When philosophers with particular concerns read a story or novel, especially if such fictions are burgeoning with potential meaning, they often find their concerns reflected in the narrative––that is, they encounter potential analogies for their own thought. Such encounters, I would argue, emanate from work that possesses the kind of organic richness that, as noted above, is inherent to the work of authors such as Sriduangkaew. Indeed, as noted above, there is a reason why multiple French thinkers have used Mallarmé as an analogical prop for their philosophy; why Benjamin kept returning to Kafka; why Adorno obsessed over Proust; why Fanon drew upon Depestre and Fodeba; why Mao in his most philosophical moments conjured the fictions of Lu. These were all works that, due to their complexity of both form and content, implicated critical engagement.
Of course it might indeed be the case that thinkers can find analogical encounters in thoughtless and petty works of literature. Take, for example, Zizek’s obsession with jokes and mundane Hollywood movies. I would argue, however, that the result of such pithy encounters are either ironic or banal––much like their source material. The analogical claims derived from such engagements are usually predictable or at best not very interesting.8 But let’s not get bogged down in literary theory and claims about artistic quality. Better to recognize that some literary geographies are more lush than others, based on an appeal to philosophical intervention as a whole, than to get sidetracked by a discussion of the meaning of aesthetic quality that is beyond the scope of this project.
Just as philosophers and theorists have drawn from fiction and poetry to elaborate their concerns, so too have fiction writers and poets drawn from philosophy and theory. We only need to think of the immense influence of Marxism and then post-structuralism/post-colonialism upon the arts to realize the truth of this relationship, or the ways in which Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon have influenced large swathes of anti-colonial literature. Moreover, long-standing debates over particular philosophical problems––identity, time, mind, causality, language, scepticism––have often been translated into plot devices in popular speculative fiction.
Philosophy and theory have inspired fiction just as much as fiction has inspired philosophy and theory; there is a mobius circuit running between these different modes of communication. Large swathes of fiction, from the avant-garde to mainstream genre, would not be possible without the ideas and concepts originating from philosophy and theory. Try to imagine Ngũgĩ’s Devil on the Cross without Fanon. Or, to cite a pop culture example, try to imagine the Wachowski sisters’ Matrix Trilogy without Descartes. Authors like playing with ideas; fiction would be pretty boring if they did not.
While I am not suggesting that I’m the kind of thinker worthy of fictional engagement, in my responses I will be drawing upon those who are and, in the process, highlighting concepts and problematics that hopefully coincide with Sriduangkaew’s own interests. Her work to date is already marked by engagements with radical political philosophy; it will not be difficult for her to bypass whatever awkwardness I might bring to the discussion and focus upon areas that already form part of her creative concern.
Three fictions and three non-fictions form the following assemblage that––beginning with the initial story and read in order––represents a kind of conversation or dialogue. The aim of this experiment is to produce something approaching a dialogical whole: the essays developed out of an engagement with the stories, elicited by some idea or concept, a turn of phrase or an analogy burgeoning with philosophical possibility, but are distinct entities. Similarly, the stories following the essays originate from something in these essays that provoked a fictional response. Although we start with a work that was previously published, because it initiates the conversation, everything following this foundation is the dialogue.
Hopefully this conversation will contribute to the conjuncture of speculative fiction I discussed above, declaring fidelity to the position that pushes the boundaries and resists backlash. The collaborative nature of this project––and the ways in which our methods devour each other so as to eke out a liminal space that is both and neither story and essay––might permit interrogations and contestations that cut across our respective ways of knowing. If speculative fiction has always been a constellation of genres that intersect with philosophical concerns, by making these concerns explicit we can reinforce resistance to the genre counter-revolution that seeks to conserve and prolong all of the conceits and retrograde gestures of an uncritical fandom. The aim is to use this dialogue to aid in the development of a new genre fandom composed of reader-militants who will think of speculative fiction as part of a larger counter-hegemony. Speculative fiction can and should be linked to the ruthless criticism of the contemporary and brutal state of affairs.
Chapter One
We Are All Wasteland On the Inside1
Benjanun Sriduangkaew
She is dying, the old spymaster, when I visit her house. Spread all over the room: lethargic on the bed, a hand (thick, callused) pinned to the ceiling, a leg (long, shapely) dangling from a bookshelf. The rate of her decay has been rapid, toxins mating and making nations in her body, fighting wars and creating cultures and making history that expresses in the bioluminescence blotting her skin. It looks editorial, opal tones and swallowed sea-storms, and would have made her the star of a body-mod exhibit. Jellyfish chic, arising salt-thick and hungry from the deep.
But still she breathes and when she sees me, she says, “Help yourself.”
The bar is fully stocked, red bottles and faceted cups. Clean stirrers, cleaner glassware. She has a housekeeper, some fresh-faced (as they eternally are) upsorn-sriha newly out of the forest: the sandals left at the door are telltale, delicate gold and shaped for hooves. For my drink I pick smoky wine and red petals that dissolve in the alcohol, giving up spice and salt and sour. I skip the coconut syrup that’s supposed to go with the cocktail. Sweet things are not my province.
I settle on a chaise lounge. It’s distracting, her collapse, the slow agony of a body pushing free of each other as though they are similarly polarized magnets. Phantom limbs have sprung from the sockets of her arm and leg. They curl about her, boneless, barely real in their pallor. Her torso is intact otherwise, the head still firmly joined to the rest. A pre-murder scene, avant-garde and carefully posed on sheets and headboard for maximum statement. She must be on anaesthetics, medulla oblongata sloshing in drugs, but her eyes are steady, her voice smooth and uninterrupted by intoxication.
“I’m your assigned legal executor.” A sip: as hard-hitting as I expected. She has good taste and the means to satisfy it, though I can’t imagine she has enjoyed anything lately. “We’ll need your authorization to unseal your will, Khun Jutamat.”
Her mouth pinches. A smile aborted late-term. “I don’t have one.”
That’s news to me. I know she has close family and two ex-wives. “Your property will revert to the state.”
“I’ll be dead and money won’t matter to me. I didn’t ask for you specifically on account of your law degree. You worked with police.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I have worked in many things: theatre, accounting, a stint in forensics and vice. Mine is a timeline in disarray, but so are most people’s. Much of life has become debris and dead skin after Himmapan, the convergence event.
Jutamat’s poltergeist arm stretches unsteadily, the movements more like limp rubber than bone and muscle. Undulating, repulsive. “It’s a good range of skills. Much more important than one’s bank balance or where that balance goes after one expires. You and I, we’ll solve my murder together before I go.”
In Jutamat’s garden there is a tree, old, its canopies dripping star-shaped leaves. Gold, green, tipped in stark white. It is heavy with a crop of makkalee fruits on the cusp of maturity and independence from the bough. I have never seen one of these trees; they don’t grow just anywhere and resist attempts at cultivation. Only at the liminal edges do they flourish, where Himmapan hovers and seeps into city, bl
ack loam making sludge of asphalt, green radiance splattering traffic signs and sidewalks. Where birds fly too close to that border they disappear, the dirt-crusted pigeons and smoke-stained crows.
Accordingly there are no birds here or butterflies, no ants or amphibians. All is clean. Not a blade of grass is too long; no weeds or infestation of fungi touch the earth, no mark of worm or insect hunger on petals. Frangipani, lotuses––either Jutamat favours those, or no other flower would grow. Symbols of passing on and peace, respectively. Appropriate perhaps.
Myth tells that makkalee fruits are alluring and sweetly scented. Reality is less glamorous. They smell faintly vegetal rather than like palm sugar, jasmines, or some heavenly blossom. On the ground one of them lies fallen and premature, ivory skin bruised from impact and seeping blue sap. I turn it in my palm, tracing the contours of full breasts and small waist, flared hips and thick thighs. The face is rough, a work in progress, but there is already a nose and mouth defined, eye sockets deepening. The ones on the bough are shaped similarly. All makkalee fruits from the same tree look alike, replicated over and over in some internal mould, the way dolls emerge from a factory.
“Have you ever met one of them full grown?”
I put the fruit down. Jutamat’s wheelchair labours, for all that her mass can’t weigh that much anymore. Shreds of her ghost leg get stuck in mechanism, between joints. “Can’t say I have, ma’am.”
“Poor conversationalists. They only think of the soil and the air, rain and sun. Not much else; I can’t imagine what hermits in legends see. But then, mythical hermits tend to be ugly and desperate.” She wheels forward. It continues to be a struggle, looking at her directly. The eye protests. Optic nerves flinch. The mind attempts to reconstitute what is there and fails. “Rumour has it that eating makkalee will cure any ill. Incorrect, of course. My housekeeper planted this, by the way, to keep her company––not many Himmapan natives live in the neighbourhood. Would you like a bite? Think of it like moulded chocolate or marzipan.”
“I will pass, thank you.” I don’t consider myself squeamish. But still they look humanlike and, given time to ripen, they will talk like humans too. Pastiche personhood. “I don’t think I am the person you want for this.” A simple arrangement of paperwork, what will go where, a list of beneficiaries and then a cut for the tax collectors. That is what it should have been.
“I’ll be the judge of that. You were police, more or less.”
“Less rather than more.” With effort I focus on the banal details: her thinning hair, the indented scar on her chin. “What makes you think there’s a crime to figure out, a perpetrator to bring to justice?”
“Justice has nothing to do with it, Khun Oraphin. I seek satisfaction and, from your records with forensics, you seem to have a nose for the strange. When you were very young, you were lost in Himmapan for a day, I understand.”
A day to my parents; a month to me. It wasn’t a bad month––Himmapan is kind to children, and I was twelve going on thirteen, sufficiently young and sufficiently pure––but I returned changed, one of the first to have made the crossing before true convergence. No one believed me, at first, until the parents of another child went on air. Talk shows, taken seriously by nobody, and then a handful of lost children grew to a dozen, a score. We became a generation. Himmapan, the domain of many things, but foremost among them the eagle and the serpent. When I open my hand I half-expect to be clutching a feather the colour of clear night, the colour of polished cobalt. This is a hallucination that’s seated itself deep inside me, parasitic, cancerous.
“I suppose I was, ma’am.” I never say anything else. Not the details. Not anything.
“Stop calling me that. You aren’t my servant.” Her flesh leg twitches; she is trying to cross it, but the other one is insubstantial and does not obey. I wonder if the amputated leg, alone in that room, flexes and pulls with effort. “I was one of the people poring over your case file, back then. It all looked like a threat to national security at the time.”
Sixteen years ago. “What’d you like me to do, Khun Jutamat?”
“Help me figure this out,” she says. “My fortune isn’t going anywhere. It’s not inconsiderable––you would know. It would serve a dead woman poorly, but you’re alive and prone to stay that way for decades yet. Sort this out and I’ll sign it all to you.”
Her assets are significant, no denying that. My thoughts dart––avarice is so magnetic––to the possibilities, the fantasies, the horizons out of reach. Money is not all, especially in the changed world, but it is still much. Humanity does not function without a currency. We’ve knotted ourselves too tight to go back to barter and an exchange of labour, to discard the coins and the notes and the cheques. Even those of the forest are becoming like us in that way. “Your family isn’t going to be happy with me.”
She issues a low chuckle, a sound of paper rustling on wood. “What does it matter, whether they are happy? Come, I’m not dying any slower. The sooner we get started, the better.”
To trace any curse, the most obvious and essential first step is to examine the site of its effect, in this case Jutamat’s body parts. There will be a piece of buffalo hide, a fragment of tooth or finger-bone, as vector for malice. I imagine the housekeeper on her dainty deer hooves dusting the celadon and polishing the teak floor, precise steps as she cleans around these lost limbs. Not everyone can afford upsorn-sriha staff, hard workers as well as supreme ornaments. All the rage in any establishment of class and currency, any household of taste and opulence. For myself I can’t stand those quiet hooved girls, but I am no tastemaker.
With gloves on––best practice must be followed––I pull down the detached limbs. The hand is first and hardest, speared in place by a reptilian tongue of glistening iron. It bleeds when I bring it down, though Jutamat evinces no reaction save mild amusement. The leg––it is a whole leg, complete, from thigh to tiptoes. Fetching it is simple; handling it less so. The weight of the limb is hot and heavy, confrontational in its gross mortality, the bones and muscles and wrinkled skin at the knees. I seize it around the ankle at first, then reverse my grip when I realize that the position would put the thigh much too close to my face. Manoeuvring it awkwardly to a sofa I put it down and try not to think on the intimacy of this. The detachment happened right at the point where it joined the groin, clean.
The leg smells faintly of shower cream, not the cheap type: this is essential oils, bergamot and frankincense, an underlying note of subtle fruits. The poison must have preserved the parts entirely, suspended them in the moment of amputation. “What were you doing when this happened?”
“I’d just come out of a bath. That was the first one.” Her voice falters, only just, then resumes smooth: lifetime-practised control sanding off the edge of trauma. “How does it end?”
“Your head.” Not that I have seen it in action but there are reports and studies. Few ailments of supernatural sources have not been catalogued, compared, cross-referenced into mundanity. We forge the changed earth through empiricism and remorseless analysis. The poets and dreamers thought they would be ascendant, but after all it’s people like me and Jutamat who thrive. Pragmatists who know how to move through the world, and know how to move it in turn by levers and hand-wheels. “It’s mostly painless. As far as I know, ma’am.”
Jutamat makes a noise through her teeth, strained and thin and high: distilled panic. “Two to five months, though they say it escalates toward the final stage.”
“Do you have enemies?”
“In my profession, at my age, who does not? Unless one is devoted to nothing but pushing pens and shuffling papers. Any number of people, domestic and foreign, would want me gone.” She sips from a glass of anchan tea so cold it radiates, mentholated and lambent. “After sixty I’d have thought they would leave me alone to die naturally. I guess not. Should’ve smoked and drunk more.”
The past doesn’t relent and deeds like hers don’t fade, not that she needs reminding. When I ope
n her detached hand it feels exhibitionist––perhaps voyeuristic?––to be caressing, touching, playing with an older stranger’s appendage. Her palm is empty: I’d expected a sliver, a thorn, the swell of a small tooth hiding under skin. The obvious carrier of a curse. If only, for once, existence would oblige by being simple. “Have you been having dreams?” Sleep paralysis, a ghostly face greenly lit. The paranormal is predictable in its symptoms, easier than viruses and cancer to diagnose, more straightforward by far than the caprices of human flesh.
“No dreams. No, that’s not quite true. One dream. A khrut. Young. Female. Four arms. She’s sitting on a chair. Blue like her feathers.” Her expression pinches: this is not a woman used to sharing her dreams. “She’s singing, I suppose, but there is no sound. Like you are receiving faulty signal, visual without auditory.”
I look at the leg, perfunctory, pushing at the skin and peering behind the knee. “I will need to consult.”
“Who, a shaman?”
“No.” The leg falls from my hand and rests, limp, on the table. It will leave smudges on the glass and the housekeeper will have to wipe that away. She will have to put the limbs somewhere, too, arrange them in neat order. Maybe a mannequin, custom-made to Jutamat’s build. “I will get back to you as soon as possible.”
Methods Devour Themselves Page 2