Unknown countries (10): Discussion and conclusions
Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, March 23, 2010 Under: writing
This is an investigation of eight novels
incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions
about the
place of speculation in fiction.
Let’s recap what I am trying to do here. I
wanted to consider eight books with non-naturalistic content. I chose
eight I had
never read before, because I wanted this to be an open-ended
investigation, a
kind of thinking online without preconceptions about what I was trying
to
achieve.
I also stated at the outset that part of my
project was to determine whether there is any intrinsically literary
meaning in
the classification of fiction as “mainstream” or “genre”, or whether
such
stratification has to do primarily with marketing.
Just to remind you, the books were:
Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things
(1987)
G K Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday
(1908)
Michel Houellbecq: The Possibility of an
Island (2005)
Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)
Richard Jefferies: After London, or Wild
England (1885)
J Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)
China Miéville: Perdido Street Station
(2000)
Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)
Before proceeding further, let me say that
my correspondent Paul A Green early in this project made the all-too-obvious point on my behalf that
it
“could be argued that
all fiction is sui generis "fantastic"
in the process of composition insofar it involves what the
philosopher/psychologist
Julian Jaynes called ‘narratisation’, the conscious construction of an
internalised world which is not consensual reality, and which , being
based in
language, depends on analogy & metaphor.”
This is true, and also
leads us into unfathomable waters. If all fiction is fantasy, there is
nothing
to be said. If it’s a question of drawing a line between descriptions of
what
could and couldn’t possibly happen, well, who would determine where that
line
might lie?
More determinable
perhaps are attitudes to the question of narrative. In The Rise of the
Novel
(1957), Ian Watt discusses the shift from a world where writers took
their
narrative material from existing public-domain sources – mythology,
religion,
history – to that of Daniel Defoe and later writers who, essentially,
made
things up. Though Watt also refers to Defoe’s Puritanical defence of
Robinson
Crusoe, which was attacked precisely for being fictitious, claiming in
his
preface that the story “though allegorical, is also historical”. (Defoe
also
famously criticised Homer for perpetrating “meer fiction”, obscuring the
historical facts of the Trojan War.)
At the same time, that
shift entailed a new attitude to the handling of narrative, and of the
characters playing it out. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, the
fantastical characters are ciphers, metaphorically wearing masks or
carrying
placards proclaiming their existential roles; there is no question of
their
having an “inner life”. Post-Defoe, the characters are recognisably
individual
human beings with no primary allegorical functions, and the treatment
accordingly is increasingly realistic, in the way we have come to
recognise.
Though of course that trend is already pretty obvious in Chaucer and
Shakespeare, it accelerates as bourgeois civilisation develops.
And yet fantastic content comes back in
different ways, for purposes including satire, or the satisfaction of
needs for
wonder, mystery and excitement. Hard on the heels of Defoe (and
Cervantes), we
have Swift, with Gulliver’s Travels. And then the Gothic novel, Poe,
Jules
Verne, Mary Shelley, Conan Doyle and the invention of the detective
novel, the
horror or ghost story and science fiction.
Returning to our eight exemplary novels,
the first thing to be said is that they all inhabit the post-Defoe
universe.
All their characters are constructed as recognisable individual human
beings,
whatever their guise: even the grotesque “xenians” of Miéville’s Perdido
Street
Station are actually human individuals in disguise. In this sense, all
eight
books are bourgeois novels, not allegories or mythological fables.
In his review of Paul Auster which I’ve
already cited, James Wood asserts somewhat condescendingly that Auster’s
“narratives conduct themselves like realistic stories, except for a
slight lack
of conviction and a general B-movie atmosphere”. The degree of
naturalism
varies among these eight books: from the apparent deadpan realism of
Ishiguro,
which nevertheless partakes of the logic of a dream, to the Dickensian
super-realism of LeFanu’s horror tale in which ghosts are threatened but
never
actually materialise, to the contemporary/historical settings of Priest
and
Houellbecq with the SF McGuffins that take them into a different
dimension, to
the cartoonish absurdity of Chesterton, to the fantastical worlds (but
rooted
in England) of Jefferies and Miéville.
What other common themes do we find? Here
are some:
Cities: Fantastical cities, with more or
less nightmarish qualities, are centrepieces of at least three of these
novels.
New Crobuzon, the setting for Perdido Street Station, is the nightmarish
city
par excellence, lingering in the reader’s memory well after details of
plot and
characters have faded. (I am reminded by two of my correspondents, by
the way,
that Miéville’s achievement owes as much if not to more to M John
Harrison’s
Viriconium series as to Mervyn Peake.) Auster’s unnamed city, consuming
itself
and falling apart before our eyes, is a black hole from which no escape
is
possible. Ishiguro’s unnamed city, probably somewhere in middle Europe,
is less
obviously frightening on the surface, but also has the feel of a dream
from
which escape is impossible.
In addition, there is Jefferies’ London,
which no longer exists in his far-future scenario, but whose
phantasmagorical
remains are at the heart of the narrative, waiting to trap forever
anyone
foolish enough to venture within their bounds.
Paradoxes or impossibilities: Chesterton’s
famous “paradoxes” are of course all over The Man Who Was Thursday, and
they do
get up my nose at times, but the central paradox of a supreme anarchist
council
(!) that turns out to be almost entirely composed of infiltrators, with a
head
who is an enigma, is not bad. I have already mentioned that the entire
narrative of In the Country of Last Things is a logical absurdity, in
that it
is enclosed within a city from which no escape is possible. The
Unconsoled
abounds in the absurdities of dreams: long journeys that end in the same
place
they started from, conversations reported verbatim by the narrator, of
whose
import he seems totally unaware, time-scales stretched to breaking
point,
characters from the protagonist’s past appearing unexpectedly for no
apparent
reason, bizarre coincidences that occasion no surprise.
Dream-like states: The Auster, Jefferies,
Le Fanu and Miéville books all have dreamlike or nightmarish qualities
in whole
or part, and The Unconsoled, as we have seen, is in effect a 400-page
dream
narrative.
Cults: The Possibility of an Island
revolves around a religious cult that develops cloning as a means to
immortality. Chesterton’s narrative is a satirical study of political
cultishness and the extremes of behaviour it does or doesn’t lead to.
Curiously, religious sects make an early appearance that is never
followed up in
two of the other novels: in Uncle Silas, an adherent of the
Swedenborgians
appears at first to have a sinister influence on the heroine’s father,
and in
The Prestige the present-day narrator is investigating a Californian
cult at
the outset – but both of these turn out to be red herrings.
Catastrophe: After London, as we have seen,
is a prototype of the English Catastrophe tradition. In the Country of
Last
Things describes catastrophic, irrevocable breakdown of human society,
with
creativity and renewal at an end. The Possibility of an Island deals
with (but
rather skates over) the End of Western Civilisation As We Know It.
Terror and/or paranoia: Le Fanu is of
course a master of building terror, then defusing it, then re-building
it.
Priest reserves the terror in The Prestige till the end, when it ramps
up
considerably. Auster’s and Miéville’s are complete terror scenarios.
While
there is danger in Jefferies’ narrative, the only true terror occurs in
the
episode when the remains of London are encountered. There are moments of
terror
in Chesterton, but usually defused by the comedy. As for paranoia, it
permeates
The Unconsoled in a consistently low-key way; terror as such is not a
factor.
Comedy and satire: Ever since Swift,
fantastical content has been a vehicle for political satire, and this is
one of
Houellbecq’s main intentions. For me, it falls flat in that it seems
complicit
with that which it is satirising, but there you are. Chesterton’s tone
throughout is comic, and his satire is on contemporary mores and
political
attitudes. There is much comic writing in Uncle Silas and in The
Unconsoled,
some in Perdido Street Station and a few sly jokes embedded in The
Prestige.
There is little or no comedy in Auster’s unrelentingly tragic book, and
Jefferies appears to have no humour whatsoever.
The unknown: This, to me, is what it’s all
about, which is why I’ve titled this project “Unknown Countries”. The
extent to
which there is an “unknown” in each of these novels, and to which that
unknown
is resolved or not, varies considerably. I shall return to this in a
minute,
but briefly: Auster never reveals what the country he sets his novel in
is, nor
why its decline is so irreversible; Ishiguro’s city seems permanently
unknowable; Jefferies spends much time on exposition and explanation of
the how
but leaves entirely out of account the reason why civilisation in
England has
broken down. The ontological status of Miéville’s city remains unknown
even as
the plot is resolved. Chesterton, Le Fanu and Priest all use the unknown
in
their novels to whip up suspense, and the resolution at the end – the
dénouement – is not necessarily 100% complete.
Finally, the question of the relationship
between each of these books’ fantastical content and genre is not an
easy one
to decide. Does it matter?
It mattered to Sheridan Le Fanu. As I
mentioned in my report on Uncle Silas, he uses his introduction to
bemoan the
fact that his books are labelled “sensational fiction” – in contrast to
those
of, say, Sir Walter Scott, which were deemed high literature in their
day,
albeit full of sensational content. So we see that even in the first
half of
the 19th century the demarcation of fiction into marketing
categories, with “genre” being regarded as a lower form of literary
life, was
under way.
Le Fanu is an interesting case, because he
has never lost that genre tag. He plays with the elements of genre, in
this
case Gothic horror, but he really aspires to be mainstream. He writes
complex
novels with vivid characters and labyrinthine sub-plots, with comedy and
suspense, and he wants to be as highly regarded as Dickens or Scott, but
he is
typecast.
The demarcations have of course become more
apparent in the century following. The literary novel retreated further
from
sensational or exotic content and focused more on everyday bourgeois
life –
think of Henry James. And in the 20th century came modernism,
and
with that the downgrading of plot, and the advance of the “open text”.
Think of
Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Robbe-Grillet. Intricate plotting with an outcome
in
which all the threads are tied at the end increasingly became the
province of
genre.
At the same time, fantastical content has
made a new bid for literary respectability outside of genre. Kafka’s
posthumous
acclaim has been followed in more recent years by the magic realism of
García
Marquez and Salman Rushdie.
The complex relationship between genre and
literary mainstream is examined in a fascinating review of JG Ballard’s
The
Complete Stories by one of the authors under review here, China Miéville (my thanks to
Paul A
Green for drawing this to my attention). Miéville’s cogent argument is
that
Ballard’s apotheosis, gaining ground even as scarcely a few months have
elapsed
since his death, is based on well-meaning misconceptions, by Zadie
Smith,
Martin Amis and others. Ballard is great, Miéville argues, not because
he is
interested in character, not because he shows humanist values or is
life-affirming, none of which is particularly true, but precisely
because he is
a science fiction writer who transcends the genre even while working
within it.
And SF doesn’t mean predicting the future either. Miéville believes
Ballard’s
“apocalypse landscapes are expressions of modern psycho-sociopathology”
and in
this inheres his value.
Miéville’s own novel, Perdido Street
Station, flawed as it may be, demonstrates an attempt to push the SF
genre
beyond itself, to become serious literature, but on its own terms, not
by
betraying its origins. The standard literary response might be that one
cannot
take seriously a book in which characters have insect heads or in which
there
are demented talking giant spiders. In which case, what price Caliban in
The Tempest,
the Houynhmns (educated, talking horses) in Gulliver’s Travels, Kafka’s
Gregor
Samsa turned insect?
There are contemporary instances, on the
other hand, of “serious” writers toying with SF content but trying to
distance
themselves from it for fear of losing respectability – Margaret Atwood,
for
example. In our selection, Michel Houellbecq may be a case in point –
perhaps
that’s one of things that turned me off his book. There’s something
condescending about it. Though Houellbecq did write a serious book about
HP
Lovecraft. Martin Amis won literary plaudits for writing a novel in
which time
goes backwards; few approving reviewers noted that Philip K Dick had
done
exactly the same thing many years earlier.
The case of Kazuo Ishiguro is interesting,
in that he is an established, major prizewinning literary novelist of a
realist
bent who, in The Unconsoled and other recent writing, has ventured, not
so much
into genre as into the Kafkaesque, in other words the avant-garde. One
suspects
that he risks losing readers who loved The Remains of the Day.
But SF and other genre writers who are
pushing the envelope are also doing so by adopting some of the
techniques and
sensibilities of modernism, for example, the “open text”, and ditching
some
elements of “plottiness”. I am indebted to another of my correspondents,
Andy
McDuffie, who in an email suggests that what is noteworthy about a novel
like Perdido
Street Station is that
“it eschews that
hermetic world building of Tolkien, replacing it with something more
mutable,
more open ended. Something that is bolder and, maybe, only explicable in
terms
of a wider context which is not only unknown but unimportant to the
text:
ambiguities taking precedence over the obsessive ‘train set’ mentality
that
informs the fantasies of Tolkien or CS Lewis.”
We read genre books
partly at least for the “what happened next” effect, and for the final
revelation, which we hope will not just fulfil expectations but will
surprise
us. More interesting still is the book that goes further, that doesn’t
deliver
a single pat resolution, that leaves us with questions only we as
readers can
answer. To return to another book from our selection, The Prestige is as
tightly plotted as any genre novel, and commercially successful as such;
but the
plot resolution does leave unexplained residues that linger in the mind;
in the
same way as, nearly a century earlier, Chesterton’s “final revelation”
at the
end of his rollicking tale is a revelation of profound and disturbing
ambiguity
that even his unfailing cheeriness cannot mask. The unknown, the
uncertain, the
unexplained – I love books that leave this in, that don’t just slake the
imaginative thirst.
I am surprised that Miéville, for all his
Marxism, doesn’t have much to say about the class basis of literary
judgements
about genre. I believe – especially in England, of course – this is at
the
heart of it. Literary fiction is respectable. Genre fiction – SF,
fantasy,
horror, crime – is for the lower orders, although it is permissible to
go
slumming in it occasionally. People without a great deal of formal
education
are not expected to know about such niceties. For example, I had a
dearly loved
aunt who veered alarmingly in her enthusiasms between Georgette Heyer
and Jane
Austen. Obviously nobody had ever taught her you weren’t suppose to love
both
equally.
In fact, of course, lit-fic is indeed just
another marketing category, another genre if you like, and has been for
some
years. Perhaps labelled “Contemporary”, you will find it all shelved
together
at many a chain bookstore, and you can bet the publishers’ marketing
departments know exactly the demographic they are aiming at.
To revert briefly, before I finish, to
another subject dear to me, there is a whiff of such class distinctions
in
British attitudes to contemporary poetry. There is Poetry with a capital
P, the
“unmarked” kind, whose gods have recently been such as Hardy and Larkin
(though
Larkin is increasingly uncool for political reasons). And then there are
the
sub-classes of poetry, such as performance and dub poetry (which may be
heavily
patronised, especially if their pracititioners are non-white) and of
course
avant-garde, which is for geeks only, most of them young men, including
some
who went to Cambridge University who should know better. (In reality,
non-genre
Poetry is a marketing category too, with a particular demographic
profile among
its designated punters: middle-class females over 40 with a college
education,
etc etc, probably not too dissimilar to those who buy Booker-winning
novels as
a matter of routine.)
In the less class-bound USA, post-avant
poetry is now being taken more seriously; perhaps the usual ten-year
time-lag
will see such a development in this country.
In conclusion – there is no conclusion.
This has genuinely been an open-ended exercise. I didn’t start with a
thesis I
wished to expound. I wanted to explore a selection of non-naturalistic
books I
had not encountered before and to think in public about them and what
they
meant to me, as a reader, and for my own writing practice. If I had
planned
this better, perhaps I would have started with a more comprehensive
selection.
I am acutely aware that among the eight only one is by a non-Anglo Saxon
writer
(OK, there’s Ishiguro too, but I can’t think of him as Japanese) and
there are
no women. Sorry about that. I hope to read further among some of these
authors
and others, and equally hope I have stimulated at least a handful of
others to
do the same.
In : writing
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This blog is written by Ken Edwards, co-founder and editor/publisher of Reality Street, and it's mainly about the press. Ken's personal blog can now be found at http://www.kenedwardsonline.co.uk
