Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (50 page)

But it is not so simple; it never is. There are
Genre Fiction
writers who are deeply concerned with Style, just as there are
Literary Fiction
writers who are deeply concerned with Story. The same goes for readers. Just as there are
Genre Fiction
readers who find it hard to read a work without at least serviceable prose, there are
Literary Fiction
readers who find it hard to read a work without at least serviceable narrative. The big difference is that where one subset of self-identifying genre kids who don’t much care for prose are largely notable by their over-zealous positivity as regards their own tastes (and a vacuous inverse snobbery about “style over substance”), that small subset of incognoscenti who don’t much care for narrative are made notable by their over-zealous negativity as regards the tastes of others and by the privileging of their position.

If the former are harmful, their patronage allowing mediocre prose to su
rvive and flourish in the ghetto of Genre, the latter are worse, their patronage allowing mediocre narrative to survive and flourish in the district of Literature
and
consistently devaluing narrative as they devalue the semiotic approach so as to inflate the value of mimesis. In their abjection of these fundamental aspects of writing they do more harm to themselves than anyone else though.

A grand ivory tower dominates the uptown district of Literature, the Tower of Mimeticists’ Bicuspids, built of teeth pliered out of the mouths of
Literary Fiction
writers by their own hands. Originally, as the name suggests, the teeth were only meant to be bicuspids—those sort of
in-between
teeth, the ones that aren’t incisors, canines or molars, that aren’t particularly good at cutting, penetrating or grinding, that seem, in fact, to lack any real purpose of their own—but once the
Literary Fiction
writers started ridding themselves of those seemingly pointless outgrowths of enamel, well, it seems they found it hard to stop.

—The tooth is not the truth, they muttered sagely. We need to strip the mouth of all this meaningless decoration, the glamorous artifice of the lying smile, the deceit of dental gleaming. So they stripped themselves down to the bare essentials needed to mumble the nasalised bilabial
mmm
and the sibilant hissing
ssss
of
mimesis
.

The tower has risen over the decades till it’s fifty years tall or more now, but it’s loo
king increasingly unstable. In the Bistro de Critique this instability is sometimes viewed as a corrosion of the foundations, blamed on the proles of Genre naturally, on the dumbing-down of culture, every YA book bought by an adult, every
Genre Fiction
novel sold for airplane reading, every comic book and DVD another brilliant-white brick of lost bite kicked from the bottom of the structure. In truth, that ivory tower is mainly crumbling under the weight of the egos sat at the top, spitting at the peasants down below who want hard ground more than hot air. Well…I
say
“spitting”; it’s more the inevitable drooling slabber of those with only gums and lips between their saliva and the outside world.

This is why some
Literary Fiction
writers of actual ambition, like David Mitchell or Glen David Gold, have adopted the methods and modes of
Genre Fiction
, why
Genre Fiction
writers like Michael Chabon or Jonathan Lethem have broken out of the ghetto and become mainstream, why all manner of works with their aesthetic homeland in the ghetto of Genre (the SF of
The Time Traveler’s Wife
, the YA of Harry Potter) are ignoring that ghetto for the much wider market of the city of New Sodom as a whole. There’s a demand for something, something that is not being supplied by
Literary
fiction, something that these types of writing do supply.

It is not happy endings they want; it is simply
endings
, period, rather than the pseudo-ending of epiphany. Beginnings, middles and endings, and maybe not in that order, but at least discernible as
structure
. They want narrative, the sort of tight, focused, dynamic
drive
you get in genre, and not at the expense of polished, interesting prose, but
with
it. Where the aesthetic of the ephemeral once gave us a breathless
yes
whispered under a Moorish wall, now the epiphany is formulated. And as with any such formulation, “more of the same” only goes so far, and there comes a time people start looking for “something different.”

When the audience is turning to
Genre Fiction
for more dynamic narrative, what does this say of its availability outside these sections? When kids are suddenly reading again because of series like Harry Potter, what does this say about keeping the reader’s attention? When adults are picking up these books after not having read a novel in years, what does that say about the dismal state of a Literature that’s been driving readers away in boredom over the last few decades? When new writers are increasingly bringing
Genre Fiction
qualities over into works sold as general fiction, and finding an eager market, what does this tell you about the vacuum they’re filling? In the Bistro de Critique (and even, in truth, in the more gentrified corners of the SF Café), some see this as a dumbing-down, but what’s happening is not a lowering of the bar, rather a
heightening
, an increased demand for greater craft in terms of narrative.

And if there’s anything to be learned in the Tower of Mimeticists’ Bicu
spids, fuck it, we’ve got no qualms about dropping by now and then just to see what’s new. Hell, we’re thieving gypos and uppity niggers, cheap whores and predatory faggots, scum who like to ramraid the kitchens of that ivory tower at every opportunity. We gate-crash the parties, steal the hors-d’oeuvres narratives, snort more than our fair share of prose, check out what’s hot and what’s not, noise up the nobs when they start sounding off about the yobs, and head back home with new recipes for the SF Café. Some of us do anyway. Many are happy just to flip their patties and serve up the same old burger plots and beery sentences, but there’s a vibrant subculture devoted to the druggy delights of prose and the gastronomic glories of narrative, and those of us in that scene, we’ve tasted the best fixes and food of both worlds, learned from it, and set out to better it.

If the toothless mimeticists don’t know the best the ghetto has to offer—either because they never thought to look, or because a few bum steers led to a hasty retreat and a firm distrust—fuck ’em. Let them hang and let them fall. It’ll be peachy keen to see what blue flowers bloom in the rubble and what weird new forms are built out of the wrec
kage of the Tower of Mimeticists’ Bicuspids by the generation of mutants who’ve been hanging in the ghetto of Genre for the last fifty years, partying and watching that structure sway in the breeze.

Okay, okay, let’s be honest. We do kind of like to take a kick at that edifice whenever we’re passing. Our librarian is there right now, in fact, chipping away at its base, plan
ting some C-4 charges in the holes. All she has to do to set them off, as a librarian, is recommend the right work of the right genre to the right person, open up their eyes to the power of semiosis.

—
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union
?

BOOM!

—
The Time Traveler’s Wife
?

BOOM!

—
The Borribles
!

BOOM!

In the Bistro de Critique, an old orthodoxy of “mundane good, outré bad” is already crumbling, with writers like Chabon and Lethem making their mark while pointedly refusing to forsake their roots, the seats they still occupy in the SF Café. Despite our best efforts to shirk respectability and maintain our freakish status as outsiders, the literati are starting to nose around the ghetto, interest piqued in what’s happening down here, where the harlots and harlequins hang out. The cocktail parties are getting stale now, maybe, and,
darling
, I hear Miéville’s monster shows actually have
ideas
in them. How quaint! And this VanderMeer chap’s apparently dancing the
Nabokov
of all things. What are they calling this stuff? The New Weird? New Wave Fabulism?

Call it the League of Fusion Fry-Cooks. Call it the Order of the Blue Flo
wer. Call it the fucking New Modern Army.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, in the era of mass-production, in the apotheosis of the Enlightenment, it seemed the strata of humanity and history were peeled away by new ways of understanding—psychoanalysis, evolutionary theory, a
rchaeology. In an increasingly interconnected world, the strange realities of other cultures were being brought home to us. As were the horrors of mechanised warfare. A new form of fiction, some thought, was required to represent a world as savage as it was civilised, as driven by passion as by reason. So an audacious project began, to wire together the best bits of both Romanticism and Rationalism, create a Frankenstein’s fiction which was more virile and imaginative than the middle-class melodrama of the Realists but more relevant and subtle than the florid self-delusions of the Romantics. The result was modernism.

Like the mimetic fiction of Literature this fiction had the drive to document the d
etails of reality, offering no easy ride, no penny-dreadful diversion, but like the semiotic fiction of Genre it freely utilised the mythic, the oneiric, the psychotic, the strange, accepted dreams and delusions as a part of that reality. Across the arts they sought to reinvest the modern era with something of the archaic—as in Picasso, influenced by cave paintings, painting the Minotaur-like bull in his
Guernica
, as in Joyce’s use of the Ulysses myth, of Daedalus, of the giant Finn McCool. Perhaps this came from the nature of the project, constructing its representations out of fragments of perspective scaled up to experience scaled up to knowledge. Through cubism and collage, Modernism attempted to tackle the chaos of our world, to deconstruct and reconstruct it into a semblance of order. Where the Romantics and the Realists failed to fully face this unfathomable world, revelling in the unreason or rationalising it away, modernism took the absence of meaning as a challenge.

Modernism heard Nietzsche’s dread pronouncement on the death of God and rolled its sleeves up: time to get to work. Nihilist, existentialist, postmo
dernist from the start—because postmodernism is only the strain of modernism that takes the end of metanarrative as its metanarrative—it was a project so grand that the whole of history had to be material, including that history that hadn’t happened yet—the future. That future is history now, with the sculptures of the Futurists as its memorials, the mechanical landscape of the Machine Age remembered, fetishised in the dynamics of steel forms fragmented to show movement,
change
. SF is the annals of that historical future, the chronicles of the twentieth century’s kinetic potentials as they emerged—fascists on the moon and communist aliens, feminist and capitalist dystopias and utopias—typewritten on a counter-top of shining Formica in the SF Café, amid the accreting kipple of broken Bakelite and plastic dreams—kipple accreting into a truth coded in trash.

The psychological landscape, to the Surrealists, was as much grist for the mill, a similar terrain of fragments thrown together out of context, mundane images juxtaposed to cr
eate cognitive dissonance and, perhaps, new meaning: a man in a bowler hat with an apple where his face should be; a man in a bowler hat with one false eyelash; fish people; mushroom people. The best of what we call SF is a similar cut-up-and-fold-in of the imagery of reality, of the structures of history and myth, the future and the psyche, steel dreams of a new Daedalus. Take a little bit of this culture, a little bit of that, splice and dice, fold and unfold. The best of what we call SF is engaged on the same project, using the same techniques and tools as the most highbrow of the highbrow modernists, every imagistic phrase another petal on a blue flower.

The modernist monster rampaged through literature, roaring in the cloisters of the Temple of Academia, tearing up the Bistro de Critique, pissing on co
nventions, gobbling up
Genres
and spewing them out in pastiche, searching for meaning everywhere, anywhere, in the Fourth Dimension or in the lint stuck in a belly-button; and, in the absence of any absolute certainty, it was left howling its emptiness, or simply laughing madly at the futility of it all. In the end, it was such a damn
freak
that the backlash of horror and incomprehension left it out on the frozen wastes. A black hole always already at the heart of the beast, what put the
post
in (post)modernism (and the reason that
post
is bracketed) was not the failure of that project, only the recognition that the one metanarrative worth shit was a blank page in a nihilist’s notebook.

The modernist experiment and its fall-out left most outside the Temple of Academia, and many inside, utterly aghast.

—What the fuck is this madness, they cried, this gibberish, this self-absorbed, self-referential, stream-of-unconsciousness fiction-which-ate-itself? Take your crazy-ass
Finnegans Wake
and get the hell away from me, ya goddamn loon.

So the uptown mimeticists stepped in, offering a nice and safe
Literary Fiction
for readers and critics averse to the outré excesses of semiosis. And the downtown semioticists stepped in, offering a nice and safe
Genre Fiction
for readers and critics averse to the mundane banalities of mimesis. But on either side of the barricades, uptown with the bores at the cocktail party or downtown with the whores in the ghetto, a few writers furtively carried on the tradition. They had to play the game in each environ, but at the end of the day there
were
at least havens for the hobo pomos and the homo bohos in the Bistro de Critique and the SF Café.

In the Bistro de Critique they still have the bones of that modernist monster, holy relics wired-together and made to play-act in the puppet-show of (post)modern archness, the semiosis couched in intellectual irony for the u
ptown crowd. In the SF Café, the mimesis had to be similarly couched in sensational rapture for the downtown crowd, but we have the heart of that big old Frankenstein’s fiction, that lumbering patchwork creature obsessed with all the grandiose tales of creation, muttering with mad eloquence about Prometheus and God, Adam and the Devil, but deep down craving only empathy, membership in the human race. We have the heart of modernism, with all its insane ambition, wired into the golem that is clawing its way up out of the cellar even now.