Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

"Bullfighting is based on the fact that it is the first meeting between the wild animal and a dismounted man. This is the fundamental premise of modern bullfighting that the bull has never been in the ring before. In the early days of bullfighting bulls were allowed to be fought which had been in the ring before and so many men were killed in the bull ring that on 20th November 1567, Pope Pius the Fifth issued a Papal edict excommunicating all Christian princes who should permit bullfights in their countries... " (Hemingway, 24).

  It is the fact that the bullfight is ritual not athletic competition that allows for its artistry and deeper existential or even religious catharsis:

  "We, in games, are not fascinated by death, its nearness and its avoidance. We are fascinated by victory, and we replace the avoidance of death by the avoidance of defeat... " (Hemingway, 25).

  The eventual outcome, however, of decadence in the bullfight, threatens to lead to its complete suppression, at least according to the thesis of Hemingway’s monumental aesthetic/philosophical work. There is a golden time in any art, where the self-reflective capacity of artists and the influence of established tradition bloom into radiance:

  "I know of no modern sculpture, except Brancusi’s, that is in any way the equal of the sculpture of modern bullfighting"

  And, gratuity of expression, given the ephemeral nature of any ritual, bullfighting not excepted, – mandatory:

  "Suppose a painter’s canvases disappeared with him and a writer’s books were automatically destroyed at his death and only existed in the memory of those that had read them...." (Hemingway, 95).

  It is Hemingway’s thesis, like Nietzsche’s, that great art – or philosophy – often flowers during times of both social and aesthetic dissipation ... Hemingway, likening the process of aesthetic decadence to wine-drinking says:

  "Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing which may be purchased. One can learn about wines and pursue the education of one’s palate with great enjoyment all of a lifetime, the palate becoming more educated and capable of appreciation and you having constantly increasing enjoyment and appreciation of wine even though the kidneys may weaken, the big toe become painful, the finger joints stiffen, until finally, just when you love it the most you are finally forbidden wine entirely (Hemingway, 14).

  Likewise, literature and SF – though one’s kidneys and big toe may be safe enough – what of one’s instinct for universal experience and expression?

  "In wine, most people at the start prefer sweet vintages, Sauternes, Graves, Barsac, and sparkling wines, such as not too dry champagne and sparkling Burgundy, because of their picturesque quality while later they would trade all these for a light but full and fine example of the Grandes cruses of Medoc though it may be in a plain bottle without label, dust, or cobwebs, with nothing picturesque but only its honesty and delicacy and the light body of it on your tongue, cool in your mouth and warm when you have drunk it [...] So in bullfighting [...] when they have learned to appreciate values through experience, what they seek is honesty and true, not tricked, emotion and always classicism and the purity of execution of all the suertes, and, as in the change in taste for wines, they want no sweetening..." (Hemingway, 15).

  Zyzygy

  Edgar Allen Poe’s visionary ‘prose poem’ "Eureka" provides a likewise self-contained cosmic (or cosmological) ontology; like Ford’s "Empire", Poe’s "Eureka" is an alloy of astronomy, poetry, narrative, the visual arts, music, philosophy and metaphysics. Like Poe, Ford has written a ‘prose poem’ of such cosmic magnitude, that it depends upon the faculties of its prospective reader to unlock its hidden ontological ‘truths’.

  Duplicity, or again, fugue, forms the symbolic frame for Poe’s ontological conceptions:

  "It is Poe’s contention that ‘simplicity’ equals Unity, and that the entire Universe has been constituted from a ‘primordial particle,’ willed by God. Both the unity and the resulting universe are the results and embodiments of God’s will. "This constitution has been affected by forcing the originally and therefore normally< i>One into the abnormal condition of Many." (Hoffman, 282)

  In Poe’s ontology, as in Ford’s, there can be no Unity so long as consciousness disturbs the cosmic pool; it is consciousness, in fact that creates the ontological phenomena we perceive:

  "On the Universal agglomeration and dissolution, we can readily conceive that a new and perhaps totally different series of conditions may ensue – another creation and irradiation, returning into itself – another action and reaction of the Divine Will. Guiding our imaginations by that omnipresent law of laws, the law or periodicity, are we not, indeed, more than justified in entertaining a belief – let us say, rather, in indulging a hope – that the processes we have here ventured to contemplate will be renewed forever, and forever, and forever; a novel universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine.

  "And now – this Heart Divine – what is it? It is our own .

  (Hoffman, 287)

  The theme of duplicity in Ford’s story is ubiquitous, elaborated through the baroque fugue structure, as well as through direct, archetypal symbolism. As in Poe’s stories, Ford’s narrator is involved with visions of a ‘mysterious woman’, what Jung called the Anima, and this permutation of the duplicity theme is where Ford’s thematic tendencies begin to disassociate, however slightly, from his literary models: Stevens, Poe, Rimbaud, etc.

  "One of Poe’s themes is the fate of the man haunted by his own double, his anima, his weird. Which is the real consciousness, the ‘I’ who speaks or the doppleganger who pursues him?" (Hoffman, 206-7).

  For Jung, the anima represented that part of the psyche of a male-oriented personality that has been suppressed, through social convention, estranged through psychic neglect, and now ‘reborn’ as an autonomous (though largely ‘unconscious’) part of the psyche, longs for unification with the Self, a process ancient alchemists referred to as Zyzygy.7

  Ford’s story allows for no reconciliation between the narrator and his ‘doppleganger’. Instead of Zyzygy, the thematic and narrative denouement reaches deeper into the theme of aesthetic ‘decadence’, art as a triumph over chaotic phenomena – while organic or psychic "Unity" is symbolically and thematically disregarded as unattainable:

  "I’ll not see you again," she said. "My therapist has given me a pill he says will eradicate my synesthesia. We have that here, in true reality. It’s already begin to work. I no longer hear my cigarette smoke as the sound of a faucet dripping. Green no longer tastes of lemon [...] "

  [...]"You may be harming yourself," I said, "by taking that drug. If you cut yourself off from me, you may cease to exist. Perhaps we are meant to be together."

  If Poe’s anima is often prematurely entombed, or strangled, or forever lost, transformed as in "The Oval Portrait" from substance to artistic shadow ... Ford’s narrator suffers an ironic reversal of failed Zyzygy, and thus, solipsism relegated through a final victory of the rational order of artistic expression, to mere self-indulgent delusion.

  The pity of this ironic reversal is not so much its tragic implications for the characters in the story, nor for the deeper disruption it may have on the story’s organic symbolism – but this sudden development of plot, like the denouement of Ford’s "Creation" seems to pull up out of its archetypal modes – itspoetically expressive modes, into a last-minute revelation of the ‘machinery behind the curtain’. That is, in "Creation" we are left with a escape window to vent all of the story’s speculative elements; in "The Empire of Ice Cream" we are given a fire escape from the story’s deeper, more disturbing ontological and psychological themes; being delivered with the plot’s climax back to a rational world where the more esoteric, but possibly more profound, themes the story raises can be dismissed as illusory.

  M
asterpiece

  A masterpiece in a decadent idiom, "The Empire of Ice Cream" represents the most skillfully constructed and ambitious SF novelette of 2003. The story is masterful not only in construction and theme, but in form and style. Ford’s virtuosic conception and execution of a SF-nal novelette that objectifies complex ontological, scientific, and artistic concepts through a refined literary aesthetic and technique should win every award in the offing, and be reprinted in as many SF anthologies as can accommodate it.

  It is important to note, however, that Ford’s idiom is reflective, baroque, confessional – when perhaps SF should be turning to a sparser, more urgent idiom, responding not to the subjective/solipsistic themes of the artist, but the shared objective themes of political and social realities. At the level of mass consciousness, escapism through archetypal symbols and plots that arrive at socially cathartic articulation, that is, works which evoke a popular ‘sense of wonder’ as opposed to aesthetic and literary refinement, may likelier result in some sort of archetypal renewal for both the SF genre and its audience.

  That said, Ford has shown clearly in "The Empire of Ice Cream" that a search for ‘literary respectability’ is not incompatible with the popular response to SF works. We can only hope that Ford will, indeed, take home the Hugo for his masterpiece.

  Footnotes

  1. It’s perfectly obvious that some sort of search for ‘literary respectability’ has, indeed become, whether by design or instinct, a concern among prestige SF editors. This year’s Nebula Award winning titles for short fiction and novelette comprised a not-surprising sweep of ‘literary’ SF for Ellen Datlow and SCI FICTION. Both of SCI FICTION’S winners this year are studies in classical composition, both rely on expository narrative to a degree which would be calamitous for pulp or commercial short fiction, and both stories rely on a sophisticated employment of literary allusion, esoteric enough that a better-than-nodding acquaintance with Wallace Stevens’ poetry, Bach’s fugue cycles, and the literary canon of James Tiptree Jr. are helpful, if not essential, for comprehending these works to any meaningful degree. As for GVD, don’t stories composed entirely of footnotes qualify as literary excursions? If not, certainly modern ‘caligramme’ in the manner of Mallarme and Apollinaire should fit the bill! So let us lay aside for the moment the question of whether or not the prestige editors like Datlow and Van Gelder are searching for ‘literary respectability’. They are not only searching for it – they are finding it — and the more provocative question is: who’s paying attention?

  2. For more on synesthesia please see "The Thackery T. Lambshead Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases."

  3. That is, science-fictional.

  4. For further elaboration on Ford’s interest in pre-industrial ‘robotics’, see his story, "Creation", F&SF, May 2002.

  5. Any volunteers?

  6. Those interested in pursuing the idea of visionary or experiential urgency as a catalyst for creating an immediate aesthetic idiom may start with Fussel’s book, or look nearly anywhere where true literary revolution flourishes.

  7. For more on Alchemy and Zyzygy, please see: "Psychology and Alchemy" or "Alchemical Studies" both books are by C.G. Jung, and are widely available.

  Works Cited

  1. Benford, Gregory, Ed. Nebula Showcase 2000, Harcourt Inc., 2000

  2. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Gateway, 1969.

  3. Schmidt, Paul, Translator, Ed.. Arthur Rimbaud Complete Works, Harper and Row Publishers, Inc., 1967

  4. Simon, Marc, Ed.. Complete Poems of Hart Crane, Liveright, 1986.

  5. Stevens, Holly, Ed.. Wallace Stevens: The Palm at the End of the Mind, Selected Poems and a Play, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1971

  6. O’Connor, William Van, Ed.. Sense and Sensibility in Modern Poetry, University of Chicago Press, 1948.

  7. Herbert, Nick. Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics, an Excursion into Metaphysics ... and the Meaning of Reality, Anchor Books, 1985.

  8.Nietzsche, Friedrich. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Regnery Gateway, Inc., 1962.

  9.Hemingway, Earnest. Death in the Afternoon, Penguin Books, 1932.

  10. Hoffman, Daniel. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, Anchor Press, 1973.

  Creation, by Jeffrey Ford

  Hugo Nomination for Best Short Story 2003; Nebula Nomination for Best Short Story 2002; World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story 2003

  I learned about creation from Mrs. Grimm, in the basement of her house down the street from ours. The room was dimly lit by a stained-glass lamp positioned above the pool table. There was also a bar in the corner, behind which hung an electric sign that read RHEINGOLD and held a can that endlessly poured golden beer into a pilsner glass that never seemed to overflow. That brew was liquid light, bright bubbles never ceasing to rise.

  “Who made you?” she would ask, consulting that little book with the pastel-colored depictions of agony in Hell and the angel-strewn clouds of Heaven. Mrs. Grimm had the nose of a witch, one continuous eyebrow and teacup-shiny skin—even the wrinkles seemed capable of cracking. Her smile was merely the absence of a frown, but she made candy apples for us at Halloween and marshmallow bricks in the shapes of wise men at Christmas. I often wondered how she had come to know so much about God, and pictured saints with halos and cassocks playing pool and drinking beer in her basement at night.

  We kids would page through our own copies of the catechism book to find the appropriate response, but before anyone else could answer, Amy Lash would already be saying, “God made me.”

  Then Richard Antonelli would get up and begin to jump around, making fart noises through his mouth, and Mrs. Grimm would shake her head and tell him God was watching. I never jumped around, never spoke out of turn, for two reasons, neither of which had to do with God. One was what my father called his “size ten,” referring to his shoe, and the other was that I was too busy watching that sign over the bar, waiting to see the beer finally spill.

  The only time I was ever distracted from my vigilance was when she told us about the creation of Adam and Eve. After God had made the world, he made them too, because he had so much love and not enough places to put it. He made Adam out of clay and blew life into him, and, once he came to life, God made him sleep and then stole a rib and made the woman. After the illustration of a naked couple consumed in flame, being bitten by black snakes and poked by the fork of a pink demon with horns and bat wings, the picture for the story of the creation of Adam was my favorite. A bearded God in flowing robes leaned over a clay man, breathing blue-gray life into him.

  That breath of life was like a great autumn wind blowing through my imagination, carrying with it all sorts of questions like pastel leaves that momentarily obscured my view of the beautiful flow of beer. Was dirt the first thing Adam tasted? Was God’s beard brushing against his chin the first thing Adam felt? When he slept, did he dream of God stealing his rib, and did it crack when it came away from him? What did he make of Eve and the fact that she was the only woman for him to marry? Was he thankful it wasn’t Amy Lash?

  Later on, I asked my father what he thought about the creation of Adam, and he gave me his usual response to any questions concerning religion. “Look,” he said, “it’s a nice story, but when you die you’re food for the worms.” One time my mother made him take me to church when she was sick, and he sat in the front row, directly in front of the priest. While everyone else was genuflecting and standing and singing, he just sat there staring, his arms folded and one leg crossed over the other. When they rang the little bell and everyone beat their chest, he laughed out loud.

  No matter what I had learned in catechism about God and Hell and the Ten Commandments, my father was hard to ignore. He worked two jobs, his muscles were huge, and once, when the neighbors’ Doberman, big as a pony, went crazy and attacked a girl walking her poodle down our street, I saw him run outside with a baseball bat, grab the girl in one arm and then beat the dog to death as it tried to go for his throat. Throughou
t all of this he never lost the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and only put it out in order to hug the girl and quiet her crying.

  Food for the worms, I thought, and took that thought along with a brown paper bag of equipment through the hole in the chain-link fence, into the woods that lay behind the schoolyard. Those woods were deep, and you could travel through them for miles and miles, never coming out from under the trees or seeing a backyard. Richard Antonelli hunted squirrels with a BB gun in them, and Bobby Lenon and his gang went there at night, lit a little fire and drank beer. Once, while exploring, I discovered a rain-sogged Playboy; once, a dead fox. Kids said there was gold in the creek that wound among the trees and that there was a far-flung acre that sunk down into a deep valley where the deer went to die. For many years it was rumored that a monkey, escaped from a traveling carnival over in Brightwaters, lived in the treetops.

  It was midsummer and the dragonflies buzzed, the squirrels leaped from branch to branch, frightened sparrows darted away. The sun beamed in through gaps in the green above, leaving, here and there, shifting puddles of light on the pine-needle floor. Within one of those patches of light, I practiced creation. There was no clay, so I used an old log for the body. The arms were long, five-fingered branches that I positioned jutting out from the torso. The legs were two large birch saplings with plenty of spring for running and jumping. These I laid angled to the base of the log.

  A large hunk of bark that had peeled off an oak was the head. On this I laid red mushroom eyes, curved barnacles of fungus for ears, a dried seedpod for a nose. The mouth was merely a hole I punched through the bark with my penknife. Before affixing the fern hair to the top of the head, I slid beneath the curve of the sheet of bark those things I thought might help to confer life—a dandelion gone to ghostly seed, a cardinal’s wing feather, a see-through quartz pebble, a twenty-five-cent compass. The ferns made a striking hairdo, the weeds, with their burrlike ends, formed a venerable beard. I gave him a weapon to hunt with: a long, pointed stick that was my exact height.