As a reviewer and critic of short SF, the most notable novelette published last year by my reckoning was, without a doubt, "The Empire of Ice Cream" by Jeff Ford. Ford’s story is a display of technical sublimity by nearly any literary standard I can think of, excepting, perhaps, a standard that posited as irreconcilable, the aims of ‘literary’ and ‘speculative’ fiction. Just such a schism is often present in theoretical discussions of SF, and has been keenly evident in certain industry circles as of late.
At any rate, the latest notions that literary approaches to Speculative Fiction are doomed to pretension and lukewarmness – or worse, obscurity – seem to have been dealt a crippling blow by the publication of "The Empire of Ice Cream", a story which merits robust criticism, in terms of both technique and theme – as well consideration for the story’s almost tertiary, but still impressively demonstrative, sidelong comment on the aforementioned schism between popular acceptance and ‘‘literary respectability’’.
"The Empire of Ice Cream" was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards this year. That it secured its Nebula is a testament to the critical acuity of the voting members of the SF industry. I find it problematic to simply recommend this story to prospective Hugo voters. It would be better to say: "Vote for this story as best novelette of 2003 at all hazards."
Synesthesia
The central conceit of Ford’s story concerns the literary application of synesthesia, a psychoneurological condition affecting .01% of the human population, postulated to effect 100% of the human population at a subliminal level, consciously perceived at various junctures, foremost among them, early infancy ². The condition may be loosely defined as a ‘confusion of the senses’, or to evoke a direct allusion to Rimbaud, ‘a systematic disorganization of the senses’, ‘systemic’ being, of course, substituted for ‘systematic’ in that there is no conscious choice implied in contemporary, clinical diagnoses of the condition.
By casting his protagonist as a victim of synesthesia, Ford enables his main character to function in one of Speculative Fiction’s most common roles as ‘outsider’ or as a ‘cast-out’ from society. The further elaboration on this theme of isolation is the narrator’s talent as a composer who paints with music: "great abstract works in the tradition of Kadinsky." Here Ford’s instinct for fugue (which later emulates the baroque range of Rubens) shines with ironic inspiration: the narrator being, as it were, an ‘idiot savant’, privy to perceptual esotericism, much as many readers and writers of SF imagine themselves; reader sympathy is easily engaged, SF-nal3 concept securely presented and all within the opening paragraphs.
That Ford’s story centers on the use of synesthesia as a SF-nal conceit, shows, threefold, his utilitarian and spirited use of symbolism; this central concept evokes: the poetic/literary allusion that is indispensable to the narrative’s overall theme and impact, the notion of fugue, another powerful device employed to magnificent effect throughout the narrative, and finally, Ford’s rich, ironic ‘narrative ontology’ expressed symbolically and allusively through an aesthetic that willfully partakes of both Stevens’ and Rimbaud’s stylistic and thematic decadence, whilst staying rooted securely in Speculative soil.
Another strong Speculative device used in the story (and, incidentally, another device constructed on a fugue model) is the shared world premise that ensues during the story’s rising action, and also fuels the denouement: an ironic ‘inversion’ (with yet another fugue) that effectively concludes the SF-nal plot, but brilliantly illumines the story’s allusive capacities, perhaps even to the brink of symbiotic ‘explication’ – that is, certain works and images of, particularly Wallace Stevens’ poetry, being brought to unique re-articulation through Ford’s complex, allusive scaffolding – while the story’s theme is likewise completed by an examination of certain of Stevens’ poems. This allusive symbiosis is directed not only at poetry, and thus, Stevens, but at visual art, classical music (Bach fugues in particular), and certainly not least of all philosophy and theoretical (quantum) physics.
This is, in effect, an expression of the story’s thematic conceit, ‘confusing’ Speculative Fiction with literary works, with works of classic music, modern visual art, and poetry, thus confusing all the arts: visual, verbal, sonic, and otherwise. The ‘systematic disorganization of the genres’ is under way, ironically under the classical form and diction of Ford’s customary, Jamesian narrative style. His baton, as it were, begins to glow magically, as we realize the fugue of ideas and plastic form offers yet another transposition, that is, that his ‘confusion’ of classical SF-nal devices (shared worlds and psycho-dementia) with baroque literary allusion is an ironic gesture directed toward SF ‘purists’.
The idea of synesthesia is common enough in poetry; nevertheless, the two poets who seem most germane to "The Empire of Ice Cream" are Rimbaud and Stevens, both of whom explored the use of synesthesia as a symbolic device in poetry. Ford’s close allusion to both Rimbaud and Stevens also conjoins a likewise tone of sophisticated decadence; both poets functioned willfully as modern Sophists, that is, they sought release through complex self-examination and ‘rebellion’ through complex rearrangement of the preconceived, ‘simple’ world; Ford intends to present his argument through the same Sophist style, an approach Nietzsche derided as:
"They are not clean enough, either; they all muddy their waters to make them look deep." (Zarathustra, 131).
Rimbaud self-celebrated his synesthesia technique in "A Season in Hell":
I invented colors for the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize.
(Second Delirium: The Alchemy of the Word) (Rim, 203)
Ford’s narrator describes his compositional method:
"Many times, I planned a composition on a blank piece of paper using the set of 64 colors I’d had since early childhood. The only difficulty in this was with colors like magenta and cobalt blue, which I perceive primarily as tastes, and so would have to write them down in pencil as licorice and tapioca on my colorfully scribbled drawing where they would appear in music."
Note the reliance of expository narrative which is prevalent throughout much of Ford’s published fiction and is, likewise, in no great absence here. In "The Empire of Ice Cream" the expository, subjective narrative voice is exploited as a confessional device, further evocation of the story’s poetic (and mid-Victorian) preoccupations; however, this confessional voice is skillfully used not only to transmit exposition, but to increase narrative suspense – and even more importantly – to extend Ford’s deeper, ontological themes.
Stevens, in his well-known poem, "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" employed synesthesia symbolically to great effect:
And in the morning summer hued the deck
And made one think of rosy chocolate
And gilt umbrellas. Paradisal green
Gave suavity to the perplexed machine
Of ocean, which in limpid water lay.
Later lines extend the symbolism: "At breakfast jelly yellow streaked the deck," "A mallow morning dozed upon the deck/And made one think of musky chocolate/and frail umbrellas"(Stevens 89-90 ).
William Van O’ Conner in his book, Sense and Sensibility in Modern Poetry found Stevens’ poetry an expedient model for an examination into the symbolic uses of color in literary works:
"The poetry of Wallace Stevens furnishes excellent examples of varied worlds of color – peacocks, barbaric glass, Chinese umbrellas, melon flowers, red birds, and butterflies. It is Stevens who most strongly objects to the ascetic because he makes an effort to see the sky "without the blue". Of themselves, the colors Stevens uses are mildly exotic, suggestive of the effete and near-decadent. When used in an ‘image that is sure," that is, as a qualitative part of the perceptions that express symbolic values, the colors become the difference between and abstract understanding and a
n experience that stirs us profoundly." (O’Conner, 115).
In essence, Ford through his complex allusiveness and exploitation of the synesthesia conceit, is reaching for an ontological symbolism based not on color, but on Rimbaud’s disorder of the senses, as represented symbolically by the condition of synesthesia. Following O’ Connor’s dictate regarding the "qualitative part of the perceptions that express symbolic values", Ford thus symbolically represents a "user-created reality", explicitly articulated through the scene in the story which describes the departure of the narrator’s first "mentor" a piano teacher named Mrs. Brithnic:
"When her face was next to mine, she whispered into my ear, "Seeing is believing," and in that moment, I knew that she had completely understood my plight."
Correspondences with poetry abound, as in Blake’s "We are led to believe in a lie/When we see with not through the eye." Or this couplet from Hart Crane, which typifies an Anglo-Western trend toward poetic Neo-Platonism fairly well:
Hieroglyphic
Did one see what one saw
Or did one see what one looked at?
(Crane, 189)
Of course, Crane’s couplet, written in the 1920's could stand as the ‘mantra’ of modern quantum theory, especially those permutations which stress "observer-based reality" and the like.
"Although the numerous physicists of the Copenhagen school do not believe in deep reality, they do assert the existence of phenomenal reality, What we see is undoubtedly real, they say, but these phenomena are not really there in absence of an observer. The Copenhagen interpretation properly consists of two distinct parts: 1. There is no reality. 2. Observation creates reality. "You create your own reality," is the theme of Fred Wolf’s Taking the Quantum Leap" (Herbert, 16).
Or, even more solipsistically:
"Among observer-created realists, a small faction asserts that only an apparatus endowed with consciousness (even as you and I) is privileged to create reality. The one observer that counts is a conscious observer" (Herbert, 24).
If you substitute ‘literacy’ and ‘literate’ for ‘consciousness’ and ‘conscious’ in the above quote, you’ll have a good idea of how Ford objectifies his fictional theme of "user-created reality" through the narrative technique of the story, in essence producing a living ‘model’ of the theme through the tension produced via reader confronting text.
Ford’s SF-nal conceit, synesthesia-meets-shared-world, presents a symbolic vocabulary which intends to express solipsism in an ironic ‘reversal’, a sudden sting, in the manner of Stevens, who frequently expressed sudden shifts from the subjective perception to objective ‘revelation’. The irony, of course, being that the ‘objectification’ of the narrator/poet is still achieved through subjective perception:
Of Mere Being
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
(Stevens, 398)
Again, through Ford’s "systematic confusion of the genres" one has here a solidly speculative story; however, it is also a story which intends to illumine as many literary ‘sensations’ and explicate as many philosophical as scientific concepts – all the while weaving a ‘classical’ narrative with a smooth surface, which masks a labyrinthine tangle of stylistic pyrotechnics ... the story, like the quantum, responds to its observer, deepening in harmony with the reader’s knowledge and expectation.
Decadence and Formalism
"The Greeks, with their truly healthy culture, have once and for all justified philosophy simply by having engaged in it, and engaged in it more fully than any other people. They could not even stop engaging in philosophy at the proper time; even in their skinny old age they retained the hectic postures of ancient suitors, even when all they meant by philosophy was but the pious sophistries and the sacrosanct hair-splittings of Christian dogmatics." (Tragic Age, 28).
Ford’s story presents a kaleidoscope of effects. Like Rodin’s "The Gates of Hell", the story presents a visible, highly-allusive and somewhat obvious ‘theme’ but the intricacies of craftsmanship, of gesture, emotion, perception, fluctuate, feed and are reborn in new variations, the eternally new energy and excitement we feel exploding from Crane, Pollock, Bach, and Stevens himself, when he writes:
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."
(Stevens, 133)
Stylistic brilliance such as Ford’s is the result of study, knowledge and application of highly refined literary techniques. As such, the story’s deeper symbolism is infused with an almost hyper-textual meaning, in that both the variety of techniques and the immensity of their subsequent permutations are, in fact, "user-created" in that Ford’s audience, confronted with the intricate symbolism and allusiveness of "The Empire of Ice Cream", will be thrust, one reader at a time, into a solipsistic vision of the story, that is, a vision of the story that expands or retracts depending upon the ‘instruments’ measuring it: in point of fact, a literary cosmos, with Ford as the Prime Mover.
Such extravagant technical accomplishment is seldom encountered in contemporary short fiction of any genre, but even less often in works of short speculative fiction, where stylistic intricacy has often been undervalued. On the other hand, there is nothing excessively ornate about Ford’s prose style in "The Empire of Ice Cream". As usual, Ford has tempered his baroque tendencies with solid neo-Aristotelean logic and plenty of mid-Victorian-esque, linear narrative exposition. Nobody will get ‘lost’ in "Empire" except for the lawless critic who dares, like the quantum theorist to ‘untangle’ this masterpiece and see what lies beneath the Event Horizon.
In truth, the best criticism that could be leveled at Ford’s story is that it represents a decadent mode of literary expression, that, like Rimbaud and Stevens, Ford has created a microcosm in words – a fully functioning Universe as it were, at novelette length, that incorporates centuries of astronomy, physics, musical composition, poetry, painting, philosophy and literary criticism ... it is like one of the great mechanical automatons built by Jacques de Vaucanson 4. A triumph of the linear mind over the seeming chaos of the unconscious. It is solid evidence of the artist’s mastery of his medium, and of the medium as a ‘pure’ insight into the murky sea of the cosmos.
Like art-mechanique, however, Ford’s story functions more like a curio than a tool. Thus, the vehemence of the technical mastery and the brilliance of its composition seem to be primarily intended for aesthetic contemplation, a complex intellectual diversion, ‘art for art’s sake’, as it were.
As an opposite model, one might take any number of ‘commercial’ mass-market SF novels, or any SF literature which eschews stylistic preoccupation for the immediate archetypal impact of SF’s so-called ‘sense of wonder’, which in actuality is a bit of industry vernacular, that would benefit greatly from proper critical and aesthetic illumination. 5
Ford’s story, simply by being distilled into novelette form, eschews ‘commercialism’, and aims its brilliant arrow straight at the heart of the critic, the refined reader, the literary-mined ... in accomplishing such stylistic and thematic feats, the narrative also fails
to forsake the general reader, but responds, as mentioned in a model of ‘reality’ to the subjective observer. This fact, besides being a conclusive demonstration that SF-nal themes and ideas are imminently compatible with ‘classical’ literary technique, and indeed, with any other avenue of intellectual or artistic pursuit.
If Ford’s style is reflective, subjective, philosophical and driven by stylistic innovation, this represents the aforementioned search for "literary respectability", but it also represents, as its Hugo nomination surely indicates, a brilliant literary accomplishment not relegated, through popular disinterest, to the status of an intellectual curio, for specialists only.
In times of turmoil, with our actual world facing global-political and environmental catastrophes, war, poverty, and an explosion of technology-driven moral and ethical questions, it would seem natural that Speculative Fiction would resonate more explosively with its potential audience (which is, incidentally,anyone who can read) were it to pursue an immediate idiom – one meant to provide a universal, rather than ontological or aesthetic, catharsis.
Paul Fussel’s groundbreaking study of the WWI generation of British poets "The Great War and Modern Memory" explores the thesis that literary allusion and simplified diction are expedient symbols for a poetry of urgency. Fussel seems to suggest that an exposure to death relegates the artist to a simpler, more universal, more immediate idiom. 6
Similarly, Hemingway’s legendary treatise on bullfighting, "Death in the Afternoon" recounts the art of bullfighting and forwards the idea of art flourishing in decadence, much as Nietzsche’s impression of ‘classical’ Greek philosophers. In essence, humans are less prone to generate and revere baroque forms of art, ritual, or even plebeian entertainment when the element of death is large, that is, when the bullfight was at it’s ‘pure’ form, man against bull:
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 229
