Hunting for the future of story

Over the last few days I’ve been pondering where narrative might go next, as a result of an interesting news story and a rather lovely website I came across the other day. So first of all, the news story, from the Sidney Morning Herald, which tells us how:

‘Remarkably, half of Japan’s top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed the same way - on the tiny handset of a mobile phone. They sold an average of 400,000 copies. By August, the president of Goma Books, Masayoshi Yoshino, was declaring in a manifesto that he was determined “to establish this not simply as a fad, but as a new kind of culture”.’

Once you get past the harrumphing of the literary establishment (‘no character development… not real writing’, etc), two fascinating thoughts emerge.

First of all, these novels were originally serialised in a very direct to the reader way. Assuming mobile phone novels take off as a novel reading medium, does that mean we’ll see a resurgence of that very direct reader / writer relationship built up by Victorian serialists like Charles Dickens? And will that kind of very engaged relationship be further encouraged by the way in which both digital entertainments and online fan networks have greatly heightened expectations of how interactive such narratives should be?

In both cases I suspect that the answer is yes – which could well make the act of writing itself  much more dynamic and responsive, moving it closer to performance than it has been for a long time.

Secondly, mobile phones aren’t just for writing on – you can take pictures with them, record film and sound, attach music to the resulting presentations, etc. I think it won’t be long before mobile phone generated narratives step away from being just text based, becoming something much more multimedia.

That, combined with full usage of the possibilities of digital interactivity, will lead to the creation of artworks at once far more diffuse and far more immersive than traditional prose works have been. The reader / viewer / listener will be encouraged to play an active part in shaping the narrative, picking and choosing from banks of words, sounds and images to create a very personal interpretation of the story  they’re engaged with.

I’m sure people are doing that kind of thing already – and in fact, here’s a purely visual example, that website I mentioned, courtesy of PFSK. It’s a bank of images created during an Inupiat Eskimo whale hunt in Alaska, by unclassifiable maven Jonathan Harris. You can search through the images in multiple different ways, assembling groups that focus on characters, location, theme, mood and so on – focussing on whatever takes your fancy, and assembling a narrative of the hunt accordingly. Is it the future of narrative in general? Maybe so…  

The dark young of Arsene Lupin

A weekend of helping H move into her new place, previewing Zali’s new album (which is fantastic), and grooving to Maurice Leblanc’s ace crime novel ‘The Hollow Needle’. La! North London life, but as this is a blog about writing I’m going to focus on Leblanc (tho’ there’ll be more on Z’s new album when it’s out and about - back catalogue downloadable here).

As I’m sure you know, Maurice Leblanc was the creator of fictional French master criminal, Arsene Lupin. In his day, Lupin rivalled pulp heroes such as Sherlock Holmes, Sexton Blake or Raffles (the notorious Gentleman Thief, and come to think of it his closest British equivalent) for popularity; but there’s a Gallic sophistication to Lupin’s adventures that’s absolutely lacking in those of his cross-Channel competitors.

Lupin’s at once profoundly urbane and wildly manipulative, a fascinating cross between an Oscar Wilde protagonist and modern uber-mythmaker Kayser Soze. Like Wilde’s heroes, his very real charm is offset by a sense of amoral recklessness; like Kayser Soze, he understands the value of enmeshing his opponents in a narrative over which he has complete control. Lupin achieves his ends through a kind of personalised propaganda, which Leblanc describes thus:

‘the very mechanism of his way of setting to work, his special tactics, his letters to the press, his threats, the announcement of his thefts, in short the whole bag of tricks which he employed to bamboozle his selected victim and throw him into such a state of mind that the victim almost offered himself to the plot contrived against him and that everything took place, as it were, with his own consent.’

In fact, the whole plot of the novel is one, gigantic con-trick, revealed at its climax to be nothing more than a series of convenient fictions created to support the book’s real hero – Lupin himself – as he moves towards the achievement of his final, and in fact rather admirable, goal. And it’s not giving anything away to say that; key to the joy of reading Leblanc’s stories is the way in which the reader, too, expects to be and is enmeshed in the partial, controlling narratives that Lupin creates.

Fundamental to the creation of those narratives is Lupin’s masterly management of the media of his day. Whether manipulating journalists, publishing in the letters pages, placing just the right adverts, or taking a controlling interest in useful publications, Lupin is always in control of the story. That control is part of what makes him such a fascinating figure for a modern audience; taken historically, it shows Leblanc as a remarkably astute social and even political thinker.

Writing in the opening decades of the century, Leblanc both demonstrated an in-depth understanding, and developed a fascinating critique, of the ways in which an ostensibly disinterested mass media (‘we don’t make the news, we only report it’) can be subverted to serve the interests of a particular controlling elite.

Lupin’s fundamental decency prevents him from excessive abuse of such media; those who came after him would have no such qualms. Twentieth century history is jam-packed with figures of various different kinds – dictators, deciders, chief executives, celebrities – who built power on highly sophisticated perception management.

Lupin was a criminal because he was a thief; these people are thieves too, stealing choice from those they rule and replacing it with a carefully managed, entirely manufactured consent for plots contrived against some or all of those that fall within their sphere of influence.

So Leblanc’s light hearted style, and Lupin’s urbane gaiety, hide a dark, prophetic secret. Theft is a crime against property; but, rather than an end in itself, it’s really only a satisfyingly profitable by-product of perception management, a crime against choice that will as the century progresses come to be one of its unique and defining characteristics.

Oh, and if you want to check out some Lupin, I’d recommend starting with the new Penguin Classics translation of some of Leblanc’s short stories, available here…

Spontaneously effusing

Well, a lovely weekend in Paris – visiting friends, hanging out in the 6^e, and once again failing to get to the Sainte Chapelle, one of the finest pieces of Late Gothic architecture in Europe. Hey ho, one day I’ll get there, tho’ I’ll be cursing Dan Brown as I do so. He mentions it in the Da Vinci Code, so there are now permanent queues to get in. Hmmph.

Anyway, I’m whizzing around at high speed today, so it’s a very quick post. I’ve just been listening to a Neil Gaiman / Susanna Clarke interview courtesy of The Guardian, in which he defines a certain kind of short story as ‘miserable people having small epiphanies of misery’.

That’s a great comment, at once a definition and criticism of a certain kind of Modernist / more generally literary writing. When it’s well done (Katherine Mansfield!) it’s fantastic; when not, it’s turgid, depressing and futile. Minute, miserable subject matter becomes an end in itself – questions of quality of writing (‘how well is this done?’) are ignored.

Which raises a very interesting question. Why is subject matter rather than quality of writing so often seen as the only value needed in defining a book’s literary worth? For me, it’s because of a lack of understanding of the craft of writing.

And I’m not sure where that lack of understanding comes from. Perhaps one explanation is that, for all the talk of Modernism and Post Modernism, our approaches to judging writing remain trapped by the great Romantic pose of the spontaneous effusion.

By definition, spontaneous effusing (what an ugly word!) privileges content over form. ‘I was so moved that I had to write this…’ – so content is all and form is ignored, at best a neutral quality, at worst something profoundly restrictive. What matters is the quality of experience that drives the piece, not the quality of the piece itself.

Which throws critical negativity onto anything that’s not directly realist. Whether detective fiction, fantasy, romance or whatever else, such fiction comes not from direct observation of reality but rather from a much more mediated process of working out – of crafting. And, if you believe in spontaneous effusion, you mistrust crafting.

So, much as the Romantic pose is very attractive (‘bring me my opium, my catamite, my quill – I must compose!’) perhaps it’s time to step beyond it and acknowledge that direct observation and subsequent effusion is an aesthetic choice only, and has nothing to do with the qualitative.

Which, come to think of it, once you’ve been to a couple of poetry readings built around dodgy confessional poets is something you really don’t need to be told.

Aliens and the family unit

Well, according to Grim Reviews and Papers Falling from an Attic Window (hi guys!) I’ve become involved in the online Derleth / Lovecraft debate. To be honest, I didn’t know there was one, but it touches on some very serious issues – the integrity of an artist’s worldview, the limits of universe sharing, and so on.

Some of the genre debates are less serious (tho’, come to think of it, not necessarily to those taking part in them). My favourite such was one I found a couple of years back – a very involved conversation about who would win in a battle between the USS Enterprise and a Star Destroyer from Star Wars.

The debate scrolled on for pages, and got very technical. I gave up reading it when both participants started referencing blueprints, competing technologies, etc. In fact, I couldn’t help feeling that the answer was very easy – the USS Enterprise, every time, because they’re the good guys, and both the Star Trek and Star Wars narrative models would demand their victory.

That throws interesting light on good guy / bad guy spaceships. For me, the basic function of bad guy spaceships is to look utterly threatening and apparently terrifyingly all-powerful (‘This station is now the ultimate power in the universe’, etc), but in fact be a bit crap; the basic function of good guy spaceships is to look ramshackle, or at the very least fallible (‘the engines canna take it, captain!’, etc), but really be indestructible and all-defeating.

That’s a result of the narrative structure that these stories are built on. Without all powerful but ultimately frangible villains, and apparently weak but in fact all-powerful good guys, you don’t get high stakes, fear of failure, final victory and thus the dramatic tension and resolution that keeps people both watching and satisfied.

I’ve also been wondering if there’s a visual semantics of starships. What’s noticeable is the extent to which good guy spaceships are rounded and cuddly, and bad guy spaceships are spiky and alienating. Good guy spaceships are implicitly a home; bad guy spaceships are a threat to that home, tearing into it and breaking it up.

One condition of much of the alien / opponent activity we’re shown is a lack of emotional bonds, contrasting strongly with the close relationships between on-board good guys. Even Star Trek – most hierarchical of SF shows, making heroes of an entire military command structure – is predicated on close emotional rather than organisational ties between its leading characters.

And in Star Trek, antagonist space ship crews are notable for their lack of that emotionalism. From the Borg to the Klingons, the Ferengi to the Romulans, anyone who fires on the Enterprise is really a non-family unit firing on a family unit. One more narrative trick to ensure we empathise with the good guys…

So where does all this lead to? Well, what’s really interesting is what it exposes about popular science fiction’s envisioning and dramatisation of the alien. It’s not really alien at all; it exists to provide a fallible opposite to human good, an opposite that’s portrayed in terms that – by definition – we can’t empathise or engage with, except as an evil, disposable antagonist.

HD and Modernism

So – Hal Duncan and Modernism.

Well, his writing (particularly ‘Vellum’, as I’ve still got to sit down properly with ‘Ink’) is profoundly modernist in structure, relying on fractured narratives, parallels between individual sub-narratives, broad, deep allusiveness and massive stylistic experimentation to communicate meaning.

But it avoids the worst excesses of High Modernist mandarin-ism through their deep commitment to the broken and the battered. HD’s heroes are neither the epic good nor the epic bad; they’re the people caught between the two, the ones that see basic humanity as a fundamental virtue to live by rather than a negotiable obstacle to enlightenment.

That commitment is de-fantasised through HD’s repeated return to the narrative and iconography of the death of Matthew Shepard, a gay student who was beaten to death for his sexuality in Laramie, Wyoming in 1999. His outrage at Shepard’s murder both gives the novel its profound ethical core and works as a structural equivalent to Dickens’ ‘dying thus around us every day’ riff in ‘Bleak House’.

It reminds us that that ‘Vellum’, like all stories, results from a process of fictionalisation, a process that always begins with reality; that the brutalities and exploitative imbalances described in the book are indeed happening thus around us every day. One of Pound’s regrets in the broken, defeated ‘Pisan Cantos’ is his lack of empathy; HD takes that empathy and makes it central to his work.

And the resultant sense of ethical precision helps him step around a key Post-Modernist problem. His clear and direct sense that ‘this is just wrong’ underpins the book’s complex, broad allusive range, preventing it from falling into simple relativism.

So that’s it in a nutshell. But of course it doesn’t communicate one key thing; this is wildly enjoyable, profoundly psychedelic and utterly groovy fantasy writing.

At base it makes me think of a comment Jim Morrison made, back in the 60s – ‘The Beatles and the Stones are for blowing your mind – The Doors are for when your mind is blown.’ That’s where Hal Duncan is in relation to much genre writing – so if you haven’t read him, go check him out!

Oh, and apologies for the dodgy lineation of the Pound quotes below – each line should be staggered across the page. I’m having huge problems getting WordPress to lineate consistently. Will have another go later today…

Reality’s a fantasy

Just finished Zola’s ‘L’Assomoir’ (‘The Drinking Den’), and once again been pondering the fantasy / reality gap. Zola saw himself as a Realist; closely allied with the Impressionists, he sought to create a prose equivalent to their vivid, journalistic depictions of everyday Parisian life.

Zola and the Impressionists broke cultural and aesthetic taboos, and both – in their day – were seen as exciting, dangerous artistic revolutionaries. But nowadays, both fit very easily into a very conservative view of how the arts work, and what they’re for. They’ve achieved a respectability that’s denied to genre fiction, of any kind.

That’s because of a very interesting shift. The argument for Realism has triumphed. To be perceived as having a serious moral purpose, art – and in particular writing – has to be seen to directly reflect reality. Zola’s work is now praised for the qualities that originally drove its condemnation.

And that creates problems for fantasists. Writing that makes no claim to direct realism immediately steps away from a key plank supporting critical approval. It doesn’t teach; it can’t improve; and so it’s not worthy of serious consideration. Ironically, the more fiction that a work is perceived to contain, the less it’s respected as fiction.

But such a view misses something very important. Zola writes fiction, and that makes him a fantasist too; and in that act of writing he shares very important motivations and goals with the best modern genre writers, the Moorcocks and the Mievilles, the Harrisons and the Peakes, and their peers.

First of all, there’s the fact of the fiction itself. ‘L’Assomoir’, for example, is a very built book, divided into thirteen chapters with a central turn in chapter seven, six chapters on either side mirroring each other in close and complex ways as its heroine Gervaise rises and then falls again. Throughout, imagery and action support this central, entirely artificial structure.

For all its claims to realism, ‘L’Assomoir’ is – like every other novel – an aestheticised, constructed fantasy of the world, not the thing itself. It’s built according to the writer’s need, to make a particular, more or less conscious argument. Zola summed up that argument very pithily: ‘Shut the drinking houses, open schools’.

If this were a conversation, it’s entirely possible that at this point someone would say – ‘But Al! Surely that disproves everything you’ve just said – because Zola is trying to create real change in the real world, whereas fantasists do their best to escape from it.’ And in response, I’d look at this person over my pint of Porter (because such conversations very often take place in pubs), and say:

Not at all. Any kind of writer – fantasist, realist, whatever else – is trying to create real change in the real world, using the inherently unreal tools of fiction. To read is to be changed. The word tells us that; its root comes from an old German verb, whose ‘original senses… are those of taking or giving counsel, taking charge, controlling.’

To read is to be counselled, to control information and at the same time to allow yourself to be controlled by it. Just like any other good writer, the best fantasists use that control to try and accomplish positive change in the reader and, by extension, in the world.

Michael Moorcock defined this kind of writing very precisely in a recent barnstorming Interzone editorial; the goal of such a writer is to ‘confront the present, rather than exemplify it’. He’s talking about writers like those above, like Ballard, Burroughs, Dick and others, but it’s a literary goal that I suspect Zola too would have heartily endorsed.

Normal service will be resumed…

…as soon as possible, I was just going to type, as for various reasons I didn’t feel much like blogging today. But thinking about that phrase - and, oddly, ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ - made me realise that there’s much to unpack in it.

I love ‘The Empire Strikes Back’. Partially for Yoda; partially for the fantastically depressing, open ending, which left me shell shocked when I was 11; but mostly for the fact that the entire plot hinges on the fact that the Millenium Falcon breaks down.

Han Solo’s malfunctioning hyperdrive is the broken engine that drives the action of the whole. That breakdown is very significant; it literalises the fact that all drama comes from disruption of one sort or another.

Whether it’s Godot not arriving, Oedipus sleeping with his mum, or the Silver Surfer announcing Galactus’ imminent plans to eat the Earth, plot starts when the expected, relied upon order stops.

‘Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible’ flags up that kind of moment. Disruption has happened, and the breakdown has to be dealt with. Normal service no longer exists.

Of course, chances are that normality will be restored - but it’ll be a new normality, and it won’t come until there’s been a little drama, because ultimately drama is the action either of restoration, or of the failure to restore.

Your 20th century boy

In the context of yesterday’s comments about the self-justifying self, I’ve been thinking about Michael Moorcock’s ‘Between the Wars’ series of books (‘Byzantium Endures’, ‘The Laughter of Carthage’, ‘Jerusalem Commands’, ‘The Vengeance of Rome’), dealing with the adventures of Maxim Pyat in the 20th Century.

Maxim’s a fascinating character. Both naïve adventurer and lethal manipulator, he at once lives through and embodies some of the worst parts of the last century. From an Eastern European starting point, he travels the world, encountering the best and (far more often) the worst of humanity at every point.

In narrative terms, Moorcock uses him as a kind of fictional mouse-pointer, guiding him around the world to highlight the moments and processes that led up to the Holocaust.

This focus on history makes the books didactic in the best sense; they support a richer, deeper understanding of the 20th Century, one that sees the Holocaust not as an isolated incident but as part of a broader pattern of deep inhumanity that in many ways is still continuing.

But there’s more to Maxim than mere didacticism. As the narrator of all four books, he’s a very developed character in his own right. Key to understanding him is realising just how he manages his own story.

The gulf between his self-image and his actions is huge. His behaviour shows him up as being variously a con-man, drug addict, thief, rapist, pederast and worse. But he consistently presents and understands himself as a thwarted visionary and frustrated romantic.

That broken self awareness is rooted in his situation. Pyat treats others badly; he often presents himself as having been treated worse. His self-deception is in part a function of those perceived or actual brutalities, a necessary defence mechanism as he becomes a kind of emblematic punchbag for the worst that the 20th Century had to offer.

That self deception builds inevitably to the final book’s emotionally shattering climax, but it also performs a valuable thematic function. It helps explore how victimhood can be the most dangerous mask of all, offering a perpetual and immutable moral high ground that legitimises the worst brutalities as a protective response to threat.

A mirror and a window both

In ‘S/Z’, his wonderful, word by word dissection of a Balzac short story, Barthes notes that ‘in the text, only the reader speaks.’

There’s a fascinating point about the process of reading to be drawn out of that. When we read a book, he’s saying, we read it in our voice, hearing the words in our head as if it’s us speaking.

That’s an index of a broader readerly solipsism. Any book only has meaning for us inasmuch as it taps into experiences we’ve already had. Once it steps beyond our emotional experiences – whether actual or fantasised - it leaves us with nothing to engage with. Without engagement, we’re unlikely to keep reading.

We tend to regard books as externalised artefacts, bringing intellectual and emotional novelty into our lives. In fact, in many ways they can only ever present our selves back to ourselves, connecting with us through our own voices and experiences that we’ve already had. A book isn’t a window; it’s a mirror.

But perhaps that’s not quite true. Books do introduce novelty into our lives – new information, new understanding, new ways of seeing. Our ability to grasp novelty may be limited, but nonetheless it is real. The voice may be ours, but the words we are reading aren’t. A book is neither mirror nor window, but a complex set of tensions between the two.

That’s a complexity that M. John Harrison picks up on, in his magnificent short story ‘A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium’ (latterly re-titled / re-edited as ‘A Young Man’s Journey to London’). It’s the concluding story of his 70s Viriconium sequence, and it very literally enacts the window / mirror tension.

A small group of characters discover a portal to the ‘magical’ world of Viriconium in the toilet of a café in the provincial English town of Huddersfield. It’s a mirror that they can climb through, and so they do.

They find themselves in a seedy and blasted semi-urban landscape. They scratch together a living for a while, before being forced to return to our world by a combination of sickness and lassitude.

The world they find themselves is authentically magical; but it’s also authentic to their situation in our world. Taking themselves through the portal isn’t a magical solution – rather, it does little more than give them a different context within which to confront the same issues that they have to deal with here.

For M. John Harrison, there’s no such thing as escape; only reframing. And perhaps that’s the best way to understand where novelty in fiction comes from. Fiction helps the self see itself in a new light by giving it a means of reframing itself. Simultaneously mirror and window, it creates new worlds for us to step into by forcing us back on what’s already there.

Whether or not that’s a good thing is up to you - literally.

 

Viriconium!

Big things exploding, forever

I was reading about the militarization of space, and ended up pondering the militarization of science fiction TV. Take the Star Trek franchise, for example – a set of shows whose heroes are almost without exception members of the military, working compliantly within military structures to achieve the goals it sets for them.

Building on that, I went through the other military based / related SF shows I’ve seen. Immediate ones that sprung to mind were Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1, Andromeda, Battlestar Galactica, Quantum Leap, Timecop, The X-Files and Space: Above and Beyond.

These are some of the key US SF shows, and all of them support a view of society in which the military – or related civil institutions – represent the finest exemplars of that society, and are battling to preserve its coherence from one kind of threat or another.

There’s an implied worldview there that’s both fascinating and rather worrying. These are very popular shows. Their viewers (myself included) are clearly happy to buy uncritically into the concept of military or militarised action as the final solution to any problems in dealing with any external, ‘other’ threat.

That’s worrying, for obvious reasons – and it’s also one more symptom of our more general obsession with violence as entertainment. If TV has its way, we’ll all come to see the future as big things blowing each other up, out of a deep rooted and unchallengeable sense of personal righteousness; or, at a more intimate scale, agents of governance stepping in to solve problems before which civilians can only ever be passive.