Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (43 page)

The librarian gazes out the window. The shadow of the Kipple Foodstuff Factory still hangs over us, but at least we know it’s there. Truth is, the junk fiction is everywhere. The Mob makes every eatery in the city carry those KFF schlockburgers. Truth is, the Bistro de Critique carries them too. Hey ho.

We call it all burger, wonder why it gets no respect, when even before the New Wave broke the “boundaries of genre,” chefs like Bradbury were cooking whatever the fuck they wanted to. Still, the Mob sends goons round every other day to strong arm our boys into hackwork. We’re just lucky some goons love them Eggs Benedict, shrug as we serve them up: guess we all like a little something different now and then; just…keep it on the QT, call it burger, don’t make out that you ain’t scum like us. Besides, the Boss Man hangs in the Bistro de Critique, and it’s important to him that he’s got “class.”

But the secret cuisine can’t help but evolve. The more the tribes of taste try to impose their formulae, the more the result is simply dialectics—thesis, a
ntithesis, synthesis. Change. So food fads come and go in the SF Café—New Wave, Cyberpunk, New Weird—the menu changing with the times, each new fry-cook doing brave new things with a million variants of burger and fried chicken, crafting bizarre creations of fusion cuisine, adding a signature dish wholly original, unique, exquisitely crafted from raw conceit. Détournement. Bricolage. Quirks.

At some time in the past—nobody knows when—a secret society was formed, a League of Fusion Fry-Cooks, dedicated to the art of fast food haute cuisine, sharing recipes and raw ingredients, tricks and techniques, their mo
tto:
Miso Soup for the Soul
. They have plans to storm the Bistro de Critique, it’s said, schemes the librarian knows will one day come to fruition…if the tales of a traveller in time are true. The project is graffitied across the ghetto of Genre, written in invisible ink right here, if you only read between the lines. Yes, they walk amongst us in the streets, meet in the back-alleys. They wear harlequin masks and dance to disguise themselves as street performers. Maybe you’re one of them. Maybe I am.

Out on the streets of the ghetto, a masked harlequin (maybe you, maybe me) walks by, in their hand a Molotov cocktail of mixed metaphors—fry-cooks and fusion cuisine, schlockburgers and cafés, ghosts and golems. This is the strategy of our strange fictions, quirk upon quirk, conceit upon conceit, e
xtended and involuted till they all shear off from a simple coherent sense, the vehicle of metaphor unmoored from its tenor, defying reduction to mere allegory. This is how we see the world through our mayashades: a quirk with a cosmos of chaos inside, all that could not be.

The librarian takes another scan of her surroundings, orients herself from another a
ngle of vision. She’s out on the street now. This could not be, but if you can sip the miso soup you couldn’t get that day in North Carolina, you can do anything.

With Faces in Their Bellies

The counter-argument born of the open definition would be that the fantastic is a technique in the text itself, and that the Greek term for that technique,
phantasia
, is perfectly applicable now as it was then. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, all distinguished out those phenomena of imagination, dreams and visions in which perception somehow blends with judgement (is, we might say, recombined by it, Hume’s “missing shade of blue” constructed in the colourspace between other directly experienced shades). So, elsewhere in
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
we read that “in the Graeco-Roman world […]
phantasia
was a technical term in the study of poetic techniques for representing these stories, and ancient literary criticism for the first time drew a clear distinction between the possible and the ‘mythic’ or ‘fabulous.’”

If we now utilise a sort of conceptual temporal dislocation as a rationalis
ation for the impossibilities, the examples offered earlier with regards to metaphysical dislocations clearly suggest that those pre-Enlightenment writers were utilising
spatial
dislocation in exactly the same manner, displacing the impossible events to an else
where
rather than an else
when
, some remote land beyond the known world (rather than known history or known science) where things might work differently—where people might be gigantic or minuscule, might even have their faces in their bellies. From Herodotus and Apollonius on, through Marco Polo, the legends of Prester John and suchlike, we can see phantasia in the traveller’s tale. Exploiting the incredible in the shape of the
exotic
, these are unquestionably strange fiction.

The librarian taps a smoke off Kid Pulp, offers a light.

Kid Pulp is working the same corner as per usual, busking and hustling, offering wild songs and ten-dollar blowjobs, dancing in a red leather miniskirt or denim cut-offs, selling limber feats as pole dance peep shows improvised with lampposts and blindfolds. The strumpet stripling slinks round a pimp, a bookstore buyer in fur coat and gold rings, diamonds in his grin bought with monies made by mining star dreck. Prissy passers-by who took a wrong turn from uptown gasp as punters splash out cash for the harlequin’s masque, a Pornographia dell’Arte that might well end in blood and tears instead of spunk these days.

This is the vision through the librarian’s mayashades, of course, filtered through the figurative, view skewed towards the sordid. It’s how society sees the sensational, painted lurid by the streetlight’s glow, painted lurid with bo
ulomaic and deontic modalities, quirks of desire and duty. We seldom see what is, too busy projecting onto it what should or should not be.

Kid Pulp, fully paid-up member of the League of Fusion Fry-Cooks, will have none of that
should not be
. Kid Pulp was suckled at the cock/paps of a dam/sire known as
Romance
, does not deny the Babylon that spawned not just Kid Pulp but all of New Sodom. No defensive twitch when this harlot/hustler’s heritage is thrown back in Kid Pulp’s face by those brought up on the right side of the tracks. No shame, no sham of fierce certainty that Kid Pulp is not that kind of girl. Or boy. No shoving that parental shame into a closet, starving it to a skeleton for the sake of prim decorum. A whirl, a twirl, and the sparkly logo on Kid Pulp’s crop top comes clear, the brand name of SF.

Dressed in such gaudy duds of glossy packaging, Kid Pulp figures, why get your knic
kers in a twist when the literati sneer? The sideshow sells well when it’s painted pretty colours and comes cheap on the street-corners, so we shill ourselves as
Sci-Fi
, wear the label in a wild and willing deal with the devil. Through the single-setting mayashades that most don’t even know they’re wearing, it sure looks like we’re just following the family trade (rough trade, that is,) as we stand out there beneath the streetlight, touting cheap thrills to sad johns.

—Show you a good time, if ya want it, honey. A tasty treat. Fresh, juicy meat.

It all began, you know, with self-righteous prigs reviling whores and faggots, proles and primitives, as slave to base sensation. With
Romance
as an unmarried mother, ill-gotten with child by the entire mob of the mass market, whore with a bastard in her hysterical womb, kicked out by the bushy-bearded patriarchs, no mercy but the workhouse or the madhouse. (It would be nice if a less sexist figuration of
Romance
could be found here, but it would be a denial of the semiotics at play, which is sexist; the discourse of the sensational is inextricable from the discourse of the hysterical.) Her recent history is starvation and desperation, the brothel trucks and army whorehouses of the Culture Wars. Kid Pulp was born of the Joy Division of fiction, and I don’t mean the fucking band.

Kid Pulp is not a hooker/hustler because of some moral degeneracy, is not fallen, just a fall guy. Bastard offspring of
Romance
and Frankenstein’s mob, Kid Pulp grew up hustling that sweet ass, knows it’s hard to scrape a living any other way, knows other ways are more degrading in the end. The propriety of polite company finds quirks a little uncouth, see, the cocks and cunts of narrative. The sensational is the sensual, and the sensual is the sexual, shockingly gauche. The secret cuisine is a naked lunch to the petit-bourgeoisie: genre fiction; pulp fiction; penny dreadfuls; dime novels; sensation novels; Gothic; Romance. The Pornographia dell’Arte is a pandering Grand Guignol of all emotions.

So Kid Pulp got real, faced the facts. You made your bed, says Kid Pulp, now you’ve got to spread your legs on it, bite the pillow and think of England. Kid Pulp is New Sodom out of Babylon, our Woman of the Ghetto, our Boy for Sale. Elsewhen, Kid Pulp would have been a faggot whore priestess prince black madonna in scarlet and pu
rple drag, offering entry into sacred mysteries of flesh and spirit, eros and logos. Elsewhen, Kid Pulp would have been none of this, more than the idealised and demonised metaphors emergent from a history of abstraction and abjection. So those snooty literati see a slapper in these Bacchic revels? So fuck? Deal with it.

Kudos comes at a price, Kid Pulp knows: ditch the miniskirt and cut-offs, move u
ptown; or join the fucking revolution.

There are other techniques we could identify, and other genres which might be made explicable in terms of quirks or analogues thereof. One might well look at the occult-history novel in these terms. Like comic, tragic or strange fiction,
The Da Vinci Code
or
The Name of the Rose
exploit a sense of the incredible which challenges our suspension-of-disbelief. Where these other modes utilise the absurd, the abject, the surreal or the quirk, the occult-history uses the
arcane
. Like tragedy and comedy there is no dislocation to a non-existent elsewhen; rather it is the links between historic events that are used to weave large scale patterns of conspiracy, to build these up to a point of collapse, at critical mass, into a sense of (incredible) lost (hidden, ancient) truths beyond imagining. The
arcanum
of occult-history bears a remarkable resemblance to the errata, nova and chimerae already detailed. A novum, indeed, which gains its novelty from its being previously unknown, may even
be
an arcanum, which gains its mystery from the fact it is a pointer to further and greater unknowns. The monolith in
2001
, for example, is both.

One might even look at the occult-history’s relative, the mystery novel, where the events are not strictly speaking incredible at all—they do not cha
llenge our subjunctivity level—but
are
intriguing. Like a mundane tragedy we have at least one event, a crime, that “should not have happened” and, while the mystery novel remains on one level a pathetic narrative, in the “could have happened” subjunctivity level, rather than going full-steam for terror and destruction, offence to the laws of God and Man, how often are the clues it throws at the reader quirks, things which don’t fit, which “should not have happened” (the enigma of the object-out-place) or which in combination “could not have happened” (the contradiction of different versions of events)?

And how much of the very purpose of the book is to reconcile those clues into the solution of just how this “
could
have happened,” just how it “
did
happen”? If epistemic modalities are unresolved until that point, perhaps we can speak of driving quirks in the absentings and obfuscations: the
lacunae
of “what did and/or did not happen”; the
limina
of “what might and/or might not have happened.” The quirk of a corpse in a locked room as an alethic irresolution: the
cryptica
of “what could and/or could not have happened.”

The cryptic is modern perhaps, but the monstrum and numina, the absurd, the arcane, the exotic—these are “genre devices” of a strange fiction of anti
quity, one that existed long before the Enlightenment, albeit one that was reshaped radically in that era. If the strange fiction we know now (by whatever name) emerged out of a reconfiguration substantial enough that we might wish to retain a distinction between
phantasia
and
fantasy
, I’m not convinced we should be looking at the texts of one as the “taproots” of the other. A better visual metaphor, I think, might be to understand that pre-Enlightenment period in which realism and fantasy were allied as the “trunk” and what came afterwards as a splitting into two great branches, the mimetic and the semiotic.