by Laura Miller
Bellona is a city created by words, but not necessarily words with referents. Bellona is an idea as much as a place. When asked his purpose, the Kid, our protagonist (whose name is also not the Kid), replies, “I want to get to Bellona and—” His sentence doesn’t finish; like so much in the book, like so much in Bellona, it is a fragment. He then restarts explaining his purpose: “Mine’s the same as everybody else’s; in real life, anyway: to get through the next second, consciousness intact.”
Can anyone get through Bellona with consciousness intact? There’s little evidence for it. Bellona is a place of shattered pavement, ruined buildings, ash. Its people are as wounded and mercurial as the city itself. It is a place with no time in any historical sense, a place that does not make the news: “Very few suspect the existence of this city. It is as if not only the media but the laws of perspective themselves have redesigned knowledge and perception to pass it by.” Throughout are references to prisms, mirrors, and lenses. Bellona is all of these at one point or another.
The ashes in Bellona are not only those of buildings, but of texts. Dhalgren is a novel endlessly interested in writing and what has been written, in the trace that fiery writing leaves behind. Its words are other words. Fragments of countless stories, poems, and books make their way through its pages, some as transients or tourists, some as lifelong citizens.
Many things happen in the novel, but there is no plot in the traditional sense, no rising and falling action, no denouement. It often seems that life in Bellona is just one thing after another, with people wandering around, having conversations, having parties, having sex, having fights. (Maybe having hallucinations, dreams, nightmares—but when reality isn’t tightly fixed, how do you know you’re out of your mind?) The prose and the people meander.
Why is Bellona the way it is? If this were a traditional novel we would know: there would be a neutron bomb or an invasion from space. But this is not a traditional novel. Bellona is a science-fictional effect without a science-fictional cause. If there is a cause of Bellona, or at least of Bellona’s apocalypse (its time out of joint, its existence apparent only to its residents, its landscape of fires and ash), the cause is that it is a city in a novel marketed as science fiction. Bellona is an experience more than it is a place: an experience of the characters and an experience of the readers. What Bellona gives us depends on what we bring to it.
Bellona is, more than anything, a city in a novel, which is to say it is a city in the mind of whoever finds its words.
GEORGES PEREC
W OR THE MEMORY OF CHILDHOOD (1975)
Perec’s semi-autobiographical novel intertwines uncertain personal memories with the story of W, a fantastic, seemingly utopian island state governed through sporting competition.
Georges Perec (1936–82) is celebrated as one of the finest authors of his generation, and was one of the most innovative writers of the twentieth century. In Perec’s work the form of the story closely reflects its themes. In W he intertwined autobiographical chapters about his childhood with chapters about “W,” an imaginary fascist society devoted to sports, and slowly draws the two stories together.
The autobiographical strand focuses on the author’s childhood in France during World War II. Both Perec’s parents died during the war; his mother was sent to Auschwitz. However, it is only in the parallel strand about the imaginary land of W that Perec is able to approach these subjects, and even here he keeps his distance from it by having this part of the book told by Gaspard Winckler. Winckler, like Perec, is an orphan, and this is one of many correspondences between the two narratives, which frequently share words, names, and phrases. For Perec, it is this very overlapping that matters most, a point made by the novel’s title, which in French is “double-vé,” describing the overlapping Vs that create a W. By overlapping fiction and truth, Perec intentionally generates an uncertainty about both narratives, one that paradoxically made it easier for him to face his experiences of the Holocaust.
W is located near Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of South America, on a tiny island shaped “like a sheep’s head with its lower jaw distinctly out of joint.” The society of W is organized around a series of regular sporting events modeled on the Olympics. The male athletes live in villages that compete with each other, while those associated with the contests live either in giant stadiums or in the “Fortress,” which is also the seat of W’s government.
In W there is no division between sports and life—its whole society claims to celebrate “the greater glory of the Body.” But it soon becomes clear to the reader that these lofty ideals are a thin justification for a system of institutionalized cruelty. All W’s athletes are permanently malnourished—only the victors are fed properly. Losers are stripped naked and attacked with sticks and riding crops, and can be condemned to death by the downturned thumb of a single spectator. There are even sporting contests whose only purpose is to mock the injured or handicapped. Though there are women on W, their numbers are strictly limited—eighty percent are killed at birth. The rest are locked up, except when they are deemed to be fertile, and then the best athletes violently compete for the chance to rape them.
I have no childhood memories.…
A different history, History with a capital H, had answered the questions in my stead: the war, the camps.
In addition to the structured humiliation and cruelty, the land of W also contains many specific parallels with the Nazi concentration camps. In W, athletes are selected for contests, just as prisoners were selected for work or extermination; novices in W have to wear a triangle on their jackets, just as Jews were forced to wear a yellow star. At the end of the book, the Fortress is revealed to contain “piles of gold teeth, rings, and spectacles” and “stocks of poor quality soap.”
Yet for all the nightmarish excesses of Perec’s imaginary land, the novel’s most powerful act of imagination takes place within the autobiographical narrative. While W is clearly an imaginary land, so in many ways is Perec’s memory of his childhood. He is candid about his inability to remember many aspects of it accurately, and freely admits that many of the memories he offers are implausible and distorted. These admissions and omissions, along with many intentional factual errors, obliquely highlight the novel’s theme of saying something by not saying it directly—such as when Perec gives May 1945 as the date of the Japanese surrender, when it was the date of the fall of Berlin.
In W, Perec’s greatest fantasy is not the imaginary island, but something far more ordinary. He wanted to be able to clear the dinner from the table with his mother, then to fetch his satchel and do his homework. He wanted this to be a memory.
GERD MJØEN BRANTENBERG
EGALIA’S DAUGHTERS: A SATIRE OF THE SEXES (1977)
A classic text of modern feminist satire depicting a fantasy matriachry in which wim hold the power, and the menwim are the oppressed.
Since the rise of first-wave feminism in the late nineteenth century, numerous writers have imagined worlds where women hold sway. Many, from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915, here), to Doris Lessing’s troubling vision of an early society rent by the birth of the first male in The Cleft (2007), are women-only communities where life proceeds without the violence and oppression traditionally attached to patriarchal structures.
Norwegian author Gerd Mjøen Brantenberg’s (b.1941) Egalia is rather different. The society depicted in Egalia’s Daughters: A Satire of the Sexes (first published in Bokmål as Egalias døtre in 1977 and translated into English in 1985) is a matriarchy where gender bias is seeded into everything, right down to the words people use to describe themselves. This is a skewed mirror world of wim and menwim, sheroes and maidmen, menwim’s coffee mornings and gentlewim’s clubs where the powerful gather to debate the issues of the day without their housebounds worrying their pretty little heads and getting their beard bows in a twist.
Brantenberg’s subversion of traditional gender inequality is ingenious and often very funny. Descriptions
of the music of Womfred Womm playing in a gay club, for example, or references to the writings of eminent psychologist Sigma Floyd are guaranteed to raise a smile, as are exclamations such as “Well I’ll be a daughter of a dog!” The portrayal of the fraught process of buying a first peho—the cupping device required to hold male genitalia in place for decency’s sake—is also amusing with its involved discussion of the importance of balancing tube size against strap measurements.
For all the laughs, though, readers are left in no doubt as to the seriousness of Brantenberg’s intentions. Through her inverted world, she holds received wisdom up to a new, searching light and repeatedly finds it wanting. We see, for example, the holes in the arguments of those who try to use nature as a justification for the power imbalance between the sexes: in Egalia, wim use the natural order to argue it is menwim’s duty to take sole responsibility for contraception, childcare, and homemaking because “menwim engender children” and are thus “eternally imprisoned within their own biology,” and because they are physically stronger are better suited to the demands of housework. In addition, the cruel preoccupations about body image that have boys obsessing over their figures and looks, and the abuse the young hero, Petronius, realizes he has been taught to regard as normal, reveal how we internalize fear and vulnerability. Cumulatively, the novel demonstrates how apparently innocuous habits—and even the words we use—can keep human (or “huwom”) beings trapped behind the barriers to free thinking.
The boys said it was awkward and uncomfortable
.… And it was so impractical when you had to pee. First you had to loosen the waistband which held the peho in place. The waistband was fastened under the skirt, so you stood fumbling for a long time… Moreover, you had to sew a slit into each of your skirts so the peho might hang freely outside.
Alongside her robust criticism of patriarchy, however, Brantenberg works hard to avoid her book becoming an attack on the male sex. As Petronius and his “masculinist” allies realize when they try to organize themselves to protest against Egalia’s inequality, such generalizations are meaningless because “as long as they lived in a society that was ruled and dominated by one sex, it was absurd to make use of such concepts as ‘menwim’s nature’ or ‘wim’s nature.’ As long as one sex held power over the other, they would never be able to find out what differences there really were between the sexes—psychically—if there were any at all.”
The real evil in Egalia is not the notion of women having power over men (or vice versa). Instead, it is power itself.
ANGELA CARTER
THE BLOODY CHAMBER AND OTHER STORIES (1979)
A groundbreaking collection of stories about power, agency, desires, and inner demons, presented as a subversive reformulation of classic fairy tales.
Angela Carter (1940–92) was born as Angela Olive Stalker in the British seaside town of Eastbourne. After studying at the University of Bristol and working as a journalist, Carter began writing fiction in the 1960s. In 1969 she was won the Somerset Maugham Award for her novel Several Perceptions (which, along with Shadow Dance, 1966, and Love, 1971, comprises her “Bristol Trilogy”), and she later claimed that the prize money allowed her to divorce her husband, travel to Japan and become radicalized as a feminist.
Like that of Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Salman Rushdie, Carter’s writing is often described as a “magical realism;” a post-modern school of literature in which highly realistic and detailed settings are combined with fabulous or fantastic events.
The baroque, gothic world of The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is held together almost entirely by the desires and the power of Carter’s female characters. Even though they are often nameless archetypes, each are well realized in their motives and drive. Their transformative powers are what further develop the atmosphere Carter so deftly creates, with personal demons just lurking at the periphery. The idea of the beast within, a beast who will emerge whether silently or with a huge roar, but always, always just about to make its presence felt, is a powerful one—the mood of these stories is always one of something terrible, something incredible about to happen, the waiting, the knowing being very much part of the fearful excitement. The women who start off as sexual objects usually morph into something greater, taking back their agency, their power, and owning their desire.
Carter’s settings for her stories may vary—from small apartments in Paris to grand castles on grim, sharp cliffs to desolate country houses to the archetypal cottage in the woods, but her worlds are all based in reality in the way any fairy tale’s can be. Everything is just a little deeper, darker, more sexual—every room is a dark, lush, ornate space with secrets tucked away, while outdoors, every element of nature is pushed to its extreme. Her mise-enscène for every story is always extravagantly theatrical and dramatic though never heavy handed and often tender and loving camp.
But it is Carter’s fabulous, rich language that is what really details the world of her stories. Her voice is bold, fearless, unabashedly lush, and voluptuous. Each page rises with an orchestra of sensual colors, snarling sounds, tongues, tails, teeth, and skin. Every sensation is magnified until it is almost hallucinatory but beautiful, always beautiful, like a nightmare you don’t want to wake up from. The ambience of each story itself is thick with wonder and heavy with mood, so bold, so daring, so relentlessly fearless.
Carter wrote about the importance of female heterosexuality and women taking control of their sexuality before anyone else did—these stories are erotic, but they aren’t erotica—it isn’t their primary purpose to titillate. Their primary purpose is to question our desires and how they define us. In understanding what she desires, Carter suggests, a woman will be able to understand who she is. Understanding and accepting desires, acknowledging them no matter how dark or strange they may be, will help women in knowing who they are. And desire, of course, isn’t just about sex.
Of course, sex, with its undertones of violence and control, is always present in the world of The Bloody Chamber. There is a constant sense of mysterious impending doom caused by dangerous desires. But female sexuality is triumphant when Carter’s heroines, with their wild hearts and sharp minds accept the beast within, the wolf or tiger or lion that desire makes of them. We see them navigate marriages as wives and daughters, we see their relationships with their mothers, we watch them take power from their sexual awakenings, transform into greater beings, survive strange transmutations, live among rot and decay, struggle with gender power dynamics, and manage the cruelty of their male lovers and oppressors.
These are girls and women who reclaim the night, who embrace the darkness and let it in so they can rise above it and claim the world as theirs.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
KINDRED (1979)
A young, black woman writer is abruptly transported from twentieth-century Los Angeles to nineteenth-century Maryland where she learns hard truths about slavery and her own family.
Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) began her career as a science-fiction writer in the 1970s, the only black American woman working in a genre then widely perceived to be the purview of white males. Her first three books were part of the “Patternist” series, featuring telepathic mind control, aliens, and power struggles between groups and individuals. Kindred was Butler’s breakthrough novel and remains her best-known work: a powerful tale about race relations, which combines aspects of science fiction with the historic slave narrative.
Although it shares many common themes with her other novels, there are no psychic powers or aliens in Kindred, only humans shaped by social, historic, and emotional forces. Its time-travel element has led to it being classified as science fiction, but because she made no attempt to provide even a pseudo-scientific justification for the time travel, Butler disagreed, calling it instead “grim fantasy.”
Dana, the main character and narrator, has her first experience of involuntary time travel on her twenty-sixth birthday, the day she and her husband move into their first
house together. One moment it is the summer of 1976, and she is in Altadena, California, unpacking books; the next, she finds herself in a green wood on the shore of a river in which a child is drowning. She plunges in and saves him, and, after a short period of confusion and danger, returns home.
Later that evening it happens again, only this time she finds herself inside a house where the same child, now about four years older, has set fire to the curtains. Once again, she saves his life. Dana learns from the boy that they are in Maryland and the year is 1815. He is Rufus Weylin—a name she knows from the family Bible. He was the father of her great-great-grandmother, Hagar. Why did no one ever mention he was white? Probably because that knowledge died with Hagar in 1880, she thinks, for she cannot deny the strange connection between them. Rufus has the power to summon her whenever his life is in danger and, for the sake of her own existence, Dana knows she must do whatever she can to keep him alive, at least until Hagar is born. But her life and liberty, as a black woman in a slave state, are constantly under threat, and even when she manages to return to her own time, she never knows when she will be pulled back to the past by her violent, unpredictable ancestor.
The world in which Dana’s adventures are set is not an imaginary land, but a well-researched, realistic reconstruction of an actual place and time. The historic sections of Kindred take place in Talbot County, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, between 1811 and 1832. Butler chose Maryland rather than the Deep South because it was the only state from which a slave had any realistic chance of escape, with freedom possible across the border in Pennsylvania. A native Californian like her character, Butler journeyed to Maryland to do research, to get a feeling for the physical place, in addition to reading the writings of former slaves, and many books about the history of slavery.
