Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (32 page)

In the uptown district of Literature, in the Bistro de Critique, where
Literary Fiction
is the order of the day and the discourse of propriety is always on the menu, a discussion kicks off about this trend in reader tastes. A bookshop assistant who hangs out down in the Combat Fiction Bar & Grill from time to time tries to explain. She describes the simple desire of readers for something more heroic, and the expectations readers have of
Genre Fiction
fulfilling that desire. She begins to speak of the thwarting of those expectations by fiction which does not, in fact, fulfil this desire—but this last point is lost amid the horrified cries of the middle-class and middlebrow regulars of the bistro, busy bewailing the debased taste of adult readers who would lower themselves to reading
Genre Fiction
, denying point blank that any work of
Combat Fiction
could be more than formulaic dreck. To the bookshop assistant they seem driven by some bourgeois neurosis about genre cooties eating away at the foundations of civilisation.

The bookshop assistant, as a reader of CF—a marker of mode rather than identity to her, not a brand label but a shorthand for an aesthetic idiom—is all too familiar with this prejudice, knows that argument is futile. She might point to everything from the
Iliad
to
War and Peace
as examples of CF, but the very idea will be dismissed as ludicrous; these aren’t
Com-Fi
. She knows that
For Whom the Bell Tolls
will likewise be disregarded along with any work that wasn’t published in the actual marketing category. She knows that
Slaughterhouse-Five
will be classed as satire or postmodernism. And there’s no point even mentioning
The Naked and the Dead
; this will be entirely unfamiliar, having been published under a
Combat Fiction
imprint, consigned to the ghetto of Genre. Why should anyone take her word that there are CF novels of the very highest calibre? With a mind already made up about
Com-Fi
and its freakish fans, why should anyone sift through the shit of that section in their local bookstore for the gems these crazies claim are hidden in the muck?

As a last resort, the bookshop assistant draws a wild comparison to fiction which f
ocuses on, for example, science as a metaphor or backdrop rather than combat. Imagine, she says, a hypothetical and absurd new genre label…call it
Science Fiction
. And then she traces out a strange counterfactual scenario where such recognised modern classics as Delany’s
Dhalgren
, Lem’s
Solaris
, Ballard’s
The Drowned World
, a whole host of landmark novels, are all lumped together under an arbitrary rackspace label. She conjures a pseudo-history of the world, a parallel timestream where—crazy as it may sound—these sort of books are considered
genre fiction
.

—If the course of events only played out a little differently, she says, you can see how a disjunct could exist between the reality of this field and the popular perception of it. Just as it does, she argues, for combat fiction. Or co
nfrontational fiction, or CF, as she prefers to call it. Surely, she says, you can’t fail to see the absurdity of a prejudice dismissing these works simply because they’re
genre fiction
, where this
genre fiction
contains a novel like
Dhalgren
.

(She doesn’t stop to think before picking
Dhalgren
as an example. It’s so familiar in its renown that the very name of its apocalyptic city-setting, Bellona, has passed into common usage as a term for any catastrophic collapse from civilisation to senselessness. Bosnia was “a real Bellona.” Rwanda was “a real Bellona.” New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was “a real Bellona.”)

Trust me, she says.
Catch-22
is at least as good as that, maybe even better. The only reason it’s not considered a modern classic is because it’s seen as
Com-Fi
, and
Com-Fi
is seen as hokey heroism, big explosions and valourous deaths—all that John Wayne movie shit. But the real CF that’s out there is about as far away from that as you can get. It’s not all plot-driven Boys’ Own adventures. It’s not all about weaponry and strategies. The characters and themes and prose can be way more important than any of that—and are in
Catch-22
. If it wasn’t for the misperceptions surrounding that
Combat Fiction
label,
Catch-22
might be as much of a household name as
Dhalgren
is today.

The incognoscenti remain unconvinced. The sort of breadth of definition she’s talking about would cover everything from the
Iliad
to
War and Peace
, and that’s not a
Genre
just a gesture at such.

To Exploit the Estrangement

The Peru and Mars limerick examples are boiled down to a ridiculous si
mplicity, but the future narrative is a good example of what’s actually going on in a lot of SF; it’s a little microcosmic picture of how at least one type of SF story may be constructed and, in its blithe disregard for any real honest-to-god theory and explication, it begs the question: why the fuck
should
we take this kind of crazy shit seriously? Mars colonies…chips in the head…identities stored as “meme-patterns”…downloaded into “Teds”…Hmmm. You don’t think that sounds a bit…fanciful?

We can and do take it seriously, but not because it’s possible. This is fiction contai
ning elements which utterly contradict our knowledge of how the world is; those elements aren’t possible but at most have the possibility of one day becoming possible. Right now we don’t have Mars colonies. The only people with chips in their heads are a few loons at MIT who read one too many issues of
Mondo 2000
. Identities cannot be stored as meme-patterns. And what the fuck is a Ted, anyway? (It’s a robotic teddy-bear, dude. Isn’t it obvious?) Half of that story is telling us “this could not have happened,” and none of it is functioning as explication to counter that.

So, of course your average reader with only a passing familiarity with pulp, recognising the dependence on conventionality, recognising the strategies of Romantic adventure stories—the heroic cowboys and the evil monsters and the gosh-wow rocket-ships and so on—is going to wonder why on Earth we take this cock-fluffing fiction of the marvellous seriously. As long as we co
ntinue to justify SF by reference to the plausibility of the science, they’ll continue to counter with the references to the innumerable works where no such plausibility is evidenced, the countless cases that work, that we immerse ourselves in, suspend our disbelief in, regardless of their fanciful content…simply because the tropes that they’re constructed from are accepted as “harmless fun.”

Of course they too are wrong. Yes, one technique for dealing with the di
sruptive artificiality of the counterfactual / hypothetical is to explicate it. Yes, another technique is just to excuse it as an idiomatic whimsy. But an equally valid technique is to
exploit
the estrangement, as a surrealist might. Like the comic and tragic narrative, this type of (alternative / future) narrative functions by making the irrationality of the quirk an integral component of the story, a structural feature. It treats the import of the quirk—and the tension towards disbelief that it generates—as a strength to be utilised. As the comic and tragic narratives are built around the absurd and the monstrous, so this narrative is built around the implausibility which it capitalises on.

That’s some catch, that Catch-22.

Joseph Heller,
Catch-22

So our bookstore assistant heads back to the Combat Fiction Bar and Grill. She begins to wonder, on her way, how events might have played out for the field of CF if that
combat fiction
label had never been coined, if they just had “war novels”—like modernity novels, but focusing on combat rather than progress as their background and theme. She imagines a world where
Kelly’s Heroes
isn’t blithely lumped in with
Schindler’s List
, or
Life Is Beautiful
with
Where Eagles Dare
; where fans of John Wayne movies,
Commando
comics, Alistair MacLean novels and other such
Combat Fiction
don’t kvetch about some latter-day
Catch-22
not playing by the rules; where there’s no need to argue the validity of
Slaughterhouse-Five
with the granfalloon of a tradition stretching back through Faulkner and Tolstoy and Shakespeare to the
Iliad
itself; where there’s no bitter resentment of the lack of respect for
genre fiction
like
The Naked and the Dead
or
Starship Troopers
; no bitching about mainstream writers who deny their work is
Combat Fiction
when it’s set in a war hospital; no teacup tempests over how
Combat Fiction
is polluted by
Intrigue
; no cringing at the self-coined nickname of
Com-Fi
because that’s
really just
the movies and TV shows, which
really just
give CF a bad rep.

It’s natural for her to think this way.
Alt History
is part of the
Genre
, after all, with all its counterfactuals of Confederate victories and Nazi triumphs. She’s not that big on the whole
Guns of the South
approach herself, but the subgenre’s been a corner of CF from way back. She’s imagining a world where there’s no argument over whether or not Philip Roth’s
The Plot Against America
is “really combat fiction,” just at the point where she pushes open the door of the Combat Fiction Bar and Grill. As she walks inside, takes a step to the left, she’s imagining a world where the lack of classifications means
Catch-22
isn’t “not really”
Combat Fiction
to either fan or incognoscenti.

Because in her fold, there’s a double-bind of double-binds. As much as the incogn
oscenti apply that notorious axiom—If it’s
Combat Fiction
, it can’t be good; if it’s good, it can’t be
Combat Fiction
—the fans have their own, it sometimes seems, those who’re looking for “more of the same” at least: if it’s “not really”
Combat Fiction
, it can’t be good, if it’s good, it can’t “not really” be
Combat Fiction
. That fan axiom is written into the very nature of
Genre
itself, the demand of readers for something that coheres as a
Genre
.

If it’s exceptional, it can’t be exemplary; if it’s exemplary, it can’t be exce
ptional.

It’s a real Catch-22, she thinks.