Other Aliens

by Bradford Morrow

  Was or it wasn’t. I was told a girl in the farmlands

  Of China had lied to her friends about owning

  A horse, said her brother put him down just yesterday

  And showed them the patch of grass: blood, hoofprint

  And all. I was told to visit her with a lead-glazed heart filled

  With aphids. I was told to write things down with a Sharpie

  Every morning on the surface of the water,

  And when I did, the words became affixed to my

  Forehead. For days I wrote anabasis, thinking it

  Meant something else. Virtual was pleased. Thirty

  Days or hours or lives of purple sky passed over

  Me, lambs and squires rested in the fields like

  White chocolate daubs on a macaroon, my skin

  Broke out in gray eruptions, I was told this was

  A common reaction to snow. The stars finally cut

  Through the purple silk, I was told this too

  Happened to visitors, visitors who forced

  Their memory of Earth’s weather and atmospheric

  Anomalies on the entoptically dense ferry terminals

  Of the Martian life terrines. I was told stories

  Of microcuisines, services in petri dishes, blue

  Liquid racing down from droppers to make things

  More palatable. I was told of the 47 facial expressions

  And the withdrawal of love after the first 108

  Days of life, the phloem and xylem that mediate

  The memory hinges. Virtual was curious about all

  Those home movies, film ones, from the seventies

  With the bleached light, memory light, those silences

  And vacancies, roadside hotels of killing music,

  Polypropylene quilts, white kids and black kids

  In matching T-shirts, the owl brown of the trees

  Corroding the film stock, the centripetal desire

  Of watching the endless false battles in Cantonese

  On Saturdays, and the difference between moths

  And paper as both emerge from tree life, and pattern

  Themselves on language, and die when wet.

  Mysterious Strangers: A Conversation

  John Clute and John Crowley

  JOHN CROWLEY: What then is our topic?

  JOHN CLUTE: Our topic, very briefly, as I take it, is the concept or motif of alienation as found in contemporary speculative fiction—not traditional renderings of alien/alienating intrusions that one finds in vampire stories or ghost stories or tales of revenants, even though they can be insinuatingly seductive; but a more contemporary alienation, more intimate, more threatening: more like the world itself with the shades off.

  CROWLEY: And not restricted to the science fiction alien—

  CLUTE: Not restricted to science fiction and open to fictions that engage other forms of alienation.

  CROWLEY: So let’s begin.

  CLUTE: There are two entries I’ve done recently for The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction What I Wrote. The one is a working definition of “Fantastika,” which implicitly incorporates models for the recognition of something we might call the alien, and the other, just drafted a month ago, is about how to think of aliens as Mysterious Strangers.

  CROWLEY: Mysterious Strangers—yes.

  CLUTE: For a complex of reasons not really relevant here, for several years I’ve been using Fantastika as an umbrella term to refer to the literatures of the fantastic in the West from around the beginning of the nineteenth century until now. But among the various conditions for Fantastika I laid down in my entry, one does seem particularly to the point here: that nonmimetic stories, at any rate those written within my time period, are normally best understood when they are read literally. I’m channeling Chip Delany here, of course. That—for something like a second—what you read is what you get. In more traditional understandings of stories, metaphor or thematic understandings can be understood as preceding the raw glimpse of something Other, of something we do not already have words for. In our context here, that which we did not have words for before we read it on the page is alien. So though 99 percent of Fantastika is otiose, there is always a chance we will encounter in some story a flash of something that has no prior convictions. To see something as literal is to see something before the jaws snap shut. Attempt to read Kafka’s Metamorphosis with eyes only and you may smell the density of the terror.

  CROWLEY: Isn’t there a third category? There is the metaphorical, on the one hand, in which in a realistic story someone could be a “bloodsucker” and “vampiric” in very many realistic ways and still have the structural impact of a vampire; or on the other hand, somehow retrofitted by imagined science, so that their blood corpuscles are described as different, or whatever. The third category merely posits a literary device, a literary artifact that we do not expect to have explained to us—why such a thing can be in the modern world—nor accounted for as metaphor, but is simply stated. I recently read Richard Matheson’s 1956 SF novel The Shrinking Man. It occurred to me halfway through what a wonderful—or much better—book this would have been if the author had never tried to attribute the shrinking to an accidental release of radioactivity. He would have then ended up with a book about a guy who’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller for no reason whatever—whose world was becoming alien to him—and it would have ended up being more Kafka than Heinlein.

  CLUTE: Pre-translation of story into what “explains” it is deadly. It’s what many mainstream writers do when they think they’re composing Fantastika. It’s deadly in most of the literary criticism that I’ve read in the last fifty years.

  CROWLEY: Criticism of fantastical literature?

  CLUTE: What I mean is any kind of academic criticism that purports to use a story to illustrate a theme, without attempting to experience the story first, and without attempting to convey that central epiphany. If you cannot paraphrase a story, you should not try to make it fit an a priori assignment of meaning. Period. Raw story is central, it is not accidental: where it appeared, how it appeared, how it was understood, how it went. And that it is told with intention, or do I blaspheme? But maybe I’m flogging a dead horse here.

  CROWLEY: I think that tendency is fading away to a certain extent, but one of the reasons for it lies in the teachers who don’t know how to talk about literature, and in trying to understand a story ask children, “What is this about? What is this story (or ‘this writer’) trying to say?”—implying that the story has a meaning, a moral, a significance that a reader is to set out to find. But having to extract the significance or moral of a story leads to a sense of, “Well, why didn’t the writer just say that?” If the significance is “We should all try to be kinder to one another” or “Things change and become bad and they can become good again” or whatever it is, that could have been said in a sentence. This form of understanding writing and reading has been very pervasive, at least in America, for the last fifty years.

  CLUTE: Kafka’s Metamorphosis should seem to come unbidden into the world, without context, like an epiphany. What it is should stare you in the face, for something (as I said a moment ago) like a second (Leonard Cohen). And then almost before we can blink we begin to reread, to retrofit: we cannot help doing so. We begin to embed that alien is-ness into our consoling knowledge that Metamorphosis is a novella written by Franz Kafka right before World War I and published in Prague then as a real book; it is part of our record of the apprehension of the war to come.

  CROWLEY: Would this apply as well to stories in which storytellers (Marlow, in Conrad’s stories) are out to convince listeners in the story, as well as readers of it, of the truth of it?

  CLUTE: In Conjunctions:39, The New Wave Fabulists, I remember going on about how Club Stories enforced witness, urged the reader to understand that a story being told cannot in a sense be gainsaid. What I’d add here is that the first glimpse of any story is a witness. Only afterwards does it fi
xate in our minds as interpretable. Or so we pray. This instant of witnessing is a paradigm for proper apprehension of the alien in 2016. So if Conjunctions is exploring the theme of the alien in this issue, I think it is a good idea if we start with the apprehension that the alien on the page has never been seen before. To see something never seen before but almost instantly recognized seems a good way to begin to define Terror. To experience Terror is to experience the malice of the world.

  CROWLEY: That’s true of science fiction, and can be extended to alien beings of other kinds, as well to the kinds of monsters that have inhabited our imaginations forever: that are sent up to outer space only to return to us in the same form or to be encountered on other planets, still in similar form. But I’m also thinking about Vladimir Nabokov, who said that “all great realistic novels are fairy tales.” Anna Karenina is a fairy tale, Madame Bovary is a fairy tale, Little Dorrit is a fairy tale, because they’re worlds inhabited by imaginary beings—aliens, in effect. They’re not facts in the world, they’re objects of words. They are fairy tales in which anything can happen, even though they have delimited what can happen by their realistic assumptions. He says, “They are fairy tales without which our real world could not exist.”

  CLUTE: That is Nabokov having a concentrated thought that I’m no way going to deal with myself very cogently, except that it seems to be intuitively spot-on and certainly a very good way of describing how his own novels feel.

  CROWLEY: Absolutely. The intentional fallacy of those schoolteachers is that an author should set out a reason for his or her book to exist in the world, with a lesson and a meaning to be extracted from it, and a generally acceptable sort of form in which to put the lesson, maybe with dramatic and interesting events, but with the ultimate intention of teaching us that all you need is love—or whatever it is.

  CLUTE: And that is, I think, almost certainly bullshit.

  CROWLEY: It is bullshit, yes. It may not even be the way most writers work to create things. Upton Sinclair probably worked that way.

  CLUTE: Both of the Sinclairs, Upton and Lewis, with their lessons that nobody can remember.

  CROWLEY: Well, that’s the problem with lesson stories. Once the lesson’s learned or is no longer useful, the book vanishes.

  CLUTE: That takes us back to Aesop, which is full of lessons, but there’s always a story from which the lesson is subsequently extracted, and sometimes the lesson has a surreal relationship to the actual story.

  CROWLEY: And in fact we have learned that the lessons at the end of Aesop’s fables were actually added long after the fables themselves were told. In the original form, some of them just remain very strange stories.

  CLUTE: So then there are stories that incline to be stories, which you read to find out what happens. Within that story, an alien has to be understood as it is uncovered, and we can talk about these implications, after the story is at great length unpacked, without needing an Aesopian appendix attached. There’s also the obvious fact that any kind of narrative is inherently nonmimetic, inherently fantastic, because any continuous presentation of data fantasticates the world. “There is more than one history of the world,” as you’ve put it, without I think claiming that a particular one of them might be true, but certainly, I think, implying no one story is the world.

  CROWLEY: Well, I think that to make new, or other, histories of the world almost certainly generates worlds in which the familiar becomes alien. It certainly isn’t unique to me.

  CLUTE: Which brings a question to mind. There is a sentence in the justly esteemed final paragraph of your novel Little, Big which has long intrigued me. As you punctuate it—“It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different.”—it conveys an apodictic certainty about the news it tells. It’s not as though I thought (because I did not so think) that you should have punctuated it like this—“It was anyway all a long time ago; the world we know now is as it is and not different.”—even though as revised it might give us a loophole to dream through about the incarnation of something better. I guess the question is a terrible one to ask: do you think that thirty-five years after Little, Big was published the world is as it is and not different? That the sentence with two commas means we’re goners for sure?

  CROWLEY: I actually love that emendation, or its possibility. The sentence was intended to close down possibilities: we know that different worlds once were, in which beings exist that no longer seem to. Our present wish that it might be different is passé: it is as it is. But of course all that other world does still exist—in the book. And it’s the same for all aliens we accept at face value, who are ghosts, AIs, centuries-old beings who persist, soulless people of the vampire and serial-killer varieties. There are all kinds of possibilities, and we can always pick up the book and find them there still.

  CLUTE: Including extraterrestrial beings themselves, because it’s less and less of a conceptual leap to think of inhabiting a more complex universe than we had previously thought plausible. This all connects with the epiphanic moment of one’s first glimpse of the Other, which I was talking about before as something enabled by the exposure to the world characteristic of Fantastika as I try to think about it. And there’s another kind of epiphany: the flash realization that what you think you are seeing in a text is something almost identical to what you thought you were seeing, but also immensely Other. This may be the heart of what we call Uncanny Valley.

  CROWLEY: This morning I read an absolutely wonderful story by Jeffrey Ford called “The Word Doll,” about something strange and alien coming to be in an ordinary Ohio world, a farmland of the last hundred years. The story is of alien beings who’ve had to go away because they didn’t suit the modern world. It’s indescribable—except to say that it is almost entirely about words creating aliens. John, you have considered alienation and usurpation in a work, The Darkening Garden, that treats horror fiction. Can you speak to the question of how a genre that’s devoted to the eliciting of fear and loathing in characters (and readers) can be understood in the terms we’re deploying here?

  CLUTE: Well, the first thing to note about what I tried to do in that book (though I was insufficiently clear in my head about this at first) was to distinguish Terror, which I defined more or less as recognition of the malice of the world, from Horror, which I pretty well defined as what I called Affect Horror: stories built on conveying an emotion of Horror, Horror tending to be defined by its effect on readers (which, of course, is circular). The heart of the four-point model of the discourse of Terror I suggested in the book—Sighting, Thickening, Revel (or Recognition), Aftermath—lies in the beat of epiphanic heightened awareness, the passage from Thickening to Recognition, the instant where the naked eye sees into, or acutely apprehends, the time and place of the truth of things. This is also rather terpsichorean, of course, the truth of things being apprehensible through a dance-like leap out of the Thickening of the prior. Like the ending of Billy Elliot, The Darkening Garden does not deal directly with the Other or the Alien as such, but it is through that leap that we see the Other undomesticated. Literally understood, aliens in twenty-first-century stories may tend to represent our insecurity in ourselves, in our societies, in our planet, in the universe. This insecurity is something that is manifestly required of us if we’re going to remain sane.

  CROWLEY: Have you not just articulated a reason to read these stories that goes beyond simply accepting them as stories? Did you just fall on your own petard there?

  CLUTE: We can only apprehend pure story in glimpses. As soon as we begin to talk about what we’ve read, that story is belated, it is fair game. The epiphanic leap of apprehension of the new lasts about as long as the moment of sexual bliss in Cohen: for as long as a second, as I think I said a ways back. As soon as you take a breath you begin to remember. Memory (as has been argued more than once recently) is intrinsicate with cognition. We are memorious creatures. We cannot say a word without memory. Guilty as charged then.

&nb
sp; CROWLEY: I will not hold you to it, though I see exactly what you mean. What may be the case is that the environment and moment in which aliens appear has to serve partly as a metaphor for how we understand their nature.

  CLUTE: If we try to figure their contemporary meaning, which it is fair game to do, Aliens and/or the Other manifest themselves uncannily in worlds where tenure is insecure. I did an entry, a month or so ago, in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, on the Mysterious Stranger motif in Western literature. In his Enter, Mysterious Stranger (1979), Roy R. Male describes narratives of the Mysterious Stranger as “cloistral fiction,” as enclosed and closing; and he made a case for understanding nineteenth-century American stories and even Mark Twain’s posthumously published The Mysterious Stranger (1916) in those terms. I started there, but thought as well that the motif might be used in a more extensive way to point to a characteristic of the literature of the West, written and mostly set as it is in a peninsula at the edge of the world whose history is a history of constant claim jumping. From this angle, the literature of the West can be scryed as a set of tales told by usurpers, but within that frame the prototypical Mysterious Stranger is not a fellow usurper but a revenant. The Mysterious Stranger story always threatens to reveal someone who has returned to claim back his or her heritage.

  I think you can unpack a lot of the stories of earlier centuries in these terms: vampires, werewolves, ghosts, reborn magi with a grudge; any one of them may fulfill the role of the Mysterious Stranger. But there is something to note here: that traditionally those “imposed” upon (you and me and Dad) have been very much realer than the figures who disrupt our world with their presence and/or their claims for restitution. We are a conquering civilization. We do not give up easily.

  CROWLEY: I think that’s true, but I think the Mysterious Stranger in most stories has more self-centeredness, more basal sense of authority than the people around him, whom he unsettles and makes to understand their unsettledness merely by his own absolute sense of self.