Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (39 page)

—Come on in, baby, we tell the incognoscenti. This is a proper burger joint, the real deal.

—No, thanks, they say. I don’t really like boogers.

—Don’t call them boogers, we bristle. They’re burgers.

—Sorry, they say. I know you take your boogers really seriously, but—

—Burgers! Boogers and burgers are totally different things.

—Whatever. Look, I don’t really eat junk food at all. I like culinary coo
king.

—But proper burgers aren’t junk food. They’re nothing like that shit the Mob goes for. Hell, they’re real food, unlike that hoity-toity culinary cooking. Fucking vegetarian tosh. I mean, come on, look at that. Doesn’t it look tasty?

—Uh, sure, but that’s steak tartare. I thought you said this was a burger joint?

—Steak tartare’s just a fancy way of pretending what you like isn’t really burger! But it is. See the red meat? See? Burger!

—It’s raw. Boogers are cooked.

—Burgers! And they don’t have to be cooked. The chefs in the SF Café long since moved on from that fry cook junk food stuff. That’s, like, Trad burger, Golden Age burger. The New Wave did away with all that; and we’re still finding new ways to make burgers. Look at this! Appetising, right?

—Yes, but that’s pâté.

—And this.

—That’s tournedos Rossini. Looks nice.

—And this.

—That’s chilli con carne. Sure, I like a good chilli, but that’s just…cooking. It’s not a burger.

—But it’s all red meat! So it’s all burgers! Or what are you trying to say: if it’s a burger, it can’t be good; if it’s good, it can’t be a burger?

—No, I’m saying it’s crazy to call a bowl of chilli a booger.

—Burger!

—Whatever! Look, culinary cooking isn’t limited to that cheap ketchup and fries approach, but a burger is a patty in a bun. With ketchup and fries. That’s basically all there is to them. Like those.

—Oh, for fuck’s sake! Those aren’t proper burgers at all. Dude, those are boogers. Typical! You think that’s what all burgers are like cause that’s what fricking Planet Ho
llywood sells as burgers. But that patty-in-a-bun junk food bullshit has nothing to do with actual burgers. Planet Hollywood is, like, decades behind the SF Café. Our burgers aren’t limited to—what?

—The fuck are you on? Look,
that
is steak tartare.
Those
are burgers.

—No, they’re boogers.
That’s
a burger. You just won’t accept that burgers can be every bit as good as culinary cooking.

—Bollocks to this. You’re nuts. I’m out of here.

—Go on then. But you can’t dismiss all burgers as boogers if you’re not even going to try a proper burger.

But they’re already backing away slowly, looking past us at the chimneys of the Kipple Foodstuff Factory that tower over the skyline of the ghetto, wo
ndering what crazy-inducing chemicals they spew into the air here.

Cut:

The Discourse of Argument

The result is three forms of narrative—alternative, future and mythic—based on three forms of quirk—counterfactual errata, hypothetical nova and metaphysical chimerae. All three types of quirk perform in equivalent manners: each breaches the “could have happened” alethic modality, presenting a challenge to suspension-of-disbelief; but each can be and is rationalised as a sort of temporal displacement; with each the reader transforms the disruptive sense that this “could not have happened” into a sense that this “could not have happened
now
.” Even where the quirks are metaphysical chimerae, this does not prevent the reader from constructing a synthetic elsewhen in which they
could
have happened. The conceptual relocation in the mythic narrative is simply in a different direction, so to speak, to that of the parallel or future narrative.

Crucially, this renders that elsewhen
arguable
. It is not arguable within the discourse of
science
, but then neither is the counterfactual elsewhen, which is arguable instead within the discourse of
history
. Rather than posit the metaphysical elsewhen as a qualitatively different type of construct, I would suggest that it is entirely arguable in the discourse of
philosophy
. Despite what their names might suggest, Nevèrÿon, Neverwhere or Never-Neverland do not throw the reader into realms of absolute impossibility; they assert themselves as outside the sphere of temporal (technical / historical) possibility, but even as they do so they remain open to, and may even invite, explication as suppositional approaches to nomological possibility, explorations of the potentials of nature rather than of history or science. We can understand these quirks in precisely those terms, as figurative signals of the discourse of argument—history, science or philosophy; where the counterfactual argues with known history and the hypothetical argues with known science, the metaphysical argues with known nature.

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Of course, not all burgers are schlockburgers. We know that all too well in the SF Café. We’ve moved on from the days when the clientele and the cooks lacked a sophisticated palate, when it was ketchup and fries with everything, because that’s what you do when you’re cooking for kids. But the whole burger/booger distinction is just kinda cracked. All those “It’s not
Sci-Fi
! It’s SF!” remonstrations just sound sorta nuts, all the more so when we’re disowning the soul food with the junk food, all of it, as ersatz boogers, in flagrant denial of the fact our Golden Age SF was born from exactly that. Or when blind loyalty to the tribe has us proclaiming steak tartare a type of burger, scorning the incognoscenti whose rampant elitism must be what leads them to deny the true nature of raw mince, veil it with some fancy-ass name.

Truth is, you will find burgers on the menu in a lot of uptown restaurants, not seen, in that context, as junk food, but still basically burgers. Down in the SF Café, we discuss examples of uptown’s “culinary cooking”—dishes by Atwood or Roth, say. We bitch of how these are blatantly burgers, just like ours—but not so good, we say often, as attempts to reinvent the wheel, ha
mstrung by ignorance of our conventions, the proper way to make a burger. Sometimes we make sense, sometimes not: that dystopian dish
The Handmaid’s Tale
, for sure, that’s ground beef in a patty, flame-grilled and served on a bun; the beef stew of
The Plot Against America
is not a burger by any stretch of the imagining, though, except in the wacky zeal of true believers who’ve seen stew served as burger over and over again in the SF Café, yeah? And besides it has red meat in it, so it must be so. Even if the meat is actually venison.

Not that this makes Atwood or Roth SF writers, mind. In the SF café they’re seen as outsiders, part-timers. Up in the Bistro de Critique, meanwhile, the very suggestion would be laughed off as a blatant attempt to appropriate the cream of culinary cooking for the sake of prestige. As another grab by those ghetto-born geeks with hard-ons for the future, pointing at Wells or Verne, Shelley or Orwell, say. As if you could call O
rwell’s dystopia a burger when he’s tackling the twentieth century head-on, reimagining Stalinism and fascism from his direct experience of it during the Spanish Civil War, not telling some Boy’s Own Adventure of battling squids in space. These are sophisticated chefs, not fry cooks of junk fiction, dishing out burger novels full of fat and sugar and salt and artificial flavourings, all crafted in absolute obeisance to a traditional recipe! What next? Is Kafka a
Horror
writer just like H.P. Lovecraft, just exactly like H.P. Lovecraft, because
The Trial
is dripping with fear and paranoia, its main character pitted against profoundly disturbing irrational forces?

It’s hard enough to get the incognoscenti to see past the absence of ketchup and fries with something like Atwood’s work, the fact that it’s not handed to you by a spotty ad
olescent who needs to learn some hard truths about personal hygiene—to persuade them that actually this isn’t how most burgers are served in the SF Café. It’s hard enough to sell them on the truth that extra ingredients of good prose and characterisation can render a work “culinary cooking” by their standards and not stop it being a fucking burger. It’s not going to get any easier if we ourselves shroud the whole discourse in an artificed dichotomy of burgers and boogers.

Especially not when we’re pointing at steak tartare as an example of good burger. Or when we ourselves are ignoring the cheese, the bacon, the chilli, the jalapeños, the refried beans, etc., on the patties of ground beef that remind us just a little too much of our pulp roots, when we’re so desperate to hig
hlight the steak tartare we’ll happily find some spurious rationale to sweep aside all the pulp, all the junk—the soul fiction with the schlock fiction—in a distinction between burgers and boogers that defies all logic.

—It’s not
Sci-Fi
, we insist, It’s SF.

Every time you say that a Venusian Slime Boy dies, you know.

Cut:

The Dimensions of Estrangement

One thing to make clear: While the metaphysically dislocated elsewhen of the mythic narrative as I’m outlining it is clearly suggestive of the secondary world of fantasy, this model is at odds with many definitions of those els
ewhens as essentially inarguable (alterior rather than alternative realities), and of fantasy as a whole as distinct from SF precisely by its alethic modality of “could never happen.” In this model, even if secondary worlds and fantasy are distinct in other respects, that differentiation is questioned.

Taken solely as a model of the mythic narrative, this is not a substantial co
ntradiction of the model of fantasy predicated by John Clute in
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
. One key distinction emerges however, where Clute considers fantasy not just a matter of stories understood by their authors and readers to concern the impossible, but as a
project
in and of itself, one which requires the scientific worldview of the Enlightenment to set the boundaries of what is and isn’t possible—the laws of reality—in order that realism can come into existence first.
Fantasy
and
the fantastic
are defined by their negation of the realistic, as a “counter-statement to a dominant worldview.”

In this model, that scientific worldview is not required, with the quirk d
efined in broad terms as any disruption of the suspension-of-disbelief by a response of incredulity—the sense that an event “could not have happened”—here in conflict not with laws of reality as defined by science, but rather with the reader’s individual nomology, their concept of the laws of nature. As a theory of the techniques rather than the genres of fiction, for now I’m more interested in trying to identify its relationship to various projects in literature (e.g. tragedy or comedy) than identifying it as a project in its own right. This narrative form based on metaphysical quirks can and should therefore be considered in a far wider context than the Enlightenment, anywhere we can expect to see such a nomology. If it’s tempting to equate the chimeric with the fantastic we might want to bear that in mind; there may be project here, but if so, it is no more post-Enlightenment than tragedy and comedy are.

There is more to Lake’s mythic narrative than metaphysics however; in his description, these fictions deal with “things which never actually happened, or could have happened in a
literal reading
, but
encapsulate important truths
for the tellers of the tale.” There is a specificity in the italicised phrases that we should be wary of, an implication that we are to understand the mythic narrative as intrinsically metaphoric, the chimera as symbolic rather than just strange. This adds an additional requirement that is not applied to alternative / future narratives; and the assumption it suggests is reinforced by the sense of archetypal symbolism associated with the term
mythic
. It should be stressed that this model implies no such assumption.

For this reason, the alternative / future / mythic narrative nomenclature is going to be discarded from here on in, in favour of a taxonomy of the nature of the conceit itself—i.e. counterfactual / hypothetical / metaphysical—or the quirk—i.e. erratum / novum / chimera. What we arrive at with this model is not a taxonomy of texts anyway, not a system of genres (e.g.
Alternate History
,
Science Fiction
and
Fantasy
) so much as a system of the
dimensions of estrangement
from which we
construct
genre (or at least begin to). It is this estrangement, in whichever direction or combination of directions, that is at the heart of all strange fiction, and it is the basic equivalence of the act of dislocation, regardless of direction, that underlies the historic and aesthetic unity of the field, whichever label we apply to whichever of its myriad permutations.

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