Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (44 page)

In the Bistro de Critique, Orwell and Huxley serve dystopia, a taster of the secret cuisine that remains unseen. They’re spared the sneers, suited up in pi
nstripes—no red leather miniskirts or denim cut-offs here. No turning tricks each night, sating sense-of-wonder-lust, ten dollars a pop. No formulae here for churning out pot-boilers by the pound. No pimps hawking hackwork product in Mass Market Square. They are members of the League of Fusion Fry-Cooks—they and others like them; but these chefs of the quirk were spared that whole grotesque and glittering scene, the garish spectacle of sensation that turned
Sci-Fi
into a slight.

Brooding in the ghetto for nigh on half a century, bitter at the literati, clan
smen stalk the dark. Beware, the unwitting wanderer from uptown who says the wrong thing in the ghetto. The tribes of taste are seasoned warriors of the flame, and they know insult when they hear it.

They howl at midnight on the streets of Genre. The works they love are r
eviled while worthy (wearisome) “mainstream” fiction garners all accolades, as if the idiom of the ascetic were the only way to tell the truth. Worse, much of it is no longer “mainstream,” not mundane but strange, miso soup for the soul. Still, the literati laud Ishiguro’s dish by its supposed distinction from SF, constructing the root cause of failure ultimately, in any novel, as not eschewing the essential nature of one’s genre. As if to work in an idiom other than the ascetic could only mean to be bound by formal strictures. As if they are still working in the idiom of the ascetic simply by not being trite. The writers themselves speak in these terms. The secret cuisine is so secret even some of its greatest chefs don’t know they’re practising it, don’t know it exists, how it works. And so they buy into that same grand folly, abjuring the very idioms their best works are in. With this, they win the kudos of the literati, lose out on all the infamy and fun.

—No SF novel ever won the Booker, growls a prowling clansman on his way into the SF Café.

The librarian swings a shotgun from inside her longcoat, blasts the bullshit axiom from the air. Screw the Booker, she thinks. She’d rather have a hookah.

She stands in the doorway of the SF Café, past and future glimmering in her mayashades. She sees Kid Pulp working uptown in the theatres, other ha
rlot/hustler harlequins crashing gallery openings and cocktail parties, noising up the regulars at the Bistro de Critique, hustling a little ass now and then to pay the rent, or dancing—prancing, entrancing maniacs blowing flutes instead of johns. For all the abjurations, every Ishiguro is another sleeper agent of the League of Fusion Fry-Cooks slipped in to open up the bistro’s back door, let the slumdogs in, slavering and savage.

But that’s tomorrow. She looks round, sees them here now, more and more by the day, her fellow agents, talking the Pornographia dell’Arte in the SF C
afé or on some corner of Mass Market Square. They talk of the kudos and cash success stories of twentieth-century literature, the canon of writers that includes Joyce alongside Hemingway, Faulkner alongside Steinbeck, writers such as Rushdie, Bulgakov, Carter, Calvino, García Márquez, Pynchon, Vonnegut, and so on. They talk of modern classics that don’t sit any better in the contemporary realist’s tower block than in the SF flophouse. They talk of that scene, the flavours of the month, the lists and prizes, the slow assimilation of contemporary realism, its descent into formulation. They know formulation when they see it, living in the ghetto. They talk of a spotlight wearing thin for the idiom of the ascetic. Kelly Link was in
Time
magazine a whiles back, they say, Top Five Books of the Year.

Change is in the air. There are always choices, chances.

The secret cuisine cannot be contained.

Ultimately, as sympathetic as I am to the open definition of fantasy, the te
ndency of this definition towards an argument that “it’s all fantasy” and the inevitable misreading of that assertion as “it’s all
Fantasy
” makes it about as useful as a taxonomy that classes every colour on the palette as a shade of blue. The similarities in the way chimerae, nova and errata are utilised does not mean the latter two are “really just” instances of the former, no more than all fiction is fantasy simply because it’s fabricated, no more than all
writing
is
fiction
because it’s fabricated. Follow this path and we end up saying that mathematics, physics, chemistry, language itself, are all subsets of fantasy—they’re just complex artifices of the human imagination, after all, representing reality in the form of abstracted symbolic patterns. This is a blurring of the term
fantasy
which renders it so vague as to be useless.

It’s for this reason above all others that I prefer to replace this overloaded terminology of
fantasy
and
the fantastic
as applied to the open definition with that of
strange fiction
, to strip away the accreted associations and start from first principles, try and model the field as a fiction of quirks, examine how these work, how the acts of mimesis, those sentences which present themselves as representations of an ersatz actuality, are interrupted by acts of semiosis, sentences that remind us that the representation is an artifice, that the events described “could not have happened.” And that would be the closed definition, focusing in on the alethic. In the open definition, all flavours of modality are in the field of vision.

I’m less concerned with fighting a side in that debate than I am with brea
king the deadlock by identifying the exact point(s) of contention, so for me the term
strange
offers a fresh slate and a territorial neutrality. It nixes those associations. It carries no further proposition, explicit or implicit, about the nature of the quirks it is founded on, the semiotic “contents” by which we can characterise this type of work. Or rather, to be more accurate, it carries no implications as to how we
respond
to these quirks. It simply says that they breach our expectations that the narrative will function as a representation of an ersatz reality modelled closely on our own. A vocabulary of
strange fiction
and
quirks
offers a distance from those conflicting connotations that are introduced whenever we talk of the content of the field in terms of SF and fantasy.

(There is, of course, the old tried and tested
weird
, but in its origin in ideas of fate, in its application to the uncanny and supernatural rather than just the queer or unusual, and in its associations with the religious and fictional conventions of certain chimerae—e.g. ghosts and vampires—we risk narrowing the focus to the excused metaphysical, rendering it no better a fit than
fantasy
. The history of this word within the commercial genre also establishes it as a sub-generic term, calling up associations with particular pulp writers like Lovecraft or magazines like
Weird Tales
. This is one reason why I’m wary of the term
New Weird
, over and above the fact of that
New
tacitly acknowledging that the label is sub-generic and commercial, placing this fiction in relation to the New Wave as another Movement within the genre.)

We need a term which can be applied beyond the commercial strictures of genres and movements, one we can apply analytically to those works pu
blished before or outside the marketing labels, such that the application is not political and subjective but rather critical and objective. With its etymological roots in the Latin
extraneous
, meaning “of external origin,” and its modern application to the foreign, the alien, the queer, the other,
strange
is an eminently suitable term, with much less conceptual baggage, as much a description of the set of narratives to be examined—strange fictions, fictions which are strange—as a naming of an aesthetic form.

And, of course, it abbreviates neatly to the old familiar SF.

The librarian heads out across Mass Market Square, towards the subway, checking in with the League of Fusion Fry-Cooks over her aether uplink, telling them all about the Bistro de Critique’s strange visitor from twenty years into tomorrow, how he told of a
Dynamism
sweeping in to overturn the tables. Her contact listens with great interest.

Here is a secret of the secret cuisine. The “mainstream” of literature is only what is in the main stream, and this is not the contemporary realism of the kitchen sink. That id
iom had a brief boom in the 1960s, as angry young men roared for realism in the name of relevance, no frills, no nonsense. It was an egalitarian agenda, born in a backlash against elitist artifices of the modernists, eschewing the strange and sensationalist quirks, seeing deceit in all conceit—but in an honest and passionate dream of telling stories
of
the common man
for
the common man. They saw the unreal as irrelevant, the incredible as mere fancy; they could not parse the strange to its meaning.

(Their attitude is not entirely unfamiliar. We have our own realists, our own Rationa
lists, down in the ghetto of Genre, in the SF Café, dug into their little corner, behind a barricade of tables, muttering darkly about the death of
Science Fiction
.)

It had a brief boom in the 1960s, this idiom of the ascetic, this genre, but it never made the mainstream, which is and always will be populist, comme
rcial…Genre. The League of Fusion Fry-Cooks have more than a little sympathy for those angry young men, and a smart of sadness that they failed to see the Molotov cocktail in the quirk…more so that their battleground could only be lost to the bourgeois. Because they had walked away from the mainstream in the abrogation of quirks, diverted into the sidestream of “proper literature” where taste becomes a class marker, where appreciation serves to signify status, where that sidestream is therefore reduced to a water feature in the Gardens of Literature.

It was never about the mainstream, but about the manners of the Bistro de Critique, what was à la mode today, what was “proper.” Three hundred years ago or so, two opp
ositional aesthetics were well-matched in their struggle for legitimacy as they clashed head-to-head. Romantic and Realist genres were the tribes of taste among the middle-class and middlebrow, back in the day, constructing modernity in a dialectic not unlike that to be found today in the SF Café. Oh, but one aesthetic was that of the vulgar proles and of “women’s fiction.”

It was infantile, unsophisticated, this aesthetic of mere storytelling, fanciful as folklore and fable, primitive as the superstitions of the savages. It was then—and remains now—the mainstream that feeds the bulk of water fou
ntains across the city of New Sodom, but this very fact was enough to damn it in the end. A true gentleman—not a vulgar prole, not a hysterical woman, not a primitive savage, not a child—surely knew that these gushing fountains of quirk were…unseemly. Only in the Gardens of Literature might one find that shallow birdbath with a china cup from which to sip the refined liquidity of edifying art. Why, one could see just how refined it was, absent those quirks!

It was inevitable that the petit-bourgeois would latch on to the legitimacy of egalitar
ianism to justify what is really a scorn of the popular. Mass Market Square. The Pornographia dell’Arte. This is what they really hate, the impropriety of it all. The bourgeois were only too happy to co-opt contemporary realism, formulate and commercialise it with formal strictures on the acceptable use of quirks. Transform it to the faux reportage of the social observer, enlightened, educated, edified and edifying. So it became about the impropriety of the sensational, what art must not be if it was to be serious, worthy, intellectual. Some literati may be held accountable, but many were—and are—as much casualties of the Culture Wars as anyone; when one is raised within the rhetoric of abjection, it is often invisible, not least to those most privileged by it.

The abjection is unsustainable though; the impetus of art is always against propriety, and so the reactionaries will always be revealed, by their own words, as antagonists to art. They say the china cup is necessary, but every now and then a writer comes along to smash it with contempt, show it up for the genteel nonsense it is. And some literati nod appreciatively even as others slip a fresh cup back in place. They say the liquid in the birdbath must be pure, but every now and then a writer comes along to piss just a hint of quirk into it, maybe more than a hint. And after decades of art refined to bland b
anality, melodrama watered-down to mundane crises, trite epiphanies, some literati hail the tang of strange conceits even as others grumble at the taint. They say the flow of it all must be kept subtle, slow and delicate, never a spectacle. But writers who see how this is all in the name of etiquette and the status it affords will feel the heft of a sledgehammer in hand, and grin as they smash that decorative folly, let the fiction come fountaining forth in a great geyser. And if some literati flap their hands in outrage, others will dance barefoot in the mud.

And the League of Fusion Fry-Cooks will move among them, handing out hors d’oeuvres of pure quirk, peachy keen articulations conjured out of raw conceit, rich del
icacies one cannot help acquire a taste for. Scotch eggs of a basilisk from a yesterday that never was. Whether they call it burger or fried chicken is irrelevant; it is the secret cuisine.

It may not remain secret for much longer.