Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (23 page)

There is more though. In such a story, we will surely see the monstrum co
ming. From early on, most likely, an epistemic modality will emerge:
will happen
. Where by all rights, we should expect no worse than the whipping of the pathetic narrative, say, in this story, we will sense the inevitable doom of the protagonist, be driven on through the narrative by the inexorability of their fate. The omens are likely to be liminal, diffuse, but I wonder if we can’t also talk then of an epistemic quirk, a
prefigura
. However we parse it, though, this story is a quite other creature from the pathetic narrative, one powered by the monstrous.

To give it its formal name, of course, this narrative is
tragic
.

The comic and the tragic go hand-in-hand, the pity and terror of the latter what the absurd would inspire if we didn’t laugh at these wildly outrageous events. Like the comic narrative, the tragic narrative is built from the irratio
nal, the incredible, just not in the way that makes us break out into belly-laughs; in its use of the monstrum bound in pathos, tragedy offers us not the absurd but the
abject
.

The whole vocabulary of early tragedy—moira, hubris, ate, nemesis—defines a system (a social, natural, divine order), the activities that isolate and separate out an individual from that system, and the (automatic) response. The tragic hero is that member of soci
ety (that part of us) who becomes distinct from it, ceases to be a part of it and is denied, rejected, an object of revulsion. The tragic act is that action which is a potential human behaviour (again, part of us) but one forbidden as beyond all morality, rejected as an
inhuman
act.

So, the earliest Greek tragedy gives us the abject in the shape of Prom
etheus, divine rebel whose theft of fire is a crime against Olympus itself, an act that severs him from his community, renders him anathema. His punishment is an enaction of his abjection—an exile, a binding and a torture, a monstrum wrapped in pathos. Pentheus, in
The Bacchae
, similarly singles himself out, breaches the divine order by refusing to recognise Dionysus and is not simply destroyed for it but monstrously so, in abject shame.

Even in a more contemporary tragedy like
The Crucible
a similar theme emerges, with John Proctor already on the verge of abjection at the start of the play and Abigail Williams testing the boundaries, dabbling in the witchcraft (abjected paganism) of Tituba (member of an abjected race), out in the forest at night (two entire aspects of the natural world—the wilderness, the night—abjected as exteriorities, alterities). As Abigail and the girls become latter-day Furies, bringing their “pointy reckoning” to Salem, Proctor’s stance against the hysteria is hubris just as his adultery is ate, calling down his own nemesis. At the end, like Prometheus he is defiant even in his abjection, refusing to surrender his autonomy, his identity, by signing a false confession:

PROCTOR [
with a cry of his soul
]: Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!

Arthur Miller,
The Crucible

This narrative of abjection is clearly relatable to the aesthetic of horror in its focus on the monstrum, albeit the monstrum of tragedy is seldom uncanny, as we might more often find in a work we classify as horror. From Aeschylus to Arthur Miller,
Prometheus Bound
to
The Crucible
, the structure of tragedy involves gradually ramping up the wrongness until we reach a crisis of abjection, the apotheosis of the hero’s destruction. The tragic hero’s heroism may in no small part be born of our recognition that the abject is in actuality a part of us, that our abhorrence of it is not entirely just—hence the pathos. There is a part of us—the part of us abjected in the tragic hero—that roars out with Prometheus against the gods, that stands with Proctor on the gallows and
will not submit
.

The tragic narrative of the rhyme above is a crude caricature of a tragedy, but in it we go from Mother Goose to Medea in four easy steps. The first line establishes the set-up of normality. The second introduces the monstrum in the disruption of social normal
ity—the old woman has too many children to cope with—and in a fully fleshed-out tragedy we would expect more to be made of this. We might well see the children as a brood of bastards running wild, the community around responding with condemnation, the old woman trying and failing to control them. The third line sets up a conflict between the old woman’s desire to support her children and her inability to do so; imagine this as the third act of a play and you can picture the slow build towards the character’s tragic fall as her attempts to deal with this double-bind fail time and time again, if they do not, in fact, exacerbate the situation. And all the while, we can imagine, a village culture increasing the moral pressure on her, the pressure to
do something about it
. Finally, in the fourth we are given a climax worthy of Aeschylus, in a tragically irrational solution: infanticide. We can imagine a moment of Medean madness, a woman with her children’s blood on her hands, screaming at the villagers who have driven her to this:
Done, done, done! Done and undone!

That we know this kind of story could play out in the real world, that we know (e.g. female) infanticide is a very real problem in the world, does not mean that this private narrative remains mundane. The mundane has been shattered by the irrational, the a
bject, the monstrous, in the difference between a whipping and a decapitation. If the comic turns on a response of “No way!” the pathetic might turn on a similar sentiment, but it’s one distinctly different in the affect invoked. We might say “No way,” to the first narrative, but we’re only voicing an empathic denial; we know all too well that the world is full of starvation and whippings. With the tragic however, this denial is forceful, powered by a sense that surely to God, surely to God, this could not have happened,
must
not have happened: No
fucking
way!

The Strange in the Mundane

If tragedy cuts a sharp silhouette with its apotheosis of misfortune, its di
stinct dynamics of modalities, this is not to say the pathetic narrative is an equally clear-cut mode. No fiction can entirely eschew the quirks of the strange if it wants to have any narrative drive whatsoever; the best it can do is exile the alethic quirks and confine itself to boulomaic quirks of more muted import, should and should not, rather than must and must not. And it is an aesthetic extreme to do so, one that cuts against the grain when the whole point of narrative is the dynamics. So, the utterly mundane being far from a default, we can discern dimmer examples of the strange in many of the private narratives that pass for realism, the mimetic weft of the mundane ruptured, by some quirk or other.

Between the tragic and the pathetic—in the fusion of the two—we find for example the mode of
melodrama
, deeply domestic whether set at the working-class kitchen-sink or in the middle-class drawing-room, but pushing the misery beyond starvation (even if it’s just being starved of love), and whippings (even if it is just verbal whippings of dysfunctional relationships) and into decapitation (or emasculation, or incineration, even if these are purely of the psychological / metaphoric variety).

Melodrama will lower the scale of monstrosity so our state of shock is not quite so heightened, our suspension-of-disbelief not quite so tested, but even at the level of miserabilist British TV soap operas, we find the monstrum lur
king. Abusive husbands end up as bodies under the patio. Blackmailers get beaten to death with pokers. Pathetic victims become tragic heroes, destroying their own innocence in attempts to overcome the villainy the fictive world throws at them. Domestic melodramas, even those which wear the respectable name of
drama
or
novel
, are rife with heroes, villains and Oliver-Twists-of-fate. American soaps have even gone as far as alien abduction and cursed jewels.

More respectable narratives can be scarce less strange. Thomas Hardy’s work is full of impossible coincidences that assist in this or that poor chara
cter’s destruction, c.f.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
. Ibsen’s
Ghosts
contains no real spectres but is steeped in the miasma of moral transgression (syphilis visited upon an innocent son; how much more miasmatic could this be?). These are borderline tragedy, powered by the same feeling of dread in places, pulling back from the ghosts and witches, omens and portents, poisoned blades and pokers up the arse, but still testing our credulity, not least with the bleakness of their vision.

We can see all of these modes emerging here and there through the history of the novel as private narrative, sometimes boldly, sometimes liminally. Looking to such works as Fielding’s
Joseph Andrews
and Richardson’s
Pamela
and most anything by Dickens, indeed, we might well trace the absurd, the tragic and the pathetic as three threads of a discourse through which the novel itself ultimately takes shape, not in an eschewal of the strange but in an ever more refined synthesis of its hues and flavours.

Pick a start point at Rabelais’s
Gargantua
, say, as a prime example of the absurd at its broadest as literary device (compare the structure of the great “arse-wiping” scene to the “Yorkshiremen” sketch above). Leap to de Sade, who seized on the monstrous as the core of the moral melodrama which, in the novel form, tragedy had become. Skip back to
Don Quixote
; is it comedy or tragedy, or both? I don’t know, but this is a discourse we’re jumping around in, an interplay that ends up, perhaps, in
Catch-22
, where we are entirely unsure whether to laugh or cry in the face of the grotesque absurdity and abject horror of war.

In the twentieth century, out of this interplay, a cruel mode of the strange emerges that takes us back more properly to the question of possibility, to the alethic quirk rather than the monstrum so powerful it elicits denial of possibi
lity. It’s the other way around indeed, where the illogic is so disruptive, so unsettlingly surreal, that the absurd becomes monstrous. Part of the monstrosity though lies in a profound identification of the absurd
with
the mundane, in a sense that we’re not so much seeing the mimetic weft of realism ruptured as we’re seeing reality’s true face, Burroughs’s naked lunch, Blier’s buffet froid, laid out before us.

There’s a neat little serving of this in Lindsay Anderson’s
If…
, where it’s hard to tell at times whether the strangeness is simply the actual irrationality of life at a public school in the early ’60s or whether it is…something more. Too wrong to be laughable, but too low-key an aspect of reality to be monstrous, tragic, the surreal is neither an irruption of the irrational into the rational world nor an encounter with that which has been expelled as irrational…not quite. It is less an exterior(ised) insanity which we laugh at or recoil from, and more a recombination of the rational world into dissonant juxtapositions.

The effect is unsettling but subtly so. When Malcolm McDowell and Chri
stine Noonan begin their mock cat-fight in the café their behaviour strikes us as unusual but it is really just a combination of flirting and fighting. When the naked woman wanders through the boy’s dormitory while they’re out on their military exercise, it is unexplained but not inexplicable; what is strange is simply that combination of images, the suturing at odds with logic, the sense that this would not happen. We get a mounting sense of dissonance, that things are just a little bizarre. We can rationalise it as satire, as representation and exaggeration of all the
actual
absurdity to be fond in such a bastion of the English class system, but there’s another wrongness here. And then McDowell uses a mixture of live ammunition and blanks during the exercise to make the reverend think he is going to be shot. And we cut to the headmaster’s office, where the Crusaders have been summoned to apologise to the reverend. As the headmaster pontificates about their misbehaviour, he walks across the room to an over-sized writing bureau and pulls open a large drawer. The reverend, lying in that drawer like a corpse in a coffin, sits up to hear the apologies of the Crusaders. And in that one simple image, the mundane becomes the strange, and the satirical and becomes the surreal.