Attack of the art-errorist

If you’re near Hamburg this weekend, then there’s only one thing you should be thinking about doing - heading to Faust bassist Jean Herve Peron’s Schiphorst Festival, a gathering of some of the continent’s finest established and upcoming avant-garde musicians. As Jean Herve puts it:

‘Our purpose is to give a platform to dedicated/renowned yet not famous avantgarde artists and give you / many people the chance to get to know a style which still suffers from negative prejudices. Avantgarde is full of life, full of humor, without any restraints or boundaries. Open to everyone and everything.’

I played over there a couple of years back with the Stellas; between the music, the beers, the frankfurters, the parachutists, the aikido display and the general huge commitment to making wonderful spontaneous sounds using any means available it was a fantastic weekend. Alas, prior commitments stop me from going over this year, but you’ll love it.

Oh, and here’s this year’s line up. But like all festivals, it’s not the individual bands that make it - it’s the event as a whole! It’s also going to be webcast, so I’ll link to that nearer the time…

Our needs, character needs

Well, a slightly distracted post today, as I’m at home, working on a re-draft of the novel. It’s coming together nicely; so far I’ve chopped out about 10,000 words. Key changes so far are to get rid of the very slow moving opening chapters, and sharpen up the ghostly hermaphrodite from another dimension that’s a key player in the action.

One of the key features of the book is the way that Tramaziel – the fantasised secondary world that various characters have been to, come from or just read about – is presented. As far as possible, you only see it diffracted through people; through their memories or dreams of it.

This was very interesting to write, as it gave me access to (in effect) a variety of different, albeit related, fantasy worlds. A child’s eye view of magical city is very different from an adult’s one – something that’s very interesting to play with in a book that spend a lot of time thinking about how and why we create fantasies from the realities that surround us.

And that process of fantasy creation is very interesting. Fantasy and sf often present the wondrous in a very unmediated way, showing it having the same ‘wow’ impact on story characters as it is meant to have on us as readers.

But people don’t work like that. Quite apart from the problem of familiarisation (what’s defamiliarising for us is normal world for characters), there’s the way that humans tend to build interpretations of the worlds around them according to their own emotional needs.

And our needs as f&sf readers will often be very different from the needs of characters living in the worlds we go to for escapism, excitement and awe. That’s a gap that’s not always acknowledged; but it should be, because it makes for more honest and ultimately far more textured and engaging fiction.

Saluting the Deathly Hallows

allumination salutes today’s Harry Potter frenzy with a link to the ever groovy Birdchick talking barn owls, namechecking ‘Labyrinth’, and highlighting appalling predator close up vision. Who knew?

Slaying Bob from HR

Was still pondering yesterday’s post about weakness / achievement gaps in genre fiction when I went to read SF Diplomat, where Jonathan McCalmont is fascinating on the content of fantasy:

‘Why does fantasy prefer to dwell on saving a morally simple world instead of making the best one can in a more realistic one?’

He’s looking for a greater sense of the cut and thrust of the commercial, for narratives that may be fantastic in setting but that acknowledge and riff off the source of most day to day drama in this world - business life, as many of us live it.

One effect of this is to create a more credible weakness / achievement gap - but it also raises a very interesting question - if you’re writing this kind of fantasy, then what’s the fantasy for?

Something very positive, I would say; rather than facilitating muscle bound escapism (’I pulled out my battleaxe and slew - SLEW!!! - Bob from HR! And all those other fools who do not appreciate my world saving genius!!!’) it enables (amongst other things) a metafictional exploration of why dealing with Bob from HR can feel so much like a deep betrayal of the self in the first place, motivating the desire to hew.

It also takes a far saner view of resolution. Rather than amassing a monstrous pile of treasure / saving the world from imminent oblivion / restoring the balance between Law and Chaos, etc, heroes in this kind of narrative resolve through infinitely more credible, less compensatory achievement sets.

And come to think of it, that kind of understanding of fantasy leads directly to M. John Harrison - but I’m not going to talk about that until I’ve had some breakfast…

The weakness / achievement gap

Well, the Alan Wall Guide to Writing has arrived (you can also check out his music here), and skimming through it this morning over my breakfast toast I was already feeling sparked by it. For example, here’s Wall on one of fiction’s key obsessions:

‘Fiction is fascinated by darkness and misfortune, and ‘plot’ is usually the negotiation of this by those whom the darkness, however temporarily, enshrouds. What might horrify us in life tends to magnetize us in writing.’

Now that to me is a fascinating comment, and it chimes interestingly with an (I think) Darko Suvin comment on fantasy; that it’s obsessed with weakness, not strength. As Wall points out, it’s not just fantasy that’s fascinated by that – it’s fiction in general.

For the most part, narratives are about failure, not success. Once a character has succeeded in their key task (whether it’s throwing a ring into Mount Doom or just throwing a dinner party) the narrative resolves; the story is at an end.

The action of the narrative comes from the protagonist’s failure to achieve their goal, not their success. The narrative they’re a part of engages the reader by probing protagonist flaws and weak points. As Wall puts it, they face deeply testing ‘darkness and misfortune’.

Which leads – with a bit of a leap – to an interesting way of differentiating between more fantasised and more realistic fiction. You don’t look at the scenery (is it set in Mordor or Knightsbridge?) – rather, you look at the gap between character weakness and achievement.

Frodo is a short, hairy person; and yet he saves an entire civilisation. This, to me, isn’t particular credible, although admittedly he does have some help from his short, hairy gardener. Mrs Dalloway is an upper-middle class Londoner – and she manages to throw a dinner party. This is a gap between weakness and achievement that I can buy into.

That’s a comparison between two books that work in very different ways, written for very different audiences. But the same holds true for books within genre. Compare, say, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ with ‘Gormenghast’. The latter offers a richly imagined, entirely fantasised setting; but within it, Titus’ great achievement is to leave home.

The weakness / achievement gap here is – in human terms – entirely credible, and so the book has an emotional credibility that LotR lacks. It doesn’t need to be read as myth or metaphor to have a real, human impact; it dramatises a situation we’ve all faced, and uses the machinery of fantasy to universalise the weaknesses and failures that set the drama in motion in the first place.

A heart of darkness

Felt a bit bummed out yesterday, so that inevitably made me think of William Hope Hodgson’s ‘The Night Land’, the book that nearly gave me a nervous breakdown over New Year 1999 / 2000.

Normally, I love William Hope Hodgson. His berserk imagery, unhinged sense of space and time, and deep nautical experience (at times he comes across like the bad acid Joseph Conrad) combine every so often to produce utter pulp magnificence.

‘The House on the Borderland’ is an acknowledged classic, helped kickstart H. P. Lovecraft, and more recently has been namechecked by Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore and China Mieville, amongst others. ‘The Ghost Pirates’ is a genuinely haunted tale of subtle nautical mayhem, stuffed to the gills with memorable imagery and authentic sea-lore. The ‘Carnacki the Ghost Finder’ stories are just plain strange (and newly reprinted by Wordsworth Classics) – and so on.

But ‘The Night Land’ is in a different league. It’s set in the far future; and the sun has died. The remnants of humanity inhabit a giant, illuminated pyramid, the Last Redoubt. Everywhere else is darkness. Terrible creatures surround the pyramid, watching and waiting… And then, a signal from the last survivor of another, previously unknown redoubt is received. The narrator sets out to find her.

That’s really it for plot. You don’t read ‘The Night Land’ for seat of the pants narrative thrills; you read it for its crushing, strange, intense atmosphere, battling through its bizarrely contorted prose to do so. The conviction with which WHH images his dark, possessed future world, and the claustrophobic grimness of the creatures that hide in it, are remarkable.

I couldn’t finish it; it was too much for me. So I don’t know how it ends, and I haven’t formed a deep critical view of it, beyond awe at its atmospheric potency. So, here’s a quote from it, to give you a sense of its unique qualities:

‘And so, in a few minutes, I was at the South-Eastern wall, and looking out through The Great Embrasure towards the Three Silver-fire Holes, that shone before the Thing That Nods, away down, far in the South-East. Southward of this, but nearer, there rose the vast bulk of the South-East Watcher - The Watching Thing of the South-East. And to the right and to the left of the squat monster burned the Torches; maybe half-a-mile upon each side; yet sufficient light they threw to show the lumbered-forward head of the never-sleeping Brute.

To the East, as I stood there in the quietness of the Sleeping-Time on the One Thousandth Plateau, I heard a far, dreadful sound, down in the lightless East; and, presently, again - a strange, dreadful laughter, deep as a low thunder among the mountains. And because this sound came odd whiles from the Unknown Lands beyond the Valley of The Hounds, we had named that far and never-seen Place “The Country Whence Comes The Great Laughter.” And though I had heard the sound, many and oft a time, yet did I never hear it without a most strange thrilling of my heart, and a sense of my littleness, and of the utter terror which had beset the last millions of the world.’

Dies Irae underdrive

Apropos of nothing at all, other than it’s good to chill, and originally thanks to Mark P, some grroooooooovvveed out blissed up kosmische musik to enjoy…

Myths to a flame

In ‘Mythologies’, Barthes notes – ‘it is well known how often our ‘realistic’ literature is mythical (if only as a crude myth of realism) and how our ‘literature of the unreal’ has at least the merit of being only slightly so’.

Elsewhere, M. John Harrison has pointed out that, as soon as you’ve got a spaceship or a dragon, you’re writing metafiction – fiction that’s very aware it’s unreal. That awareness effects the reader’s engagement with the whole, drawing attention again and again to the fact that they’re dealing with nothing more than some ink and some paper.

That would seem to run counter to Barthes’ defense of the unreal as the more real. But he’s getting at something deeper.

All fiction contains ideology. For example, the writer uses words to mimic people, has them behave in a certain way, and then punishes or rewards them – or at the very least, judges them – accordingly. The ideology of a given narrative lies in part in that authorial response to character, and by extension character action.

The metafictional status of the ‘literature of the unreal’ constantly reminds the reader that what he or she is reading is entirely constructed. It’s not a real world; it’s a rhetorical world, created (whether consciously or unconsciously) to articulate a given world view.

Contrasting the ‘literature of the unreal’ with ‘realistic’ literature reveals the flawed nature of the latter. It pretends to be an accurate recreation of reality but in reality – filtered in the same way through a set of authorial values – it’s as mythological as the fantastic. It exerts the same ideological pressure on the reader.

But it pretends not to; it pretends to be a world, rather than an interested representation of a world. It hides the subjective values it embodies, presenting them instead as objective truths. Opinion becomes an artefact – in Barthes’ terms, a myth.

Hence Barthes’ criticism of the ‘realistic’ as being more mythical than the fantastic. Unlike non-realist fiction, it pretends to be something it’s not; a real, objective world, rather than just ink on paper building subjectivity.

The Wall game

Monday again, and time to think about Alan Wall, as he has a ‘how to’ book on writing out. This is very exciting, because he’s a magnificent writer. First book of his I read was ‘China’, which was hugely enjoyable (in part because it’s very well written, in part because it’s mostly set around five minutes walk from where I live), but it was ‘The School of Night’ that really blew me away.

‘The School of Night’ is about Sean Tallow, a rather ineffectual intellectual who combines his Shakespeare obsession (who really wrote the plays?) with a job at the BBC. His life is intertwined with that of his school friend Daniel Pagett, who has become a Richard Branson-like multi-millionaire.

There’s a lot going on in the book; but what really leapt out at me is Wall’s deep, subtle consideration of the innate criminality of the self. Building on Nietzsche, Wall riffs on the way that our needs and desires sooner or later clash with those of the people around us.

When that happens, we have a choice; we either betray ourselves by acceding to the needs of others, or we criminalise ourselves by ignoring or actively working against those needs. To fulfil ourselves, we need to deny those around us.

This – in essence – is the problem that Sean has; the book charts his different ways of engaging with it, contrasting his behaviour with that of the more directly criminal Daniel. And it does so in a memorably focussed way. There’s not a wasted sentence in it – in fact, I started re-reading it as soon as I’d finished it, all the better to appreciate the tautness and precision of Wall’s craft.

So it’s very exciting to see that his guide to writing is coming out. Oh, and he’s also very engaged with Michael Moorcock; as I understand it, he looks critically at Moorcock’s marvellous ‘Between the Wars’ novel sequence in the book. I can’t wait to see what he’s got to say about them; and I can’t wait to see what he’s going to say about writing in general.

La Planete Sauvage

Well, as promised here’s part 1 of ‘La Planete Sauvage’ from Youtube. Alas, it’s not subtitled or dubbed - but then again, who needs language when you have such trippy music and visuals? Oh, and the rest of it’s linked to from the Youtube page.