texts more competitive in the marketplace. But both readers and publishers know the importance of initial reviews, packaging, and classification. What if Bridge of Birds were to be re-released into a different classification, with careful attention to sending the book to appropriate reviewers? Would it suddenly find large numbers of new readers who had not appreciated it in its first release?
Hughart's situation exemplifies how things are complicated in the DMZ of the Interstitial. Interstitial works are self-negating. That is, if they become successful to the degree that they engender imitations or tributes to themselves, or if they spark a movement which results in like-minded works, then they are no longer truly interstitial, having spawned their own genre, subgenre, or even form. The DMZ they initially inhabit becomes its own nation, so to speak.
What I am trying to illustrate is the oddly ironic quality of interstitial art. Once it manifests itself, regardless of the conditions of its creation, the interstitial work has the potential to create a retroactive historical trajectory. Further, if this historical trajectory is prominent enough, the work that sparked its discovery (or creation) then may become a representative—though not necessarily the first—work in a newly-identified genre or subgenre whose parameters the work has helped illuminate.
An example might be the form of the Revisionary Fairytale, which has become a clear subgenre by now. Although its current form is best represented by the works collected in the six volumes edited by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow as well as books like Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch, there are numerous recent works that make use of the same trope, some by established writers like Robert Coover, who enjoy a highbrow credibility for their Postm
odern writing. Once this subgenre exists and is identifiable by various consistent characteristics, it is possible to begin tracing the history of the form. We might begin with a work with strong elements of Revisionary Fairytale like the film that made Reese Witherspoon famous—Freeway (1996)—and then look for other works that perform similar transformations on the Little Red Riding Hood story and arrive at Angela Carter's collection, The Bloody Chamber (1979). Carter is recognized now as one of the originators of the contemporary Revisionist Fairytale, but while doing some random reading, one might run across an even earlier text, Djuna Barnes’ perplexing novel, Nightwood (1937), which uses tropes very similar to Carter's, and may, in fact, be a formative influence on her work. But by this time we will have noticed the Red Riding Hood motif in perfume commercials, music videos (by Tori Amos and Sarah Evans), and other recent films (Pieter van Hees's short, Black XXX-Mas: a.k.a. Little Red in the Hood).
IV. Illuminating the Interstitial
What the Interstitial does, actually, is transform the reader's experience of reading. Formerly invisible historical trajectories become visible to the reader. The interstitial work, in combination with the reader's particular perception of it, manifests itself in that particular way because the reader's “reality” has changed. We have figures of speech for this kind of transformation at a profound level—"I have seen the light,” for example—but the transformation caused by the Interstitial is far more subtle. Perhaps instead of something as extreme as “The scales have fallen from my eyes,” one might characterize this change as “A scale has fallen from my eye.” In any case, the reader has learned to see in a different light, and that change causes a reinterpretation of the reader's experience of the past—in general—though perhaps this begins with a re-examination and reinterpretation of other texts the reader has experienced.
An interstitial work provides a wider range of possibilities for the reader's engagement and transformation. It is more faceted than a typical literary work, though it also operates under its own internal logic. At Readercon, on a panel discussing Metafantasy, I used the term “bilocation” (borrowed from the practice of Remote Viewing) to describe the reader's state of mind when reading works like John Crowley's Little, Big, which are Fantasy but also aware of the fact that they are Fantasy and make the reader aware of that awareness. Readers can lose themselves in the world of the novel, but simultaneously maintain an awareness of the act of reading. This “bilocation” (more precisely, a “multilocality") of the reader's awareness produces a form of engagement characteristic of metafiction and altered states of consciousness. Many readers find this state of mind so uncomfortable that they reject works of this nature (often rationalizing their rejection by focusing on some perceived flaw). Interstitial works also induce a sort of multilocality in the reader's consciousness, but at a different threshold of perception. The reader may not be aware of this phenomenon, and therefore stays with the work, achieving the effect of multilocality over repeated engagements over time. This multilocality then extends to the reader's perception and memory of other works. (And once again, this is not to suggest that interstitial works cannot be metafictions.)