Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (48 page)

If we rearticulate Sterling’s thesis, we might, I hope, get to the heart of a type of fiction which is not just strange but strange in the strangest way. If I fall into the use of dichotomies like
genre
versus
mainstream
here, bear in mind that these are only informal approximations in the schema of strange fiction proposed. Ultimately, in the infernokrusher spirit, we need to put a bullet through every instance of those terms, blast them the fuck out of the discourse. We need to give the whole debate a lead injection of the strange—the absurd, the abject and the incredible most of all—take a flamethrower to it and burn away all that pertains to strange fiction in its general sense, all the commonalities that are simply the product of their being strange fiction, whether sold as genre or as mainstream. Explode the very terms
conventions
and
strictures
.

If we characterise this type of fiction as Sterling does, by features of att
itude, composition and style, there is little that infernokrusher does, attitudinally, that other types of strange fiction don’t. Likewise, compositionally, many of Sterling’s characteristics are simply those of strange fiction which exploits rather than explains or excuses, characteristics of rhapsody. And his focus on irrationality, “darker elements” which refuse to be made sense of, simply point towards an overlap between the strange and the monstrous, the natural co-occurrence of the alethic modality of “could not happen” and the boulomaic modalities of “should not happen” or “must not happen,” the unease that these engender.

Stylistically
, however, Sterling identifies additional techniques of estrangement we have only touched on—collage narrative (think Burroughs), metafiction (think Borges), typographical layout (think Bester). These are the techniques of the modernists and postmodernists, of course, so perhaps all we are talking about here is a subset of (post)modernist strange fiction. But Sterling’s characterisation of the elsewhens of this type of story as
not
“clearcut departures from the known world,” as “integral to the author’s worldview,” as “in the nature of an inherent dementia” point us to something other—or something more—than the dislocations we have posited for strange narratives.

This is an explicit rejection of the idea that the reader’s way out is to repos
ition the narrative in an elsewhen in which they “could have happened.” Does this type of fiction simply not perform these dislocations then? One way to put it might be to say that the reader is indeed dislocated but left hanging in the subjunctivity level of “could not have happened” because they are refused the
stability
of an artificial elsewhen under their feet. Or we could look at another way. We could say that it does dislocate the reader to an elsewhen, it’s just that it does something extra. It does indeed rip the reader sideways and forward and up, to a hypothetical, counterfactual, metaphysical elsewhen.

It’s just that it brings the whole fucking reality we live in with it.

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what we are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.

Donald Barthelme

In the SF Café, if one looks out of the corner of one’s eye at the lapels of this patron or that, one might notice a blue flower as a buttonhole, a sweet-scented and asymmetrica
lly-petalled orchid of a shade somewhere near azure and indigo, across from cerulean and cyan. Take a walk outside, squinting your eyes against the sunlight and you might notice these flowers growing from every crack in the sidewalks of the ghetto of Genre. They sprout in the crack that runs right across the floor of the SF Café. It is a strange blue, the blue of the blue flower—enigma and exotica, artifice or anomaly.

For one SF loyalist—let’s call him Strawman—those blue flowers on the l
apels of the SF Café’s irregular regulars are a vile sight. Often you’ll hear him mutter that the blue flower is a weed to be eradicated, a sign of all that’s wrong with the ghetto of Genre, the lotus of the lotus-eaters. Those who wear it, he’s convinced, do so as sign of their allegiance to some mystic cult, some latter-day Golden Dawn or Theosophical Society…an Order of the Blue Flower. He does not trust such an enigma; all enigma is the ineffable to Strawman, and the ineffable is the irrational. It is fantasy. He recoils in revulsion from the heady hallucinogenic Blue Flower Tea served in the SF Café…which is an entirely natural response of disgust to blue-coloured food, of course…not reasoned, not rational, but natural.

His suspicion is not entirely misplaced. The blue flower was once a symbol of Romanticism: the blue flower of Novalis’s
Heinrich von Ofterdingen
; of Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff’s “Die blaue Blume”; the flower that Adelbert von Chamisso saw as the symbol of our striving for love and eternity; the flower Goethe searched for in the countryside of Italy; the flower C.S. Lewis declared himself a votary of, associated with the yearning of Sehnsucht. Strawman hears tell of it in George R.R. Martin’s
A Song of Ice and Fire
series. He hears it in the talk of latter-day Romantics, their boasts of the grand lineage of their cult—MacDonald, Tennyson, Macpherson, Spenser, Malory, Geoffrey of Monmouth. But if Strawman looked closer, he might see that the emblems of an imaginary lost idyll those dreamers cradle in their cupped palms are paper copies. Closer still and he might see the real blue flower they don’t even know they’re wearing on their lapels. He might see the blue flower he’s wearing on his own.

The blue flower is not fantasy but rhapsody, the strange. If it might be s
upernatural, some magical blossom sprouting and blooming through rifts in reality itself, it might as easily be extraterrestrial, an alien life-form carried to the planet by a meteorite. Marvellous or monstrous, uncanny or weird, all we can say for sure is that it has no place in our experience of the world. To glimpse the blue flower is to see something with no place in all known history, known science. It might even be beyond the laws of nature or the strictures of logic. Or not.

If Strawman studied his own blue flower, he’d find that its blue is Hume’s hypothe
tical “missing shade of blue,” a shade unknown in nature, never seen, but imaginable in the mind’s eye…perhaps. This was Hume’s thought experiment: if conception is a recombination of perception, he asked, could we then imagine a colour we have never sensed? Hume was unsure, but given that blue and yellow, green and red, black and white, we now know, are only the symbolic dimensions in which our sense of colour is constructed as an abstract modelling of light frequencies by opponent processes, to take this literally rather than figuratively, the positive answer is obvious. It’s like asking if we can imagine a number between fifty-four and fifty-six without ever seeing a group of fifty-five things; the possibility is self-evident, our mind a palette made to mix shades of colours which are always already imaginary.

To push the question beyond the literal though, towards a deeper interrog
ation, is to make the blue of the blue flower a figuration of the figurative itself. It is to imagine that blue only our symbol of another missing shade, a blue that lies not between two shades we’ve seen but beyond them all—a bluer-than-blue. The blue of the blue flower is a colour out of colourspace imagined in place of a colour from beyond it, a surrogate we conjure in order to visualise the strange flower right in front of us. It is our rendering of the as-yet-unspoken, which was once Romantic, once purely a locus of the sensational, but which became, with the advent of modernity, too dangerous to leave unspoken. It is the impossible blue by which we articulate what others claim ineffable, do so figuratively in defiant experiments of unmoored metaphor, success uncertain. It’s the entirely new yellowish-blue seen by the subjects of Billock, Gleason and Tsou’s experiments in suppressing the mutual inhibition of opponent processes that otherwise prevents such a sensation.

The blue flower is that from which Philip K. Dick’s fictitious Substance D is derived in
A Scanner Darkly
. It’s the strangeness in that fiction that’s not Romantic awe but existential angst, in which metaphysical questions of the nature of reality are bound to questions of the nature of humanity, in which scientific rationalism is far from the point but in which the core value of secular humanism is—empathy. It’s the blue flower worn by Lil the Dancer in David Lynch’s
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
, an oneiric enigma of signifier divorced from signified, the irrational perhaps, but the unreason masked by mundane shams of order, the faux reality of the suburbs; it seeks to render the as-yet-unspoken of the bugfuck nutjobbery that lurks beneath. It is not the ineffable but the touchstones by which we demarcate it, begin to make it effable. It’s the blue flower that might have been described in the meticulous botanical detail of a Guy Davenport story, “The Meadow,” say…though it so happens that it wasn’t.

Bradbury, Silverberg, Zelazny—all wear the blue flower as a buttonhole. All strange fiction writers wear the blue flower, whether they call it supernat
ural or extraterrestrial, both words parsing to the same relational meaning, different only in the subtle shading: super- or extra- denoting from above, outside, beyond; natural or terrestrial denoting of or pertaining to the condition we were born into, the soil that we live on, the world as our material environment. The blue flower is the quirk, and the quirk is alterity. Wherever strange fictions serve as a force against base prejudice, it is because of how they treat that alterity—not credulous in a conviction that we will be saved or slaughtered by the extraterrestrial or supernatural but sceptical of all Camp Consolation’s tales that cast the Other as enemy. It is all too easy to be prejudiced against blacks and gays when your SF is telling you that the invading aliens and the mutants in the wastelands are just plain dangerous.

Where this is our heroic fantasy—that the blue flowers are poisonous weeds to be stamped out—we are not tackling the rapture of unreason but surrende
ring to it. We will be until we are able to see the flower on every lapel, our own included, until we can see that we are all of us of the Order of the Blue Flower.

Living in the ghetto, the stranglehold that contemporary realism has exerted over the literature of the last half century or so seems self-evident, with all that is unreal, weird,
strange
—the novum, the erratum, the chimera—largely relegated to the margins, magical realism pretty much alone in being afforded recognition as
Literary Fiction
rather than
Genre Fiction
. The patrons of the Bistro de Critique do have a tendency to see those fields of fiction schismed off as Genre rather than Literature in terms of the dominant formulation—as more interested in plot than character, more concerned with worldbuilding than prose.

Is the perception wholly unfair? Plot is deeply important in that
Genre
fiction which requires not just
narrative
but
story
, and the conceit is an integral aspect of these strange fictions, extrapolated out through the text, the reimagining of reality at the core of what the work is saying and how it says it, from the worldbuilding of Tolkien or Peake to most any work by Ballard. This is why “mainstream” writers who use the strange (Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, Gabriel García Márquez, Angela Carter, Edward Whittemore and so on) appeal deeply and widely to the SF market, why SF readers are drawn to them, why SF writers very often cite them as influences and write similar works that they can then sell as SF. We recognise the blue flower on their lapels.

Beat writers, (post)modernists, magic realists, all manner of fantasists, fab
ulists and plain old weird-ass experimentalists have been popular amongst SF readers so long that a market for their work is well and truly established within the ghetto of Genre, a more dynamic and cohesive market possibly than anything the district of Literature has to offer. There are whole magazines, anthologies and imprints which focus primarily on this type of fiction and form a significant facet of the field. More conventional magazines, anthologies and imprints continually publish fiction of this type, reflecting that facet. Result: there are writers like Kelly Link and Jeffrey Ford, who reside largely in the ghetto of Genre but who clearly belong in the same aesthetic territory as those writers above, in terms of both approach and quality. The idea that these writers are unconcerned with characterisation and prose is risible at best. The Blue Flower Tea of the SF Café does not dull the palate but stimulates it.

Truth is, we’ve had delicatessens in the ghetto of Genre for decades now, and gastro pubs selling gourmet cuisine to the hipsters. The SF Café isn’t even the only place to go. Hell, we’ve got opium dens dealing prose that will get you
truly
whacked out. Head down to the Paraliterary Diner and try out some of the Delany. Or some fresh Lucius Shepard might be more to your taste. Ask Matt Cheney at The Mumpsimus Tourist Centre what’s good and tell him I sent you. You may have walked a few blocks in, seen a few of the most popular tourist spots—Gaiman’s Café, Le Guin’s Bar and Grill—and a few of the old run-down greasy spoons (man, I wouldn’t let my dog eat at Tolkien’s Trattoria)…but you have to check out the centre and the side-streets around it, not be spooked into flight by the wildlife, weird as we may seem at times. Remember to take some time to smell the flowers that sprout from every crack in the sidewalk.

It is unfortunate that, for those writers of
Literary Fiction
who have little concern with the pataphor, the concrete metaphor or conceit, a passing awareness of this technique shades into a sweeping dismissal, an assumption that
Genre Fiction
focuses on this element to the detriment of the prose—but more for them than for us. The ramification of the prejudice that results from this is that there’s a whole literary technique which their fiction excludes, and a readership, it seems, who care little about the vast potential squandered, but do care about: well-turned and well-heeled sentences; well-observed and insightful characterisation; a pat epiphany at the end.