Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (21 page)

A Cup of Tea Without Tea

A while back, in a TV program on
Britain’s 50 Greatest Comedy Sketches
, amongst other sketches shown were a couple of classics from Monty Python’s Flying Circus—the Yorkshiremen sketch and the Dead Parrot sketch. Linking between these was a clip of an interview with John Cleese in which he commented on the Dead Parrot sketch: that “you can’t believe they’re having this conversation”; and “that’s where the comic effect gets its power from.” “This could not be happening” is just a different tense of “This could not have happened.” “This
would
not be happening” is only the more honest articulation of the alethic modality in play, of the breach of the strictures of logic. Taking the Yorkshiremen sketch as an example, it’s not hard to see how the comic narrative exploits the absurd. In this case the structure is as basic as it could be, each absurdity (each quirk of illogic) largely attempting to outdo the last in its representation of hardship, raising the stakes to ridiculous extremes.

1: Imagine us, sitting in the fanciest pub in England, drinking our Chateau de Chauclea wine.

2: Right you are, thirty years ago we would have been lucky to have had a cup of tea.

3: Cold tea.

2: Yes, without sugar or milk.

1: Or tea.

And the first absurdity enters in the contradiction of a cup of tea without tea, a hard breach of logic: could not happened.

2: In a cracked and filthy cup.

3: We used to be so poor that we would drink tea out of a rolled-up newspaper.

2: You were lucky to have a newspaper; we used to have to suck our tea out of a damp cloth.

And yet the escalation out of the realms of possibility is mitigated. In the three lines above we flick back and forth through a breach of possibility: could; could
not
; could. But if it’s possible to suck tea out of a cloth, it’s utterly preposterous: would not. Still, we know exactly the sort of mundane reality the hyperbole is rendering, and there’s just enough of it under the absurdity to keep it from overwhelming our suspension-of-disbelief. So, that absurdity is ramped up slowly to grandiose claims.

1: You were lucky to live in the bottom of a lake. There were a hundred fifty of us living in a shoe box in the middle of a road. We dreamed of living in a lake.

3: You were lucky to live in a shoe box. We lived in a brown paper bag. All three hundred of us! Got up at six a.m., ate a crust of stale bread and worked in the mills for twelve hours. When we got home, Dad would beat us and put us to bed with no dinner.

Living in a lake, a paper bag, a shoe box: would not, could not. And yet a “could have happened” alethic modality persists. The whole sketch is, after all, only a representation of a conversation, and that conversation is not
itself
impossible. We recognise all too well the type of conversation it is satirising, the one-upmanship of childhood miseries encapsulated in the “you were lucky” refrain. But it is increasingly absurd as it strains our suspension-of-disbelief, tromps roughshod over our credulity, that anyone would go so far beyond reason in their exaggerations. The impossibilities of the claims push this towards the nascent fantasy of fairy-tales and nursery rhymes. There’s a clear reference point here:

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.

She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.

She gave them some broth without any bread.

She whipped them all soundly and sent them to bed.

In both cases, note, we’re presented with bad housing, huge families, maln
utrition and child abuse. Cheery stuff. But they’re pushed out of the realm of possibility by the wild irrationalities. In the comic sketch, those irrationalities are heightened to the final apotheosis:

1: Well, you were lucky! That was luxury. We used to get up in the morning at ten at night—which was half an hour before we went to bed—eat a hunk of dry poison, work twenty-nine hours a day at the mill and when we got home our parents would kill us and dance around our grave singing “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah.”

Not just physical impossibilities and preposterous action now but logical contradictions, a whole series of them—could
not
, could
not
, could
not
, could
not
—seamlessly woven into one elegant and eloquent articulation, rounded off with a “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah.” And then all the tension built up in the apotheosis of absurdity is released with the bathos of a punch line that brings the reality satirised by that conversation crashing into the absurdity of its extremes:

3: But you tell that to the kids today and they simply don’t believe you.

It is a cliché that at once inhabits the “could have happened” alethic modality (being precisely what is said by these type of people in the real world) and a “could not have happened” / “would not have happened” alethic modality (because the absurd idea of anyone
not
disbelieving such absurdity is absurdity recursed to a perfect loop of unreason).

It plays all manner of havoc upon the narrative, this flavour of alethic quirk that comes in soft or hard,
would not
or
could not
happen, in the irrationality of drinking tea out of a rolled-up newspaper or the logical impossibility of getting up before one goes to bed, the quirk born as we step through and between the sentences to find the mundane sliced and spliced back together in unreason, in a nonsensical stitch: the
sutura
.

If you’ve spent any time in the SF Café you should be all too familiar with such a
bsurdity, and I don’t mean because it’s impossible to escape the geeks trying to flog the Dead Parrot Sketch to death.

“SF’s no good!” they bellow till we’re deaf.

“But this looks good…” “Well, then, it’s not SF!”

Kingsley Amis

It was a merry day in the SF Café, sometime around the middle of the last century, when the newspaper reporter and the moviemaker arrived, both ha
ving heard about this crazy joint so full of stories…so full of Story. There were kids running around with little toy rocket ships, teenagers talking astronomy in the booths, adults speaking Esperanto at each other ’cause it was the language of the future. There were atheists and admen. There was futurology and fantasia. You know this because you were there—

—are there now, standing beside the reporter and the moviemaker, on the pavement outside, looking at a big bold sign above the door that once read
The Science Fiction Café
. Not any more. Some of those letters have been taken down now, you note, stuck up in the window to spell out:
cenection
. Whatever the fuck that means.

—See, it’s ’cause we’re all connected, says a grinning numpty at the door. Connection,
cenection
. You see? Isn’t that cute? Isn’t that clever?

The moviemaker thinks it’s awesome. The reporter’s eyes are alight. You…you nod and smile, nod and smile, and step aside as a writer slopes out the door, shaking his head in sorrow, muttering darkly that a pun on
hi-fi
sounds godawful now, never mind in fifty-something years. For a second, you think maybe you could tell him
wifi
will be all cool and stuff by then…but you suspect that’ll be small consolation as you look up at the sign, where the remaining letters now spell out the new name of the haunt: The Sci Fi Café. And maybe a little part of you dies inside.

That discomfort has deep roots. The trivialising diminutive is abhorred not just as a token of the outsider’s disregard for actual literary achievements, but as an emblem of uncritical devotion, of the disregard for quality, of the indi
scriminate appetite for any old shite with a spaceship, the urge to buy every book in a series long since degenerated into drivel, every book by a certain author, any book about X, Y or Z, regardless of quality. It conjures the overgrown adolescents who continue consuming formulaic drivel most fourteen year olds would scoff at. It conjures the hacks ready to supply the demands of that juvenile market, not for a little escapism, but for a wholesale retreat from adulthood.

Which is to say, it reminds us that the SF Café is, even when we get past the gaudy window display, a schlock market, serving up brain-out, sponge-in, sit-back-and-enjoy-it, eyeball-kicks, and if we go there today to drink craft beers and discuss pataphysics with peers, well, the TV over the counter is still tuned to
Alphas
,
Babylon 5
,
Carnivàle
,
Dark Skies
,
Enterprise
,
Farscape
,
Grimm
,
Heroes
,
Invasion
,
Jericho
,
Lost
,
Millennium
,
Night Stalker
,
The Outer Limits
,
Planet of the Apes
,
Quantum Leap
,
Red Dwarf
,
Supernatural
,
Teen Wolf
,
UFO
,
V
,
War of the Worlds
,
The X-Files
, you name it, zzzzzzzzzz… Sometimes we have the TV on because the series is good. Sometimes we have it on simply because it’s there.

We insist that this stuff we call
science fiction
is not
Sci-Fi
. For some in the ghetto of Genre this is axiomatic, a secret truth known only to the genre kids, that there is
proper science fiction
and there’s that
Sci-Fi
shit. That crud Sturgeon shrugged off is not the real deal, we tell ourselves, just the factory-line commercial product, extruded according to a formula, shat out in a turd of a movie or a TV show, a media tie-in or an Nth generation copy of a hack-job of a rip-off of an insult to the word
novel
. But that high-profile, low-quality dreck gives the genre its bad rep because that’s what we, the fans, God bless us, have saddled ourselves with in lapping up every hokey, cheesy, clichéd pukeball of a B-movie with a spaceship in it, spewed out by the Ed Woods of the world. It is our desire for “more of the same” that transforms genre into
Genre
.

The term
Sci-Fi
signifies an uncritical ardour we seek to distance ourselves from in our quest for acceptance, in a desire to be taken seriously. We can hardly deny the actuality of the puerile, formulaic tosh that gets sold as
Science Fiction
; so we abject it as
Sci-Fi
and distinguish the
proper science fiction
out from it on the basis of quality. It is a different abjection to that carried out on
Fantasy
(at once more direct in its targeting of
Genre
rather than a scapegoat symbol, and more deluded in its denial of our own desires), but it is still an abjection, a recoiling in repulsion from that which is essentially a part of ourselves. Here’s the logic of that abjection:

If it’s sci-fi, it must be bad. If it’s good, it can’t be sci-fi.

Sound familiar?