The House of Writers

by M. J. Nicholls

  —Hebridean Crumbs: A Novel of Shortbread (p.178)

  If your proposal is selected (can take forty or so tries), you are invited to a formally informal shindig in the same room with two VIPs from the American offices, where four tables are set up with the top four Scots stereotypes—servings of haggis laid out on the first, kilts of various clans on the second, thistles in soil on the third, and shortbread on the fourth. Two Highland pipers in full kilted regalia blast out “Flower of Scotland” and other unfavourites while red-haired serving girls with rustic cheeks busy about offering wine and canapés to the lucky commissioned. The VIPs are simply let’s-get-down-to-businessmen, permitting themselves only several smiles before and after their address to the room. Paul Buggle CEO said:

  “It’s wonderful to be back in the former Scotland. Thank you for the warm welcome. All my favourite cultural archetypes are here. But we need to be careful not to oversell these commodities. Americans have no idea that Scotland today is owned by the Mudrake Corporation and is funded entirely from the profits of American business. They have no idea that shortbread, haggis, and Irn-Bru are all made in American factories. It’s crucial that the buyers of Scottish products believe these things originate in the Old Country. Remember, Scotland is nothing more than a wing of the American tourist industry and earns its right to retain its history by trading on now-mythical cultural stereotypes completely alien to the residents here, who live entirely on American food, television, and products. ScotCall is part of the Mudrake Corporation. It’s all about creating the illusion of some kind of choice, some kind of freedom, some kind of free will, so consumers don’t become stultified by the lack of any. All companies are owned by the Mudrake Corporation. In fact, there’s a joke that Scotland is run out of a tiny office of the NY marketing department! But it’s true. Scotland comprises such a small percentage of the market, its loss would be irrelevant, but its history is still relatively tradable. So it’s imperative that we keep these cultural archetypes going in books and other art forms. After all, we’re not in the business of wiping out a country’s history and culture—not when it is still so profitable. Adaptation is the word. It simply isn’t viable to let a country’s populace cling to its cultural stereotypes. We all know they were absorbed into the culture a long time ago, as the world became more homogenous, universalised, as the Mudrake Corporation created their global hypermarket. Can you imagine a 21st century Scot would ever don a kilt unironically or eat haggis for his tea? These were anachronisms way back in the late 20th century. Really, it’s corporations like ours that do a service to small countries like Scotland. If it wasn’t for us giving them the chance to trade, they would have forgotten their history and culture, and where would we all be then? Anyway, here’s to the success of the latest shortbread range. Thank you.”

  Sleeping arrangements? Nope! Pelf kindly let me bed down in the conference room, borrowing a sleeping bag from the caretaker, and helped me find leftover food from the higher departments. You need to rely on your wits on this floor. I asked Marilyn for extra work promoting The House in the community and she sent me off around the farmhouses in Crarsix to collect donations to help with essential repairs in the building (the lifts were mouldy with moss and fungi and some new form of furry-backed beetle was emerging from the cracks). I ambled along the gravel road past the stock-dump fields. The grass was hissing from molten electrical equipment, and the cries of starved digi-pets could be heard over the whirrs and moans of moribund electric mango skinners, lemon pulpers, banana strippers, orange pulpers, and apple mulchers. I reached the first hous,: a red-brick throwback erected beside the biggest stock-dump field in Crarsix, and knocked on the door, where and a tall man with ferrety eyebrows opened and said nothing. “I’m looking to—” “Say no more. I’m Sid. Come in!”

  His front room was busy with all sorts of sharp-toothed animatronic scrapyard inventions. Sid was a prolific scrap farmer who eked out a living turning dumped stock into implausibly useful household friends. He showed me a trifunctional breakfast-cum-entertainment device made from the extrusions of an old toaster, TV remote, and several CD lasers. Four columns of lasers in one slot burned bread into toast on one side, requiring a simple flip to toast the reverse, while in a second slot another four columns of lasers played several songs on a CD at once down various earphone holes. The whole family could listen to different tracks from the same CD while slowly toasting their breakfast. Two TV remotes on the outer shells could flick channels if the breakfaster didn’t want to participate in the listening and toasting process that morning. Sid showed off several other devices including a fan with a sprinkler in the back that dispensed cold water and air to cool sunbathers in the garden and simultaneously water the plants for up to two metres, and a chair with prosthetic hands that massaged the backs of users, tailored to their particular muscular requirements, with added buttons for handshakes, high-fives, scissors-paper-stone, foreplay, and sexual relief. He took me to his barnyard where ten pens of mechanical animals constructed from disembowelled laptops, monitors, CPUs, consoles, and miscellaneous techno-offal stood on standby. A line of cows had been made from various desktop parts: three keyboards-as-legs protruded from a body of monitors, and a shrivelled Apple Mac formed the head, sealed up with a set of sharp teeth and two digi-cam eyes. Old USB cables swished on its rump. These creatures scoured the fields devouring loose wires and pieces, mashing the debris down to produce a mushy oil-like sediment from their udders (eight pipettes sticking out an inverted colander) to be used as lubricant or solvent for his inventions. I watched a dozen or so in the field and spotted a few sheep gambolling through the debris. The sheep were old microwaves with legs, nibbling up things like wires and cables that might come in handy. “The microwave bodies on these sheep are functioning. Sometimes for a laugh I like to heat up haggises in them,” Sid said. He offered me £12 after.

  Some Crarsicans were less charitable. One old crone said to me: “No. Writers are entirely worthless to society. They don’t deserve anything. It would be useless for me to waste my money trying to help them cling to the last remaining delusion they already pretend to have. Son, you’re a young man. You shouldn’t be working for criminals. Let me tell you, the sooner these people are drummed into proper jobs, the better. Art teaches us nothing about the real world. You can’t phone up a book for practical advice, can you? No, ScotCall is better. I have a switchboard set up in my front room and take a few hundred calls every day. Something to do in my retirement. The people you speak to, it’s incredible. Someone phoned earlier asking if the sky was blue, or if it was an optical illusion. I told him that whatever colour we see with our eyes is valid, so the sea is blue too, not clear. A woman phoned up this morning asking what the proper spelling of ‘napkin’ was. I told her, two A’s and two P’s. You’re a young man, so think about it. There’s always room for more helpers at ScotCall. They even hire ex-murderers, you know.” Among other colourful characters in the area, I met a retired web trader whose sanity had been taken in the power outage of ’34, when the electricity cut out for half a second and five trillion internet traders were bankrupted. He was forever besieged by vicious popups and screamed at me to watch out for the army of surveys with Trojan viruses advancing from the cyber-vacuum! Another had the friendly sign ALL WRITER’S [sic] WILL BE SHOT ON SITE in his garden. There was a young couple who had two TVs rigged up in every room and had never heard the word “book” before, looking scared as I defined it as words written down on paper to be read slowly for some kind of pleasure, amusement, or intellectual or emotional sustenance. They gave me £2 out of pity.

  The production of Hebridean Crumbs was halted due to a lack of available paper. I had to present my manuscript to the CEO in extremely rough form (only 10K written in illegible pencil). A scrunch of handwritten paper alongside nineteen manila-foldered sheaves of A4 typed in psychometrically tested corporate fonts would clearly not suffice. I cowered behind the others and showed my mess to CHAD. “I didn’t quite get around
to finishing up,” I told him. The others had no expressions of disapproval on their faces, which helped. They seemed incapable of reacting to anything that didn’t directly concern them. “Oh, that’s fine. One of our editors will add the polish,” CHAD said. “But there’s another 60,000 words left to write.” “No problem, we’ll stitch something together.” My luck was both disappointing and reassuring. Why had I bothered to sit in a plastic chair for six hours a day, scribbling barely legible drivel onto flimsy recycled paper with a ten-inch pencil nub, when an editor in America could simply upload the necessary clichés from his hard drive and substitute all kilt references for shortbread ones? It would have saved me the hand cramp! Once the manuscripts had been cleared, the cheques were handed out in brown envelopes. CHAD made a parting speech: “Thank you everyone for your contributions. Our next meeting will take place in a month’s time in the same room, our sell being Irn-Bru-themed books. You are all welcome to attend and pitch your ideas as usual.” I had made my first money from writing: ten crisp pounds.

  A Word from the Team

  CHAD: It’s about harnessing the power of shortbread. Next to porridge oats, bottled water, and commemorative Billy Connolly plates, shortbread is Scotland’s biggest export. As content makars for SIBINC, your duty is to harness the salesability of shortbread to reach as wide an audience as possible. We want to see novels about the production of shortbread, histories of shortbread manufacture, reflections and aphorisms about shortbread, quotes from notable Scots about shortbread. The Canadian market for shortbread books is booming at the moment, we need to seize the carpe diem. If you have an idea, please attend a weekly pitch (Third Floor Tuesdays at 2.15pm).

  FRANK: I had success on the Irish historical market, but it crashed when readers could no longer subside on a diet of potato famine and poverty porn. I was worried people would forget the bankable stereotypes and I would have to invent an entirely new history and mythology for Ireland, which was tricky contriving from nowhere as it usually involved borrowing from other countries, and people are clued-in to these sly cultural steals. The public can swallow a lot, but they can’t swallow inauthenticity. The guys on this floor respect this.

  TEDDY: I have potential ancestors in the Old Country, somewhere in Invernoddle in the Higherlands, and I was totally stoked to be able to write a tribute to my (maybe!) family.

  BIFF: Man, I love this country but I ain’t touchin’ that haggis. Sheep innards in cylinders? No way, man!!!!

  JIM: It makes no difference to me, cashing in on my heritage. Hell, I was raised in a culture totally saturated by American television and products. I only know vague things about Scotland anyway through the stereotypes propagated through American television and products. In European school syllabuses, they stopped teaching the history of individual countries and focused instead on corporate history since the ScotCall rise. I read every work on the syllabus, including the 1000-page ScotCall Procedural Guidelines and ScotCall Book of Customer Satisfaction and ScotCall Rules for Dealing with Rude Clients (which had the naughty words on pages 328–330!)

  DAVE: Do I like working here? Yeah! Sort of. Well, no not really. Why’d you ask?

  _____________________________

  1“How are you?” / “Have a nice trip over? Care for a mineral water or espresso? Tea? Like to use the bathroom? Care for a massage? Small snack? Small snack with ketchup? Hug?”

  This

  3

  CHANCES are that the reader (who?) will not be familiar with the sort of fictions that presage this particular masterpiece. In the early 2000s, soi-disant “experimental” fiction was the biggest-selling material on the block. The revolution began with the publication of Christine Brooke-Rose’s molecular histoire du monde, Subscript (1999), and the following decade made millionaires of such marginal figures as Ron Sukenick, Christopher Sorrentino, Sergio de la Pava, Irmtraud Morgner, and Meredith Brosnan. These writers were vanguards of the avant-garde revolution and paved the way for all manner of stunning deviations from conventional storytelling and highwire acts of dazzling discursive prose. Sergio de la Pava’s novel Personae (2011) won the Pulitzer Prize for its famous five-brains-suspended-in-a-vat scene, and Meredith Brosnan’s second novel Fuck You and Your Momma (2015) won the O. Henry award for its famous depiction of doublebutt colonic irrigation between George W. Bush and English folk singer Laura Marling. These were times when the sheer splendour of language and the boundless potential of the human imagination to transcend the inexorable, horrendous dullness of a consumerist society in its death throes mattered more to readers than accessible plots and well-drawn characters and TV spin-offs. It was a second Enlightenment. Other art forms adapted to the rise of the avanguard (as literary critic Steven Moore punningly labelled this particular band of geniuses). TV talent shows auditioned raggedy hopefuls desperate for the lead in the latest production of Krapp’s Last Tape. From Dover to Thurso, people flocked to the BBC studios dressed as Patrick Magee and Bore Angelovski eager to prove themselves the quintessence of 69-year-old Krapp. Publishers went into spasms of ecstasy at every manuscript labelled highbrow or labyrinthine. Complexity, re-readability, depth and vision—these were the watchwords for a whole generation of fiction writers! Even minor parodists and pranksters like myself sat down and penned works that dared to capture the zeitgeist in this wonderful and rich era. The Faber & Faber-published debut novel of mine A Postmodern Belch (2012) was hailed by critic and novelist Tom McCarthy as “a rumbustious comedic novel in the impish manner of Rabelais, refracted through the lens of Sorrentino, and rammed down the digestive tract of Carlton Mellick III.” It was an amazing time to be alive! Ah, how those days are long gone! Lost forever in the sands of time, for want of a less disgraceful cliché.

  The Trauma Rooms

  3

  IN this room, we have Brian Lettsin. He worked as a proofreader for small press I & I Books, who specialised in metafictional novels subverting the reader’s expectations as to the purpose of narrative in narrative fiction and all that piffle. One warning: he won’t make eye contact during the conversation and might need persistent reminding of his name to the point it becomes annoying,” the doctor said. Brian’s room was covered from floor to ceiling in mirrors, into which a bemused Brian stared, fingering his multiple reflections, muttering existential and ontological one-liners to himself (“Who am I? Whose novel am I in?”), freezing stock-still whenever he suspected the Creator/Author to be present in the room.

  “Brian! It’s me, the doctor. I have a new character here, Erin,” he said.

  “Hi Brian!”

  “Hello. What is your function?” he asked.

  “Erin’s here to spice up the novel.”

  “Good,” Brian said, removing his trousers.

  “No! Brian! Now, what have I told you? Hmm?”

  “We aren’t in a novel.”

  “Correct.”

  “But ... I really do have a sneaking suspicion we are in one.”

  “No.”

  “I mean ... a tower block of writers. A call centre eating up the country. I can’t see this happening in the real world.”

  “The what?”

  “Oh, my head! Don’t do that!”

  “Sorry, Brian. I tease. Erin would like to know your story, care to tell her? The one we have been practising?”

  “Wait ... who am I?”

  “Oh not this again!”

  “Who am I?”

  “You are Brian Lettsin. Brian Lettsin. Brian Lettsin. Erin, help please.”

  “Brian Lettsin,” she said.

  “I am Brian ... ?”

  “Brian Lettsin. Brian Lettsin. Brian Lettsin. Brian Lettsin.”

  “Brian Lettsin. Brian Lettsin. Brian Lettsin. Brian Lettsin. Brian Lettsin. Brian Lettsin. Brian Lettsin,” Erin said.

  “I’m Brian Lettsin?”

  “That’s correct. Brian Lettsin. Brian Lettsin. Brian Lettsin.”

  “Yes. I am Brian Lettsin.”

  “Well done, Brian Lettsin. Now, Bri
an Lettsin, would you like to tell Erin your story, Brian Lettsin?”

  “I’d like to hear your story, Brian Lettsin.”

  “All right. I am Brian Lettsin and here is my story. I was working for I & I Books. It began innocently, with a few novels featuring bemused writers: their affairs, drinking problems, failure to produce their works, and so on. Nothing too harmful. Then I received this novel, A Postmodern Postmortem. Set in an afterlife for bad characters, the book was riddled with the kind of intertextual knowingness that was to set me on the path to destruction. There followed an orgiastic spree of metafucking—writers stepping into their novels to slap and screw their characters, writers appearing in other writers’ novels to do the same, then writers slapping and screwing the other writers in their novels, and characters taking over the narration of the novels and so on. One book, I Am the Novel, pushed me over the edge. Over ten thousand unidentified voices, zigzagging along the page, or huddled into spirals or boxes, even printed overlapping one another, squabbled for authorship, offering nothing in the manner of plot or character, or a conceivable point to the whole thing—one voice even cried out in orgasm ‘Oh! This is so pointless ... so ... oh oh oh! ... meeeeeaaaningleeeeeesss!’ epitomising the masturbatory emptiness at the heart of this publisher’s project. I suppose there was some theoretical logic behind these novels—I recall some drear pamphlet penned by the editor riddled with Derrida/Barthes references, as if cribbing from those two was a sufficient apologia for their gummy deluge—but this was too late for me. I Am the Novel, running at over 1000 pages, no author name on the cover, sent me into a spasm of self-doubt. I woke up having no idea who I was, if I was a character in a novel, if I had written a novel ... I cracked up. I spent my days staring into mirrors in the hope I might recall a mere snippet of the previous ‘life’ I was supposed to have led ... a life that is ... I am Brian ... hang on, who I am again?”