New Wave Fabulists

by Bradford Morrow

  The ultimate problem with Todorov is the problem of twentieth-century critics in general: their unspoken assumption that the fantastic cannot be told as a given, that it is a moral/aesthetic/cultural hot potato requiring decisive action, that equipoise is obscurely untruthful. The heartwood indeterminacy of “Heart of Darkness” has seemed invisible to them—see Gary Wolfe’s comments on “vacancies of sensibility”—because they have been able only to conceive of Conrad’s active, unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) equipoise between the fantastic and the mundane in terms of vacillation: as a wobbling between the inadmissible and mimesis, between subliterary genres of adventure and mature renderings of the “seeable” world, with a not exactly hidden rider that the choice between the fantastic and the real is in the first instance necessary, and in the second constitutes a choice between recidivism and progress. But the suspendedness of “Heart of Darkness” cannot be defined as sensationalism awaiting moral restitution. There is no moral gradient in the range of Marlow’s perception of the phenomena. What Marlow tells us is the case of the story. Kurtz himself—twinning Marlow and Mephistopheles—is not a metaphor, he does not stand for anything but the case and the position of himself: he hovers, he is equipoise.

  As do its 1890s cohorts, “Heart of Darkness” hovers between protocols of story, between centuries, between fin de siècle and aftermath, between Ruin and Futurity. It is a tale about enduring the vertigo of unknowing, forever; its example paces within the stories of Conjunctions, which have also been written at a time of change, when it is, perhaps, as important—as gallant—to know how to inhabit conflicting protocols as it is to know the truth about things.

  Portal/Cloaca. Portal, a term commonly found in the criticism of the fantastic, generally designates an opening—whether rabbit hole or wardrobe or borderline or cave or tornado—from one reality to another. Portals are penetrated by children or heroes in their quest, beyond the fields we know, for a world consubstantial with the heart’s desire. As Marlow’s tale begins we learn that the liminal beings who inhabit the Whited Sepulchre of Brussels have given him the OK to cross the borderline into the unknown, and that initially he thinks of the Congo as a vast gate or portal into the great darkness he thinks he wishes to plumb. Though, in his telling of the tale, Marlow mutes and ironizes this frame of mind of his, it is pretty clear that the beginning of his long trip up the Congo toward Kurtz follows a basic fantasy story: that of the quest undertaken through a portal. Soon, however, a hovering “insecurity” of language cues us to suspect that this initial story may be under serious attack, that a darker model of story may be overwriting it.

  Horror and Fantasy, as grammars of story, can be understood as mirror reversals. Such a mirror stands athwart “Heart of Darkness,” and when Marlow passes through that mirror he passes into a black Wonderland, and Portal becomes a Cloaca down which the raw world pours. Marlow’s Quest becomes its mirror opposite, a Hook (the hook that gaffs the fish), which compels him to continue, keelhauling him on the rind of the world (the world the Congo exhales) till he drowns. The only way Marlow can avoid fatal immersion (by now the world has literally infected him with a fever) is to leap up the Cloaca like a spawning salmon, toward the dark within which the demon twin resides. The oneiric plunges of elision which mark the storyline of “Heart of Darkness” might have been more fruitfully registered by critics if they had been able to understand without derision that the profound metamorphosis in Marlow comes about through a reversal of story type. E. M. Forster famously derided as contentless the language Conrad uses here to trace this deep transfiguration of his tale. The truth, of course, is that Conrad’s language here is not a meditation but a grammar, and that certain tools of understanding will find that grammar invisible.

  Terms useful for analysis, like Portal/Cloaca, are of course grossly simpler than the works they cartoon. But they are pointers. It does seem, for instance, that something like a Portal/Cloaca transformation—some systole and diastole of interchange between optimism and pessimism, between conquering and being overwhelmed, between fix and consequence, initiative and atrocity, Gesamptkunstwerk and the Absurd, Papa Joe and Koba the Dread—does singularly mark the last century, which is the second century to be so singed with time that its inhabitants could think of the world as an engine pounding. So the grammar of “Heart of Darkness” prefigures the rhythm of the century it opens; deep within that grammar, or so it still seems to readers in 2002, lies a body English of the terrible anxiety of time (at least one story assembled here in Conjunctions—John Crowley’s “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines,” see below—can be understood as a tragic description of the unwriting of Portal in a lamed world, as though Marlow’s boat had simply sunk). Nor is it at all strange that the genres of the fantastic of the West refract, with allergenic sensitivity, this pulsation of the world, for they were created when it began to turn, round about 1800. The fantastic in the West is time’s child. The genres of the fantastic—and stories like “Heart of Darkness,” whose shape is the shape of the openness to the world of the Ocean of Story—have ever since taken the world’s pulse.

  Twins, or Doubles, or Shadows, are the wake of that pulse. In horror stories—and in tales like “Heart of Darkness,” which evoke the modes of horror—they represent a locus for some original part of our lives that remains in situ when the world turns so fast we leave something of ourselves behind, something torn from us unfinished. Twins haunt texts, therefore, whose ostensible heroes—like Marlow before the Congo turns on him and he must learn to swim, or Dr. Jekyll, or Dorian Gray, or Miles Teagarden in If You Could See Me Now (1977) by Peter Straub, or Humbert Humbert, or the witch in China Mieville’s “Familiar,” another Conjunctions story—are hollow men.

  This sense of a hollowness surrounding an inner self is, I think, modern. It is a modern experience to be bifurcated by the world into mask and twin, to experience évolué guilt for no greater sin than that of attempting to match the beat of a world which will not stop. Any litany of malaises of twentieth-century Western man—anomie, estrangement, alienation, one-dimensionality, all the hysterias (from consumerism to recovered memories), dissociations of sensibility (including the dissociative calving off of mimetic literature from its amniotic twin, the fantastic that surrounds it), the lonely crowd, vastation, the death of God—adds up in the end to a statement that, in the end, it is impossible to keep up. The approaches to “Heart of Darkness” that we have been describing all point to this anxiety of ceaselessness, this amnesia consequent upon fracture. The literatures of the fantastic—which were born in 1800 or so, when time began to split us, and which “Heart of Darkness” taps—are topiary growths in the pulse of time: they are the body English of what has happened to us.

  Under rubrics of this sort, a critic of the fantastic in literature might approach a text not normally interpreted as a citizen of the Ocean of Story. For it does seem clear that Conrad—at least in 1899—was as opportunistic as any great artist in his choice of ways to tell. The artistic creed he first published as a preface to the magazine release in 1897 of The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” and republished in 1902, seems anomalous in this frame of understanding, or perhaps it is “Heart of Darkness” itself which is anomalous in his career. Certainly it’s the case that a phrase like “before all, to make you see,” by seeming to restrict evocation to the mundane (as Wolfe notes in “Malebolge”), does little to describe the author’s attempts, in “Heart of Darkness,” to give tongue to an equipoise which limns the abyss of Kurtz. It is a credo whose republication three years after “Heart of Darkness” reads more like retraction than advocacy.

  The creed won in the end, however, and Conrad retracted into the English gentleman of Chance—an odyssey of diminishment that took from us a writer of greatness—and we are left with a master-work whose gravamen, in the eyes of those whose task it has been to marshall our understanding, is either illicit or indetectable.

  But it is not only “Heart of Darkness” that has been mispri
sioned or ignored through the critical exclusion of the fantastic from the organon of literature, an exclusion which fatally slights the centrality of story in any wider understanding of what it is we do when we tell. By creating a restrictive paling around the residue which is deemed real and therefore tellable, the literary critics of the past two centuries have created a canon so focused on the simple end of the spectrum of story that most of world literature has vanished out of ken.

  The operators of this exclusionary theoretic, in terms of which texts respond to the world the way a snail responds to salt, have signally failed to understand the underlying project of the genres of the fantastic over the past two centuries, the centuries of world change and species anxiety. As a whole, to put it into a nutshell, the project of the fantastic since 1800, a project which underlies the pulp and the junk as well as “Heart of Darkness,” the meretricious and the mechanically repetitive as well as (say) Stephen Spielberg’s hugely misunderstood AI (2001), is that of making storyable our profound anxieties about a world whose claws are Time.

  2. “HURRY, HURRY, THE EARTH’S TURNING”

  So we were wrong at the beginning. “Heart of Darkness” is more than a running start into the cusp country we inhabit here in 2002 like blind men in the belly of an elephant: “Heart of Darkness” is a twin of now. If it were reprinted here in Conjunctions, it would segue seamlessly into (say) Neil Gaiman’s “October in the Chair,” a Club Story in which the months forgather to tell one another seasonal tales, each tale telling the nature of the month who tells it as the great year turns; or (say) Kelly Link’s “Lull,” a tale which might be described as Club Story wrought to its uttermost. The first half is constructed as an immensely complex frame—as the first half of a palindrome—that introduces the second half, which comprises a tale told to the forgathered Auditors by a woman who usually does telephone sex at four bucks a minute, but who also does Story if asked. Into the shattered lull of the lives depicted in the frame, this unseen voice of Story tells a tale (which contains further tales within tales) that seems to reverse the stalled lives of the characters who witness its telling, but in the end does not: for the figure of the palindrome at the heart of the working of the overall tale is a figure with no exit, and the cast of “Lull” is in hell.

  John Crowley’s “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines,” which we’ve already mentioned, might also share a book with “Heart of Darkness,” for both are tales dependent for their outcomes on a handling of Equipoise (as is M. John Harrison’s “Entertaining Angels Unawares,” which hovers between two angels of death, the fearless boss who dreams of decapitating whole populations but whose life is a giving, and the protagonist, the wannabe angel whose ungivingness fails to qualify him to share the dream). Where Conrad keeps his tale open as to the nature of Kurtz—who cannot therefore be decided upon, so that the oneiric latency of the tale, its hovering between the mimetic and the fantastic, the personal and the world-historical, remains uncensorably witnessable—Crowley closes his novella to any final possibility that there may be more than one story of the world, that there may be a story of the world in which story is true. “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines” closes into a tragedy of aftermath almost as soon as its Kurtz figure, the festival sponsor whose name cannot be remembered after he evanesces from view, poisonously suggests that Shakespeare is nothing but Mask, that the true hidden progenitor of the magic words about to play on stage is Bacon the Twin. This litany is poisonous, almost devilish, because it is literally false: it takes from the narrator and his young lover in 1959 a world athrum with storyline, reducing sense of potential—that Equipoise—into a world of false codes, lamings of Story. That the protagonists of the story are themselves gallant only intensifies the vastation they inhabit as their time closes. Hurry, the narrator thinks, contemplating his lover’s adult attempts to recapture through photographs a world unspoliated by code death: hurry, hurry, the earth’s turning. But the earth continues to turn, like a clock. This is genuinely tragic; but it is a rendering of tragedy that can best—perhaps only—be understood when it is understood how “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines” is not a fantasy.

  For if there is an ascertainable deep structure to twentieth-century fantasy, it is something that Crowley bids farewell to in his novella. What we now recognize as fantasy (as distinguished from other modes of the fantastic like supernatural fiction or horror) was created out of the wound of aftermath of World War I by a wide range of writers—from E. R. Eddison to J. R. R. Tolkien to C. S. Lewis to Hugh Lofting to David Lindsay and beyond—who shared little but a need to close the wound. For them, fantasy begins in suture. From their works as a whole, and from the works of those influenced by them, comes a sense of the underlying movement of fantasy as a loosening of bondage—history loosening into story—a process I’ve found convenient to articulate as a four-part discourse, one that fantasy texts themselves, in the flesh, translate into storyable form. The first two terms of that discourse constitute a negotiation with history: which impinges upon the world of the story as a sense of Wrongness (which in seasonal terms can be understood as the end of Summer), and metastasizes into a cancerous Thinning (which is Autumn) of the created land. Thinning—which is often manifested in the tale as a kind of cultural and personal amnesia: which is the bondage of losing who we were—often takes up much of the action of typical fantasy novels (genre fantasy series, set in rigid Fantasylands, never really pass beyond Thinning), and conveys an affect of terrible, impoverishing, senseless affray, rather like trench warfare. But then—in No Man’s Land, in the Waste Land—the Story speaks at last, rescue is nigh, light at the end of the tunnel, and the story opens into Recognition (Winter), where we learn who we are, and what Story is telling us. Recognition itself exfoliates finally into Return (Spring), but relatively few fantasy stories give much space to achieved pastoral, perhaps because just governance (like Utopias) can hardly be told at all. Twentieth-century fantasy, in other words, is a literature of refusal. It is subversive. It is a counter-story to the world. It tells us that history has gone wrong, and must be left behind, or we are lost. Fantasy in this light is an escape (as J. R. R. Tolkien suggested in 1947) from prison.

  “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines,” like “Lull,” ends in prison; no loosening is possible. A revisionist fantasy like Andy Duncan’s “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” reverses the pattern of discourse: its protagonist escapes the just governance of his 1930s Paradise, and undergoes a Recognition in reverse, discovering who he was in the world of time; only at that point, before tuberculosis thins him stone dead, is he storied back to bliss. A fantasy like Elizabeth Hand’s “The Least Trumps” may share a starting point with Crowley—a recognizable world populous with characters drawn with a loving attentiveness more frequently associated with “realist” texts—but translates itself almost imperceptibly into a tale that illuminates the discourse of fantasy, for its protagonist recovers her lost Story by tattooing it literally onto her own skin: an extremely neat rendering of the act of Recognition.

  But Hand has not written a fantasy of Recognition because it was expected of her, any more than Crowley was expected to describe a world that becomes tragic, that cannot be retold; or Gaiman to conceive the reverse, to imagine Story as the key to season; or Link to create a loop out of horror, out of the raw materials of the mundane, a house of mirrors with no exit; or Duncan to create, on the other hand, a loop which becomes rescue. If any of these stories obey any expectations, they do so by choice. The whole range of works offered here in Conjunctions demonstrates the ruthless opportunism of the writers of 2002 when it comes to deciding how to tell, when it comes to choosing how to conjunct with the pulse of the world.

  The extremes are great. Karen Joy Fowler’s “The Further Adventures of the Invisible Man” invokes the fantastic only to refuse it, in order (I’d guess) to simplify the task of understanding a protagonist already overburdened with story. Peter Straub’s “Little Red’s Tango,” on the o
ther hand, could be understood to begin in the mundane world—and a critic of nonfantastic literature might readily understand the movement of the story as a gradual intensification of its metaphorical content, and read the tale as mundane to the end. But years ago, Samuel R. Delany argued with great cogency that the reading protocols of the fantastic demanded that we be open to the literal: that in the literatures of the fantastic a cigar is what the story says it is. Sometimes it is only a cigar. Sometimes it is a spaceship. Sometimes it is a stogie in God’s mouth. If the cigar inhales us, it is a Portal; if it drowns us in contaminants, it is a Cloaca. If it occupies two worlds, but remains a cigar in both, it is a conjunction. What the cigar almost never is, is a metaphor. “Little Red’s Tango” is, in other words, exactly what Straub tells us it is, in a form of telling (the story reads as a parody of scripture) that underlines the literalness of his intent: Little Red is literally a Christ of our days, a benign hemorrhage of giving, a being who decreases entropy. His substance, which is explicitly bread and wine, feeds us.

  There is more. “Little Red’s Tango,” after our reading of the literal tale, gives us more: the pleasure of the text is markedly enhanced when we understand that the story evokes a central dynamic of horror—a transfer of substance from the hollow to the hungry—but is itself not horror. Our joy in understanding that Little Red is plenitude comes from our knowledge of the alternatives Straub chooses not to follow, that he has written a tale of counterhorror. Like so many stories of the present era, “Little Red’s Tango” is a conversation with the Ocean of Story: in a world of convulsive instability, the world it is the task of the fantastic to make storyable, it knows its place. A more orthodox transfer of substance governs the action of China Miéville’s “Familiar,” though with the twist that the familiar is consubstantial with its host—the Twin consubstantial with its Mask—so that when the abandoned familiar gains ontological conglomeration by literally hollowing its maker into a pattern of holes penetrating a few “handspans of sternum, inches of belly,” this transfer of substance is revealed as a deep pun, an ideogram of the nature of the hunger of the Twin since long before Hyde. Like “Little Red’s Tango,” like every story assembled in Conjunctions, “Familiar” is itself a kind of pun: an autonomous story that has not ever been told before, that is, at the same time, a conversation with siblings.