Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (42 page)

To understand what’s actually going on in any idiom, any genre, we need to turn this model inside out. Forget the notion of genres as delimited by formal strictures. The strictures are techniques. With a volta this is obvious, but even the number of lines is not a limitation; it is a technique of economy and of structural patternings—two sevens, two sixes and a two, three fours and a two, four threes and a two. Those techniques are core components, conceits around which individual works develop an entirely original articulation, not boundaries on what that articulation can be.

You can make anything with the core components used in the SF Café—those alethic quirks. They are no more than a breach of the ongoing possibility of the narrative, after all, the injection of an alethic modality of
could not happen
. That is the technique at play in the SF Café’s cooking, the secret ingredient that could be anything that could not be—by history, science, laws of nature, rules of logic.

No, there are no strictures on what you can do with the alethic quirk, only tribes of taste—look, see them now, as the librarian turns her head—raging for burgers only in the booths, fried chicken only at the tables, tribes of taste ra
ging for proper burgers, proper fried chicken, tribes of taste raging against each other and against the chefs, with the insufferable petulance of the entitled. We do have our favourite recipes and the right, we think, to expunge all else from our café. We are a plethora of follies, not least in the fervour with which we howl injustice that the sating of our demands for “more of the same” should lead to derision.

Still, as the turf wars of the clans carry on, the librarian wouldn’t give it up for the world. She has the miso soup she couldn’t get that day. She might wonder why the chef doesn’t head uptown to the district of Literature, but she asked him fifteen minutes ago and he simply smiled.

—The secret cuisine, he said.

So she’d ordered a Number One or a Number Two. It doesn’t really matter because she didn’t even specify how she wanted it, just gave a shrug: surprise me. And so, five minutes ago, he came out with the miso soup.

Truth is, the ghetto of Genre, every dive bar and greasy spoon in the neighbourhood itself, is a substrate that nurtures truly refusenik writers too. Sure there are those who sneer at miso soup. What the fuck, they say, is miso anyway? Some kind of animal? But they do buy a lot of burgers. So publishers piggyback off the sales of formula fare to support the secret cuisine that is the true heart of every genre. They know the demand for works which treat a technique as core component, as mere conceit around which the articulation is developed, prized precisely for its originality.

To deny this is simply ignorance of the historical reality and of the underl
ying mechanisms by which literature evolves. It’s an ignorance born of blind desire among the tribes of taste. Among the literati it’s born of the fact that when they do come slumming in the ghetto and end up in the SF Café, they see a menu of hamburger and fried chicken, and a host of culinary clansmen fighting over it, wordspittle flying at how the enemy’s recipes are all schlock. And maybe while they’re there, they’ll turn to see the chef bring out a bowl of miso soup to the woman sat looking out the window at the Kipple Foodstuff Factory, and a plate of coq au vin to the man with the notebook at the table.

—This transcends the genre, they’ll hear him say.

This is why the cuisine is secret.

That menu promising SF Special Hamburger (However You Want It) doesn’t help. Miso soup is not hamburger whether it’s served in a fancy u
ptown Japanese restaurant or in the SF Café. It’s not
Hamburger
,
Hamburger/Frankfurter
,
New Grill
,
Burgerpunk
,
Hamfurter
or
Flipgrease
. It’s fucking miso soup. And the literati slumming it in the SF Café, watching the librarian sip her miso soup, they’ve seen it served as miso soup in that fancy new Japanese joint, Pomo, in the uptown district of Literature. They know it ain’t a fucking burger. Must be a little quality cuisine slipped in, or some sly sleight-of-hand disguising of the dreck. They speak of miso soup served by some uptown chef, food critics raving of Ishiguro’s
Never Let Me Go
. Which definitely isn’t burger, they say a little too loud.

The atmosphere in the SF Café flips in an instant. It irks that they deny this is a burger. It irks that Ishiguro must have tasted the miso soup here, reco
nstructed the recipe. It irks that he failed to properly follow the formal strictures. It irks that Ishiguro gets kudos where our chefs don’t. It irks that he didn’t come from the ghetto of Genre, didn’t sprout from the cracks in the literary sidewalk, struggle up out of gutters thick with filth. It irks that he didn’t learn his craft in Mass Market Square, hasn’t paid his dues. And now he’s out there making miso soup just like our boys, denying that it’s hamburger and getting lauded by the critics. How come he gets the kudos and our chefs don’t?

The simple answer: because he didn’t call it fucking hamburger.

The complex answer: this is not about burgers and recipes, constraints and kudos, struggles and dues; or it is in a way, but at the heart of it, where it matters, it’s really about the secret cuisine, about the quirks that you can do anything with, that anyone, anywhere, anywhen can do anything with.

At the Heart of Sehnsucht and Saudade

When it comes to
fantasy
and
the fantastic
, the discourse that has developed over the decades with regards to this field of quirk-driven narratives is fraught with problems of indefinition and over-definition. For many, both terms are interchangeable and used in a wide sense, to signify the underlying aesthetic or approach of any work utilising quirks. The quirks might be the chimerae of Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “The House Beyond Your Sky,” or of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Book of Sand,” but they might equally be the errata or nova of works that others would class as
Alternate History
or
Hard SF
. More significantly, while there’s a deep allure of the marvellous in Borges’s idea of a book with infinite pages, that allure is not the driving affect of the story, and Rosenbaum’s story is perhaps even more ambiguous, the world it presents more strange than most of us would wish for. If the terms
fantasy
and
the fantastic
are applied to work such as these it is not to be read as implying that we
yearn
for these conceits to be made real.

As the definition of fantasy is closed however we tend to see not just a f
ocusing in on the chimera, but also on specific affects conventionally associated with it. There are those for whom fantasy is indelibly coupled with a sense of daydreams and reveries, defined by that yearning, by the boulomaic modality of
should
. Some disdain the genre as wish-fulfilment on that basis, but others see this as a deeper feature. The numina is at the heart of Sehnsucht and saudade, and to conflate these with the sort of cosy consolatory cock-fluffing Moorcock skewers in his “Epic Pooh” essay is shallow to say the least.

There is an aesthetic of the idyll we find in Ray Bradbury’s “The Scythe,” for example, even as it enters into the terrain of horror. There are stories like Jeffrey Ford’s “The A
nnals of Eelin-Ok,” a tale largely powered by a sense of loss in direct proportion to the quirky charm of its conceit. With stories like these in mind, it would not be a criticism to call fantasy the literature of desire. As much as a partisan of the open definition might seek to distance the form from any suggestion of consolatory purpose, the term itself does have its roots in the Greek
phantos
and its sense of making visible. To create a fantasy is, by one definition, to
fantasise
.

So. On the one hand we may have an open definition equivalent to John Clute’s s
uperset of
fantastika
, defined in his “Fantastika in the World Storm” essay as that fiction characterised by “contents” that are “understood to be fantastic,” a definition that encompasses all sorts of (post)modernism and magic realist works, never mind SF, fantasy and horror. On the other hand we may have a closed definition roughly equivalent to Clute’s subset of
Fantasy
, defined in the same essay in terms of a specific narrative grammar highly suggestive of yearning in its stages of Wrongness, Thinning, Recognition and Return/Healing.

The problem with the open definition is its denial of the sheer force of co
nvention, the inseverable association of fantasy with yearning. One can dismiss as ignorance the apparent inability of the incognoscenti to get to grips with the notion that fantasy does
not
necessarily equate to wish-fulfilment nonsenses of magic, elves and dragons. But even Clute’s narrative grammar is articulated figuratively in the imagery of
Fantasy
’s conventional chimerae—heroes, wounded lands and happy endings. And given the symmetries of the grammars identified in Clute’s model, and their clear application to the field, it is difficult to argue against the logical pairing of
Horror
as a literature of dread with
Fantasy
as a literature of desire.

The problem with a closed definition such as Clute’s, on the other hand, is that the model it applies to the genre as a whole is couched in the stereotypical iconography of
Epic Fantasy
and sufficiently restrictive that works many would consider as within the genre simply due to their incredible content are excluded, redefined as fantastika. The application of a stereotype to a genre, X, and the subsequent relabelling of every non-stereotypical work as
not really X
should be all too familiar to SF readers, the same strategy of redefinition by which SF has been and still is dismissed as Romantic adventures about robots, aliens and spaceships…or lauded as
not really SF
.

Given the commercial mass of the field, it is hard to blame SF readers for buying into that stereotype (as hard as it is to blame those who have the same attitude to SF). Given the literary diversity of the field however, it is hard to deny fantasy writers the right to reject it (as hard as it was to deny those who had the same defiance with respect to SF). Unfortunately, the result is a ba
bble of incompatible terminologies in which one man’s
fantastika
is another man’s
fantasy
, and one man’s
fantasy
is another man’s
Fantasy
. It is the exact deadlock of conflicting definitions we find in the Great Debate.

The librarian remembers the Great Eggs Benedict Scandal which made the truth of the secret cuisine clear to her—Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451
versus Huxley’s
Brave New World
. Back while the New Wave writers were learning to read, never mind write, Bradbury was chef at the SF Café, serving up his own secret cuisine while the place was still as greasy spoon as they come. So one day a customer comes in and takes a seat at one of the tables. She’s in her usual booth, not far away, can’t help but hear when he asks for a burger…maybe sort of like that eggs-over-easy malarkey but…not quite…something different.

—Surprise me, he says.

So out comes Bradbury with Eggs Benedict to put the fancy bistros uptown to shame, beats Huxley’s hands-down, everyone agrees, as they all come to try it over the next few weeks. But does he get kudos for it in the
Writing City Journal
’s food column? Does the SF Café get kudos for this dazzling dish of dystopia? Or do those bastards at the Bistro de Critique just ignore this instant classic, keep blathering on about Huxley, even denying that when he does Burger à la Eggs Benedict, it’s actually burger. In the Temple of Academia, rituals are enacted in celebration of Saint Huxley, but Bradbury…?

The architect François Truffaut just built a motherfucking monument to his dish, the librarian remembers reading in the paper one day, as she sat in the SF Café, listening to the kvetching. A skyscraper in midtown.

Still, around her the culinary clansmen raged of the literati’s unjust hatred of all burgers…and raged of the literati’s love for this Huxley’s burger. They raged that the twisted literati turned a blind eye to the bacon and relish of Huxley’s burger, had no idea of the greater glory of the bacon and relish in Bradbury’s.

One slumming literatus frowned, perplexed. Bradbury’s dish is great, for sure, but it’s Eggs Benedict, not burger. Burgers have ground beef in them.

The clansmen howled! The bistro bastard was insisting it’s all formulation. Every clansman knew you could have eggburger! Couldn’t he see the bacon and relish that prove there’s more to burger than mere formulae! See?! See the Hollandaise relish?!

But the librarian, she knew. This Burger à la Eggs Benedict, this dystopic dish, it wasn’t ground beef. It was eggs, and not just any old eggs—the eggs of a cockatrice from the next century. Like Huxley’s were the eggs of a harpy from a next century two steps to the right. And it was that special ingredient that really mattered, the thing that could not be, not here and now.

And should not be, she realised.

She looked down at the Eggs Benedict on her plate. Her mayashades scrolled instant analyses, coded in glyphs of light, across the lenses: detected modalities: negative bo
ulomaic: should not be; negative deontic: should not be; positive alethic: would be if…; analysis: impossibility + contingency > possibility; and this:

is dystopia, she realised, in the quirk of a monstrous egg that could not be unpacked to contingencies that meant it could be if, if, if…not here and now, but one day. Wireframe edge detection traced the substructure of narrative logic, the dynamics blo
ssoming from a single conceit. No recipe, no formulae, just…a core component around which articulation unfolded by the deep drive of narrative itself, in an articulation original and unconstrained.

She saw the quirk at the heart of it, the egg wireframed to abstraction: flense specificity; abstract to base form. Neither cockatrice nor harpy egg, origin u
nknown, nature unknown, the ovoid collapsed to sphere, the sphere collapsed to singularity, a point of pure potential from which anything impossible could hatch. It hatched.

—You see the secret cuisine? said the chef at her side as the true form of the alethic quirk filled her vision—novum, erratum, chimera, sutura.

—Why the fuck do we call this burger? she said.

—Eggs Benedict?! some clansmen snarled. Who the fuck is called Benedict anyway? Faggot intellectuals, that’s who! Ben maybe, but fucking Benedict? That’s a name for traitors and Catholics. It’s just a fuckin’ hamburger.

—Ah, said the librarian.

Nomology Is Nomology

There’s an additional consideration of scope, as mentioned earlier with r
egards to
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
definition of fantasy and the fantastic as a project. The idea is: that we must consider fantastika and/or fantasy as a product of the Enlightenment; that while texts like
The Epic of Gilgamesh
can be and are claimed as fantasy by many, this is casting the net far too wide; it’s impossible to be sure to what extent writers or readers would have distinguished the incredible (implicitly chimeric, implicitly marvellous) as a distinct quality before the separation out of mimetic literature from non-mimetic; there certainly wasn’t an identifiable project to be distinguished out from that mimetic literature as fantasy.

There is an extension of this that could be articulated. This is not Clute’s point but it’s a related one, not uncommon in discussions of the boundaries of fantasy: that it’s impossible to be sure how far readers would have reacted with disbelief at narratives portraying events we now consider utterly incred
ible; that we don’t know whether they would have considered them fantastic as we do; that only with the advent of the scientific worldview with its sense of the laws of reality can we really assume a reader will be judging a work by those laws.

I’m deeply dubious of this aspect of the argument. In the pre-Enlightenment world there were still geography, philosophy, religion, a whole host of disc
iplines devoted to detailing the laws of nature as they were understood at the time. Nomology is nomology, whether it is scientific, religious or simply philosophical. There seems little question to me that narrative was capable of breaching nomology as an aesthetic purpose long before the scientific worldview came along. The scientific worldview did not imbue us with a sense of nomology, simply redefined the
terms
of that nomology and the basis of how we construct it. The argument confuses the absence of
our
consensus nomology (and the methods underlying it) with the absence of
any
nomology at all.

We need only remember the importance of the ancient concept of “miasma” in Greek Tragedy to be faced with a clear example of pre-Enlightenment lite
rature exploiting a breach of entirely non-scientific nomology. For the ancients there may have been no idea of thermodynamics, but there was a widespread notion of a natural, social and divine order, the laws of nature as the laws of God. While we need to reconstruct these sorts of beliefs from the non-narrative literature of historical cultures, which may be difficult for a culture like that of Sumer, this is hardly an impossible task when it comes to, say, Classical Greece.

Further, one might well challenge the extent to which the nomology applied by a modern reader will in practice be more rational(ist) than that of an post-Enlightenment reader; one might well suggest that any number of factors (e.g. religious faith) will render the modern reader’s nomology just as much an a
cquired set of laws of nature rather than a systematic set of laws of reality. Given that nomological beliefs—religious, philosophical or scientific—are a fairly fundamental aspect of any culture, the argument comes dangerously close to implying an absence of basic cultural features in the absence of those post-Enlightenment values. We, of course, the assumption seems to be, from our Western “civilised” perspective, have a distinction between the fantastic and the realistic; we cannot be sure that the same is true of more “primitive” cultures. This is what the Greeks called hubris.