Interfictions
Authors: Delia Sherman
Small Beer Press
www.lcrw.net
Copyright ©2007 by Small Beer Press
First published in 2007, 2007
NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom
Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing.
Copyright © 2007 by the Interstitial Arts Foundation. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously. All rights reserved. Not reproducible without written permission.
Cover art © 2007 by Connie Toebe.
"Introduction” Copyright © 2007 by Heinz Insu Fenkl. Previously published in a longer form as “The Interstitial DMZ": www.interstitialarts.org/why/theinterstitialdmz1.html.
"What We Know About the Lost Families ofâHouse” Copyright © 2007 by Christopher Barzak.
"Post Hoc” Copyright © 2007 by Leslie What.
"The Shoe in SHOES' Window” Copyright © 2007 by Anna Tambour.
"Pallas at Noon” Copyright © 2007 by Joy Marchand.
"Willow Pattern” Copyright © 2007 by Jon Singer.
"Black Feather” Copyright © 2007 by K. Tempest Bradford.
"A Drop of Raspberry” Copyright © 2007 by Csilla Kleinheincz. Translation from the Hungarian Copyright © 2007 by Noémi Szelényi.
"The Utter Proximity of God” Copyright © 2007 by Michael J. DeLuca.
"Alternate Anxieties” Copyright © 2007 by Karen Jordan Allen.
"Burning Beard” Copyright © 2007 by Rachel Pollack.
"Rats” Copyright © 2007 by Veronica Schanoes.
"Climbing Redemption Mountain” Copyright © 2007 by Mikal Trimm.
"Timothy” Copyright © 2007 by Colin Greenland.
"Hunger” Copyright © 2007 by Vandana Singh. Also appears in
The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories
by Vandana Singh, Zubaan (New Delhi, India 2007: www.zubaanbooks.com).
"A Map of the Everywhere” Copyright © 2007 by Matthew Cheney.
"Emblemata” Copyright © 2007 by Léa Silhol. Translation from the French Copyright © 2007 by Sarah Smith.
"When It Rains, You'd Better Get Out of Ulga” Copyright © 2007 by Adrián Ferrero. Translation from the French Copyright © 2007 by Edo Mor.
"Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom” Copyright © 2007 by Holly Phillips.
"A Dirge for Prester John” Copyright © 2007 by Catherynne M. Valente.
"Afterword: The Spaces Between” Copyright © 2007 by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss.
I. An Introduction
I worked on my first book for twenty-three years, from the time I was twelve to the time I turned thirty-five. I am not an especially slow writer; this was writing that had deep meaning for me, writing that was at the beginning of a life-long series of interlinked works. In 1996, this book,
Memories of My Ghost Brother
, was published as a novel.
But
Memories of My Ghost Brother
is not a novel. It is the story of my childhood in Korea, drawn from life but told in such a way that there is a clear aesthetic consciousness behind it.
The decision to call it a novelâand not a memoirâwas made by the publisher's marketing department, not by me.
I had told my editor that given the current state of literary theory, I was comfortable calling my work either thingâa novel (because of its literary style, its use of tropes, its collaging of time and character) or a memoir (because nearly everything in it is true, in the factual sense, within the realm of flexibility for that form). I had just come out of a PhD program in Cultural Anthropology, having spent the last several years heavily engaged with the theory of ethnographic writing.
Memories of My Ghost Brother
was what I had written in response to, and in implicit criticism of, both ethnographic and theoretical works I had been reading. It was what I was compelled to finish instead of my dissertation monograph.
Nearly a decade after its initial publication, there is now another publisher that would like to repackage
Memories of My Ghost Brother
as a memoir.
I have directly experienced the power of binary oppositions in the world of publishing. As an academic with a background in a wide range of theoretical approaches, including semiotics and structuralism, it is no surprise to me; but as a first-time “novelist,” this experience was both disillusioning and educational. It gave me that proverbial eye-opening look behind the scenes, and as I began to work later with small presses, I learned things that helped me become a more realistic academic. For me as the writer of an autobiographical narrative that pushed the envelope in both directions, the problem of categories was: memoir or novel (fact or fiction)? I approached it head-on by labeling my work “autoethnography."
In an essay I called “an autoethonographic recursion,” I looked at my own writing as if I were an anthropologist looking at a text, and this exercise helped me put to rest a tangle of theoretical and writerly problems. I had been familiar with various theoretical approaches to texts, which examine their “liminality” or “hybridity,” often applying terms with the prefixes “inter” or “trans” ("intertextuality” and “transnationality,” for example), but these approaches all rely on an implicit notion of dichotomy combined with the idea of moving from one state to another or combining (intersecting) one thing with another.
In the world of publishing, this way of thinking presents itself as a series of either/or decisions: Fact or Fiction, Fantasy or Science Fiction, Genre or Mainstream, Mystery or History? I present these categorical problems as dilemmas of a sort, but in many cases the possibilities are not initially limited only to two; and yet, when a particular work is hard to classify, its final label is then often compared to or contrasted with a series of other possibilities, one at a time.
The result may be that an either/or decision (which implicitly negates neither/nor) produces a thing that then follows an and/or logicâand then transcends it, perhaps by ignoring it altogether.
II. The Interstices
An interstice is not an intersection. (That is why a concept like hybridity, by itself, is not adequate to the idea of the Interstitial.) The word “interstice” comes from the Latin roots “inter” (between) and “sistere” (to stand). Literally, it means to “stand between” or “stand in the middle.” It generally refers to a space between things: a chink in a fence, a gap in the clouds, a DMZ between nations at war, the potentially infinite space between two musical notes, a form of writing that defies genre classification.
An interstitial thing falls between categories, and so one might think of “interstitial” as coterminous with “liminal” (from the Latin “limen,” meaning threshold, or “limes,” referring to boundaryâthe word “limit” comes from the same root). Liminality is a concept made prominent (in Anthropology) by Victor Turner, who used it to refer to that strange “betwixt and between” state initiates go through in rites of passage. Liminality is a suspended state, but there is an underlying idea that it is also transitional.
In the field of Cultural Studies, the figure most identified with the idea of liminality is Homi K. Bhabha, who deals with various boundaries and borders, concepts directly relevant to the issue of
Interfictions
. In his introduction to
The Location of Culture
, he writes: “It is in the emergence of the intersticesâthe overlap and displacement of domains of differenceâthat the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated.” Bhabha is writing about nations, cultures, and marginalized peoples, but what he says is just as applicable to the world of literature. In place of “nationness” we can think “genre” (or, more widely, “marketing category") and the parallels are quite clear. Imagine the “domains of difference” being the vaguely-articulated features that distinguish the category “Fantasy” from “Mainstream Fiction” and the ideas of “community interest” and “cultural value” become apparent. And this is not an inappropriate application of Bhabha's ideasâwe are still dealing with domains of discourse and the relationship among centralized power, the margins, and minority groups. In the realm of discourse, the dynamics are remarkably parallel.
In the world of genre literature, there are few venues that seek “to authorize cultural hybridities” (as Bhabha puts it) except perhaps some recent e-zines and web resources.
Science Fiction Eye
comes to mind as a forum for genre discourse, but its circulation was small, and one could argue that even with its elite readership and contributorship, its general impact was minimal. And yet we are clearly in one of those moments of historical transformation.
III. In the Interstitial DMZ
There is a major difference between liminality and interstitiality. Unlike the liminal, the Interstitial is not implicitly transitoryâthat is to say, it is not on its way toward becoming something else. The liminal state in a rite of passage precedes the final phase, which is reintegration, but an interstitial work does not require reintegrationâit already has its own being in a willfully transgressive or noncategorical way. Interstitial works maintain a consciousness of the boundaries they have crossed or disengaged with; they present a clear awareness of the kinds of subtexts which might be their closest classifiable counterparts.
The problem with an interstitial work is in its relationship with the audienceâboth its initial audience (which we may construe, for economy's sake, as the publisher) and its eventual audience, the readers. The relationship between reader and text, as we all know, is integral because each separate reader of the same text creates a unique work in his or her mind. Our general agreements about the plot or theme of a work are essentially the same as our agreements about the “real” world, which is actually determined by cultural consensus. Interstitial works have a special relationship with the reader because they have a higher degree of indeterminacy (or one could say a greater range of potentialities) than a typical work.
For example, if an interstitial novel is determined to be Fantasy by its publisher, a reader, having the parameters of initial engagement with the text predetermined, might experience it as a Fantasy novel exhibiting odd dissonances or interesting novelties in relation to that genre.
Barry Hughart's
Bridge of Birds
is a novel that did well in its genre classification, winning the World Fantasy Award in 1985. Fantasy readers found the work uniquely vivid and full of a sharp and lively humor. The backdrop, a “China that never was,” proved the novel feature, and all of the representations of that mythic China (a collage of different historical periods and literary sensibilities) were what made the book unique in the genre. But read outside the genre by a reader unfamiliar with the built-in expectations of Fantasy, say, a reader of Mystery novels,
Bridge of Birds
presents an updated twist on an old tradition started by the Dutch diplomat Robert Van Gulik, with the Judge Dee series, set in T'ang Dynasty China. Yet another category of readerâsay, one with background in Asian Studiesâmight appreciate Hughart's mixing of history and fiction, something Van Gulik's could not do as brilliantly after the initial Judge Dee novel (which happened to be a translation of an eighteenth-century Chinese novel set against a T'ang Dynasty backdrop).
