Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (8 page)

Here’s a rather more contentious honing of that definition, situating the ae
sthetic form in its historical context:

Originally coined as a substitute for the more unwieldy labels of scientific romance or scientifiction, the term
Science Fiction
properly applies to a short-lived
Genre
of the early to mid twentieth century
Modern Pulp
boom utilising Romantic character types, plot structures and settings but sourcing its fantasia in Rationalist futurology. This genre existed for a few decades at most before its practitioners exploded the rigid conventions of the original form.

Trust me, I know this closed definition invites irate challenges. Just how short-lived is short-lived? If we are defining this form as pulp are we excluding works published outside this commercial environment? Where do Jules Verne and H.G. Wells sit in relation to this
Science Fiction
? What of Orwell or Huxley? Don’t these writers fit the open definitions of science fiction that have accreted to the coinage? And if so, why are we denying them a seat in the SF Café, saying they’re not
Science Fiction
? Isn’t this too narrowly limiting our scope?

It’s certainly a narrower view than that of Brian Aldiss who, in his
Trillion Year Spree
, positions science fiction as an outgrowth of the Gothic, tracing it back to Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
as point of origin. Aldiss’s is a fair argument. He is not simply co-opting a classic in a grasp for literary credibility, the common accusation of science fiction’s detractors whenever this sort of case is made—his analysis is a valid attempt to trace the roots of this mode of writing—but there’s a substantial disjunct between the dynamics of the
monstrous
in Shelley’s novel and that of the
marvellous
by which a fantasia is driven.

They’re as diametrically opposed as dread and desire, as
should not
and
should
, as
must not
and
must
; the horror (i.e. the monstrous) that permeates
Gothic Romance
is, if anything, the direct antithesis of the sense-of-wonder (i.e. the marvellous plus the incredible) that this bold Campbellian
Science Fiction
inherits from the fantasias of
Modern Pulp
. We might point at
Frankenstein
as a landmark en route, but it is not
Science Fiction
.

No, the SF Café, when it opens, comes as a new scene with a new vibe—it has its goths, but there’s a damn sight more geeks among the host of freaks frequenting it. The Gottischromanzen Kaffeehaus sat on a different corner of Mass Market Square entirely from the SF Café. Its blasted shell still sits there, in fact, haunted by sparkly vampires too meek for the Darkening Biergarten next door, first casualty in the Culture Wars that created the ghetto of Genre.

The Culture Wars? you say.

Let’s jump back a few centuries, to the period when the Enlightenment was radically reshaping our notions of literature. In the city-state of New Sodom in those days, co
ming out of the Renaissance, you had two rival aesthetics, one attaching itself to this new scientific outlook called Rationalism, idealising reason, and the other grounded in the flip-side worldview of Romanticism, idealising passion. Each was defined partly in relation to the past (Classical Greece on the one hand and Dark Ages Europe on the other) but largely in relation to each other.

One day, into this worldscape, into the city of New Sodom, a strange figure rides. He dismounts, strides into the Tall Tale Tavern, where poets and stor
ytellers sit recounting grandiose nonsenses, endless episodes of
Chivalric Romance
like
Amadis de Gaula
. With a bitter biting grin, Cervantes slams his
Don Quixote
down upon a wooden table and begins, his savage satire bringing a Rationalist’s scorn of wonder to bear, crafting a modern endeavour quite distinct from the heroic Romances of his peers—an endeavour that will come to be known as the
novel
.

In the centuries that follow, that novel takes a curious course. The Romantic aesthetic is brought back into play, as writers respond to the response, critique the critique, attempt to fuse the two aesthetics, to create a
Rationalist Romance
; the
Gothic Romance
and the
Victorian Realist
novel make fuckee-fuckee in the minds of unashamed synthesists, give us works like
Wuthering Heights
. In the dialectic between the two factions, in the interzones where they collide and collude through the medium of individual texts—where the author isn’t purely allied one way or the other but playing out the conflict in their writing—there emerges a synthesis of Rationalist thesis and Romanticist antithesis that we might call Protomodern.

In that long period up to 1900 or just beyond we get the roots of every co
ntemporary
Genre
. We get Samuel Richardson, Ann Radcliffe, Emily Brontë, Jane Austen (roots of
Romance
). We get Sara Coleridge, George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, E. Nesbit, Kenneth Grahame (roots of
Fantasy
). We get Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Buchan, H. Rider Haggard (roots of
Adventure
). We get Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, M.R. James (roots of
Horror
). We get Ernest William Hornung, Arthur Conan Doyle (roots of
Crime
and
Mystery
and
Thriller
). We get Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells (roots of
Science Fiction
).

None of their works are
genre fiction
in the modern sense because
Genre
in the modern sense doesn’t yet exist—the walls of the ghetto have not yet been built—but a slow drift of writers uptown or downtown does begin to gradually reshape the city of New Sodom, a divide emerging between the polar extremes of
Gothic
and
Realist
fictions, Romantic and Rationalist, “Popular Fiction” and “Literature.” The petit bourgeois haven’t yet degraded the debate with their middlebrow propriety, haven’t yet sealed the coming century of straight white male (and middle-aged and middle-class) scorn for the sensational, but writers themselves are a combative bunch when it comes to aesthetics, and the generation before
Genre
are born into a discourse that’s been brewing since Cervantes.

So, some of these writers find themselves on one or other side of that boundary, drawn to the Gottischromanzen Kaffeehaus downtown or the Social Realist Tea Room uptown. Still, many of them live and work in that interzone between the two, formative of mult
iple
Genres
because they work in multiple modes, creating works acknowledged to this day as part of the canon. The literary variety journals in the UK, most notably
The Strand
, capture the last days of this Protomodern period perfectly, publishing many of the writers named above, printing poetry and fiction in any and every mode. Ghost stories, detective stories, all sorts of strange fictions pervade the Protomodern periodicals, fiction that exploits a sense of the incredible with events that breach the laws of nature, or taps into our fears and desires with the marvellous and the monstrous, or teases us with the mysterious, titillates with the mundane monstrosities and absurdities of melodrama and the grotesque—c.f. Dickens.

If these works don’t sit in
Genre
, they’re clearly using the
techniques
of
Genre
, the effects derived from stepping outside the strictures of mimetic
Realism
. But this is hardly shocking, that
Genre
of
Realism
only in this period defining itself into existence by the spurning of such quirks, the default of fiction not so delimited thus being to use whatever tools are fit to purpose. The scorn of the sensational may not be entirely modern, but it’s certainly not the prevailing tide in literature’s history.

It is in these journals, among the tales of mystery and adventure that the embryo that will become
Science Fiction
gestates, scion of Sherlock Holmes and Allan Quatermain as much as Victor Frankenstein.

Then the steam train of modernity hits, leads to mass-production and mass-marketing, greater literacy and a corresponding shift in class demographics. Through the last half of the nineteenth century we see the penny dreadfuls and dime novels burgeoning. With the turn of the new century comes category fi
ction—magazines and imprints dedicated to specific forms. From the early 1900s through to the 1930s or 1940s, a boom of
Modern Pulp
utterly reshapes the territory. It’s a totally evolutionary process—expansion, diffusion, isolation, specialisation—that leads to the
Genres
we still have today—and a few that are now all but defunct—as the idioms carved out to sit under a rackspace label.

A process of formulation sets in within all of those
Genres
, of course; the formal conceits by which we recognise an idiom are only a step from the formulaic strictures by which we mechanise its manufacturing, and if an idiom sells you can bet that step will be taken. Marketing to readers on the basis that there’s an audience for “more of the same” means codifying “the same,” defining what each
Genre
is, or should be, in terms of tropes of character, worldscape and plot structure. Where a genre becomes a
Genre
, indeed, is in large part in that fact of formulation.

The fallout of this is the Culture Wars. All of these fictions being driven by the
Modern Pulp
dynamics of the sensational, the power of conjuring what woulda coulda shoulda been, any fiction using that dynamics is now perceived as being not simply a work within this or that
Genre
(
Gothic
,
Mystery
,
Adventure
, etc.) but as having a common quality of sensationalism by which a super-class can be identified:
Genre Fiction
. The requirement for that mode of conjuring in category fiction makes it a marker of populist pandering in opposition to literary craft…assuming an ignorance of the artistry by which sensational and intellectual are allied, assuming an unconsidered reverence for literature that mutes the former and/or mediates it with the latter—as in the distanced narrative of the Victorian novelist as observer, commentator, critic.

For the middlebrow petit bourgeoisie to whom intellectual status is i
mportant and for whom observation and commentary is equated with relevance and insight, a crisis of faith is inevitable—should they really be reading this sensationalist pulp? Should they really be reading this…
Genre Fiction
? Should they be writing it, editing it, publishing it?

So the battle-lines are drawn, tastes divided into good and bad, the dynamics of the sensational abjured in the name of propriety, the entire toolkit of formal conceits unde
rpinning it shunned as signifiers of that quality. Soon there’s no way you could publish a journal like
The Strand
, no way you could run a publishing imprint with a similar diversity. The fiction which mutes and mediates the sensational gets bootstrapped
to
privilege
by
privilege, and before you know it that rupture has become a rift between
Literature
and
Genre
.

We cast that schism as highbrow versus lowbrow, but in truth the first salvo in the Culture Wars is fired by the middlebrow and it is their enterprise, this construction of
Literature
in the abjection of
Genre
; the mediocre must establish their edification to rectitude, propriety of taste, in the expulsion of the gauche, whereas an actual elevation of craft or critique leads more to scorn of literary decorum. The gauche for their part are blasé about the volleys fired in their direction, happy to see the walls rise around a ghetto they constructed anyway, an aesthetic territory carved out and carved up by rackspace labels in their own enterprise of commercial cultivation. It’s in their interest that the heirs of all those Protomodern writers find the uptown districts of New Sodom hostile.

And so the barricades are built and we find ourselves in that downtown di
strict of New Sodom, in that dodgy neighbourhood known as Genre, on the corner of Street & Smith, where
Science Fiction
was born, in a flurry of futurity’s onset, in panic and excitement, a bastard child of the reviled, of the pulps, of the
vulgar
mob’s
Dime Novel
and the
hysterical
female’s
Sensation Novel
.

And its first infant squall ripped the air, a rupture in reality—

The Third Axis

It seems to me in some murky way that in genre fiction there ought to be a third axis-of-story here, a third dimension of thought. Call them genre devices. These are the things which make a genre story what it is, rather than naturalistic fiction.

Jay Lake

Elsewhen in the SF Café, Jay Lake proposes a three-axis view of what he r
efers to—what a lot of people refer to—as
genre fiction
. But what does he mean by that label? Given that
Naturalism
and
Realism
are as much genres as SF,
Fantasy
and
Horror
, or
Western
,
Crime
and
Chick-Lit
—they’re just not marketing categories—given that all fiction sits in one genre or another, all fiction is, strictly speaking, genre fiction. Sometimes what we mean by the term is simply category fiction, fiction sold under some particular rackspace label. Here in the SF Café though what we mean when we say
genre fiction
is largely that type of fiction, often sold as pulp, but sometimes not, distinguished from general fiction by the presence of…
something
. What we really mean is the fiction that doesn’t quite fit with the rest of that common-or-garden everyday mundane fiction.

What we mean is strange fiction.

Lake’s three-axis approach makes it clear this is what he means. The first axis he offers is story elements—character, situation, problem, solution. The second axis he offers is craft techniques—voice, tense, point-of-view, style. The third axis is…
something
, the distinctive quirky whatever-the-fucks that distinguish this type of work from the mimetic, from mundane fiction. What these whojamaflips might be, what might represent that third axis in the model, is the crucial question of what makes strange fiction strange.

To Map the Strangeness

We should not, of course, simply ignore the role of authorial intent and reader inte
rpretation in the decision over whether or not this work or that is
genre fiction
—which is to say, whether or not it’s strange fiction. In its intersection with the rackspace label of SF, strange fiction often seems to acquire that label by ad hoc consensus, as much as anything else. If we begin by looking for some more objective criteria, we are assuming that those criteria exist, that a work of strange fiction may be in that aesthetic idiom regardless of subjective judgement. This isn’t necessarily the best starting point. So:

1) Does authorial intent determine the nature of the work?

2) Does authorial intent (legitimately) influence the reader’s experience of the work?

3) Is authorial intent even relevant at all to the reader’s experience of the work?

Jay Lake

The reality is, I think, that all of this depends if you’re viewing genre as a market cat
egory, a conventional template or an aesthetic idiom.

If SF is just a label slapped on a book to position it in the marketplace, then Lake’s
Rocket Science
, to take one example, is SF because the publisher has decided it is. Authorial intent and reader experience are factors in their decision, but ultimately what matters most is whether more units will shift if you put it in the SF section. Whether a work qualifies to sit in the SF section is arbitrated on a simple basis: fuck it, we can sell this as SF so it
is
SF. We have only a granfalloon of a marketing category constructed by gatekeepers, inclusion or exclusion decided by authority.

If we’re to look past those authorities and see SF as a conventional template (or fuzzy set of such), a consensus judgement thrashed out by writers and readers, a matter of pu
rpose (authorial intent) and import (reader experience), we have now a historical genre, but it is still a granfalloon, and there is patently no real consensus. This is the rabbit hole of SF as a subset of SF, a turf war of multiple aesthetics that’s really political, proprietorial: which aesthetic has the more legitimate claim to a nominal label?

If we want to play that game, we might seek to unravel the legitimacy of claims, the actualities of territorial coups and negotiated compromises, to map out the discourse of a historical genre, but to look for a third axis goes beyond this into the question of what it is
about the fiction itself
all those turf wars are taking place over,
what
the purposes are,
what
the imports are,
how they work
.