But matters grow yet more complex, in the work of these writers and others, as the borders of genre themselves begin to dissolve, along with the borders between genre fiction and literary fiction. Jonathan Carroll’s first novel, The Land of Laughs (1980), was read by some as a horror novel, with its strange small Missouri town haunted—and perhaps formed—by the imagination of a writer who once lived there, but subsequent novels have made such easy readings all but impossible, as Carroll combines ghosts, time travel, supernatural agents, aliens, and even such hard science concepts as cold fusion into narratives that at times seem cavalierly unconcerned with what genre they might properly belong to. Jonathan Lethem’s first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music (1994), uses the form of the hard-boiled detective tale, but is set in a postliterate, drug-dazed twenty-first century dystopia filled with talking animals that function much like cartoon characters; his later novels have moved increasingly further from traditional genre structures, but have never quite abandoned the skillful structural use of genre iconography. China Miéville’s second and third novels, Perdido Street Station (2000) and The Scar (2002), are set in a densely grotesque fantasy world—his New Crobuzon is one of the great urban environments of modern fantasy—but a world whose inhabitants and whose technology seem a chaotic mix of figures from science fiction, horror, and alchemy. Patrick O’Leary’s 1997 novel, The Gift, seems a fairly conventional fantasy, until we note mention of spacecraft and personality matrices, while his 2001 novel, The Impossible Bird, is a posthumous fantasy of brotherly love in which the fantasy premise is rationalized by an appeal to alien conspiracies and information-laden hummingbirds. Even Stephen King, in what may turn out to become the most ambitious work of his career, combines classic quest fantasy motifs with apocalyptic science fiction and his more familiar trademark horror effects in his “Dark Tower” sequence, which began more than twenty years ago and shows few signs of being completely unfolded yet.
At the same time that genre materials begin flowing freely into one another, we begin to see evidence of an even more peculiar development: the nongenre genre story. By this I don’t mean those attempts at using genre material by writers from “outside,” such as the occasional ill-conceived science fiction novel by P. D. James, John Updike, or Paul Theroux, but rather those stories so closely informed by genre-based structures and sensibilities that they may convey the feel of a particular genre, and may open up to genre readings in a way different from how they open up to conventional readings, even though they lack traditional genre markers. Examples of this in—or near—the horror genre include Peter Straub’s 1988 novel Koko, which shares with genre horror a concern for portraying extreme experience as almost mystically transformative, but lacks the direct supernatural elements that had once been regarded as a defining element of the genre. (Despite this, and perhaps as a sign of the changing times, the novel won a World Fantasy Award for best novel, and one of its competing nominees was the equally un-supernatural The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris.) By a similar token, novels such as Bruce Sterling’s Zeitgeist (2000) and Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (1999) bear all the hallmarks of good near-future science fiction—the world slightly estranged from our own by new developments in technology and exaggerated social trends, the elements of absurdist social satire, the sense of history as malleable—but in fact neither novel is even set in the future nor makes much use of the surface machinery of science fiction. The Stephenson concerns cryptography and early computer theory at Bletchley Park during World War II, combined with a contemporary tale of data espionage; the latter is about a cynically manufactured multicultural pop group designed to maximize the profit potential of the premillennium zeitgeist, and to be disbanded at the turn of the century. Both novels, however, are rife with the science fictional habits of treating speculative thought as though it were heroic action, and of manipulating ideas as though they were characters.
So now we have a situation in which novels containing no material fantasy at all are nominated for and receive fantasy awards, in which novels with little or no science fiction content gain huge followings among science fiction readers who recognize in them something of their own, in which growing numbers of writers view the materials forged in genre as resources rather than as constraints, in which the edges of the genres themselves bleed into one another, in which authors gleefully and knowingly cut the wrong wire. There is perhaps a certain danger in this, in drawing so freely on material that was once condemned to exile, in assembling story-machines that demand a wider repertoire of sensibilities on the part of readers, and it may not be an exaggeration to describe these writers as courageous. Genre writers still complain of the “ghetto” in which they see themselves forced to toil, but an only slightly more overbaked metaphor might be hell itself, and even a particular region of hell: in Dante’s Inferno, it’s curious to note how many of the sinners gathered together in the eighth circle, the Malebolge, or ditches of evil, seem to be guilty of crimes of genre: the fortune-tellers and diviners, who pretend to see the future; the alchemists, who claimed their art could transform base materials into something wonderful; the sowers of discord; the evil counselors who sinned by glibness of tongue; the panderers and seducers; and, in the central pit, the giant Nimrod, the builder of the Tower of Babel. For the myriad distinctive voices that make up the postgenre fantastic, the voices heard after the explosion, there is yet the risk of that baleful gaze from the moral poet, still suspecting the crime of fantasy for its own sake no matter how elegant the tale. Dante may never have read a word of Tolkien or Lovecraft or Heinlein, but he knew a shell game when he saw one.
Beyond the Pale
John Clute
1. MISS MIMESIS IN THE FOGGY DEW
IN ORDER TO GET a running start on our subject, which is the fantastic in 2002, the state of the fantastic in cusp country, it might be an idea to back off a century, and begin with Joseph Conrad.
In early 1899, after an intense and feverish spate of work, Conrad published “Heart of Darkness” in Blackwood’s Magazine. It was the greatest novella he would ever write, and the last of the great English-language novellas of the 1890s; those of interest for us include Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” (1894), H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), and Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” (1898). Of these, it is almost certainly Conrad’s premonitory masterpiece that has had the deepest influence over the past hundred years. “Heart of Darkness” remains a profoundly visible book, a map of the long portage the Western World would make through the twentieth century (which is the second of the two centuries that have most made us). And even now the tale is present to us, a shape of story timed to catch us in the act.
Conrad’s great novella is also, of course, as we have been taught, a central text in the etiology of Modernism, in the analysis of late European imperialism; and it has become a taproot for the study of postcolonial literatures. These discourses extractable from the text are, we know, justly studied. But when we look at “Heart of Darkness” in situ, we find that the seemingly extractable elements of the tale twist in the mind’s eye like chimerae, illusions of available content. When we gaze into the overwhelmingly dense dreamtime of story that is “Heart of Darkness,” we find our attention focusing instead upon the highly foregrounded, indeed spectacular way it is actually told, upon the presentness of the storytelling even now, a hundred years further into the anxiety of the world, for the hypnopompic drama Marlow recounts, and the hypnopompic experience of reading the tale, are as one. Reading “Heart of Darkness” is like spelunking the century it adumbrates. It is Conrad’s central stab at a task hardly undertaken by writers before him, and rarely by those who have followed: the task of understanding a world contemporaneous with the world he is writing in.
But here’s the rub. This yarn, which has told a century, itself wants explication; but when we turn to the professional literary critics of the last hundred years, whose job it is to give us the likes of Conrad whole, we find too often what
seems a real disinclination (not only on the part of E. M. Forster or F. R. Leavis) to address precisely the way of “Heart of Darkness,” or for that matter the nature of Conrad’s subsequent decline into the dignified English gentleman who created the Whited Sepulchre of Chance (1913). There is something tight-sphinctered in this critical vacancy of response, almost as though twentieth-century critics were embarrassed to admit that, in “Heart of Darkness,” echt proto-pre-Modernist Joseph Conrad had achieved his greatest effects, had understood most deeply the world of his time and ours, through subliterary means: because “Heart of Darkness” takes its incipit from the tale of adventure, whose roots do not lie in realism, whose access to the Ocean of Story is uncensored.
Club Story, a term which describes one late form of a story type found throughout that vast repertory, might come in useful at this point; it is one of several terms which a critic of the fantastic—in contradistinction to a critic of establishment literatures—might comfortably apply to “Heart of Darkness.” Under various names, precursor versions of the Club Story have existed since the first story was told about a storyteller telling stories. It dates from the Decameron and The Thousand and One Nights and before; seminal texts in the literature of the fantastic—including Ludwig Tieck’s Phantasus (1812-1816, three volumes), which Gary Wolfe refers to above (in “Malebolge, Or the Ordnance of Genre”), and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Serapion Brothers (1819-1821, four volumes)—are presented in a format very similar to that of the Club Story proper, which flourished for half a century or so after Robert Louis Stevenson published The New Arabian Nights (1882, two volumes), becoming more and more popular as new magazines like the Strand found that the form attracted a continuing readership.
The Club Story is simple enough to describe: it is a tale or tales recounted orally to a group of listeners forgathered in a venue safe from interruption. Its structure is normally twofold: there is the tale told; and encompassing that a frame which introduces the teller of the tale—who may well claim to have himself lived the story he’s telling—along with its auditors and the venue. At its most primitive, the Club Story usefully frames Tall Tales in a way that eases our suspension of disbelief during the duration of the telling—the Mulliner stories by P. G. Wodehouse and the Jorkens tales by Lord Dunsany are examples of this form of subjunctive allowance—but surrender the tale to the judgment of the world once it has been told. At all levels of sophistication, the Club Story form enforces our understanding that a tale has been told.
It is not a term which forms, to my knowledge, any large part of the twentieth-century critical response to “Heart of Darkness,” though it does seem that any critic of the literature of the 1890s in English might plausibly have asked, long before now, why the four greatest novellas published during that period—the Machen, the Wells, the James, and “Heart of Darkness” itself—were Club Stories. The Time Machine and “The Turn of the Screw” and “Heart of Darkness” are straightforward enough, though “The Great God Pan” might be described as a recomplicated example of the form, one whose story implicates and whose outcome is affected by those who have listened to the early stages of the tale. The 1890s was a decade of denial and boast, recessional and augur, a decade during the course of which, to the exilic perception of Joseph Conrad, Europe must visibly have begun to distend with Empire like a balloon, a snake that had swallowed the Underworld, and soon to burst asunder. It was a decade that begged alarum. So it is noteworthy that the great augur-loaded novellas of the decade are texts conspicuously shaped as vessels for the mandatory reception of story: stories which enforce witness.
In “Heart of Darkness,” the auditors of Marlow’s tale—the Director and the Lawyer and the Accountant and the narrator (an implied author who is probably Conrad himself)—hear him out on a sloop becalmed upon the estuarial Thames, east of babylonic London, just as the tide is about to turn from the West and the sloop to slide down darkness into Ocean. These auditors, who seem to have bestrid the world, may pretend to refuse to hear Marlow, but it’s too late for that, the story has been told: Marlow’s deposition about the fate of the Western World has been so presented that the rulers of that world (and the readers of “Heart of Darkness”) have had to witness it. Like any Club Story, “Heart of Darkness” is both a story and a device to mandate its reception. It may be that the “impurity” of this element of reportage at the heart of the Club Story accounts for the fact that literary theorists seem to scant it. Critics of the fantastic, dealing as they do with a set of genres intensely sensitive to the world, should have no such compunction.
We come to time, the conversation between time past and time present. The Club Story frame bears within it a double relationship to time, for it bears—like a Mask enclosing its Twin—a tale which, though it must logically have taken place before being told, now bursts by virtue of its means of telling through the Whited Sepulchre of the conventional world into the present tense, demanding witness. So “Heart of Darkness,” as we’ve noted already, happens at the time the author is writing it: right there in the present tense of the end of the nineteenth century as the Western World edges toward cusp country, that badlands for humans which we may now, after a two-century dance to the music of time, be leaving:
Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. “We have lost the first of the ebb,” said the Director suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
To describe “Heart of Darkness” as a Club Story is not to say that Conrad is locked into any literal reiteration of the modes of the tale of adventure, like poor H. Rider Haggard stuck to his salt lick down She way. “Heart of Darkness” is a deeply unlocked manifestation of story. In the revolutionary balance it achieves between the fantastic and the mundane, it is circumscribed neither by previous models, nor by propriety, nor by any sense of moral gradient between one mode of understanding the universe and another. The perturbation of the tale in 1899 still shakes us today, still opens into a world unparsable by any one set of tools (it might be noted that the strategies of several stories assembled here in Conjunctions are similarly strategies of equipoise).
Equipoise, then, is also a term of use to critics of the fantastic. It takes into account, but goes beyond, Tzvetan Todorov’s famous definition of the fantastic as the “duration of uncertainty” until an implied reader (safely decontextualized in time and place) decides whether a particular story is to be read as uncanny (that is, mundane but creepy) or marvelous (that is, impossible according to the rules of the world at the time the story was written down). But just as theories of the “pure” novel can end up describing only Middlemarch, Todorov’s theory ends up describing (insecurely) little more than “The Turn of the Screw.” This may be acute, but it is a knife too sharp for sense. Critics of science fiction have the same problem with Darko Suvin, who defines science fiction as “cognitive estrangement within a novum.” But Suvin’s diktat can be tamed into a description of the actual time-governed world, if we define science fiction as that set of texts which makes cognitive estrangement storyable. It should also be possible to domesticate Todorov in a similar fashion: if we focus upon “hesitation” (his term) or equipoise, we can expand his version of the fantastic into a description of something storytellers do in time.
Equipoise as used here is not a term normally applicable to fantasy, which may be described as comprising stories set in worlds which are impossible but which the story believes; nor, at a hazard, does it seem to be much use in understanding the epistemology games of science fiction, which have much more to do with suspense. But it certainly applies to works—like “Heart of Darkness” or “The Turn of the Screw” or James’s otherwise inexplicable The Sacred Fount (1901)—which are built upon sustained narrative negotiations of uncertainty, without coming to any n
ecessary decision as to what is real.
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