Bombing the alien

Continuing to ponder the alien, in the context of bombings. Recapping yesterday, Lem sees the alien as being inexplicable in common human terms; it happens without apparently comprehensible cause or effect. We can be physically proximate to it, but we can never approach it rationally or emotionally.

So what does this have to do with bombings? Well, it’s a question of motivation. Speaking after the recent failed attacks in Glasgow and London, PM Gordon Brown described this kind of terrorism as being perpetrated by ‘a few extremists who wish to practise violence and inflict maximum loss of life in the interests of a perversion of their religion.’ While in power, Tony Blair consistently used a comparable formulation, talking of an ‘extremism based on a perversion of Islam’.

According to both Brown and Blair, terrorist motivation is rooted in wrong headed faith. Key aspects of faith are that it’s spontaneous; it’s absolute; and it’s irrational. Made wrong-headed, ‘perverted’, it becomes even more so. Given this definition of terrorist motivation, terrorist activity becomes a force of nature – or more appositely, an act of god. It’s something that just happens.

That implied ‘it just happens’ is fascinating. It moves terrorist activity into the realm of the alien, making it something that can’t be understood or engaged with on rational terms.

It can’t be predicted – so sweeping action against anyone who might conceivably be / become a terrorist is justified. It has no clear context – so trying to understand it as a response to (say) the invasion and occupation of Iraq is rendered futile. And it will never go away – so substantial measures against it *have* to be taken, because it’s become a perpetual, ongoing threat.

Narcissus in space

A character in Stanislaw Lem’s novel ‘Solaris’ comments:

‘We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of the earth to the frontiers of the cosmos… we have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors.’

‘Solaris’ is about an encounter with the truly alien;  a planet sized ocean that is apparently alive, but that is authentically incomprehensible. The human characters in the book experience the alien either through baffling, oceanic activities, or through human-like emanations; key figures in their past, created by the ocean to engage with them.

These emanations are fascinating, a very direct image for our quest for a cosmic mirror. Talking to the alien, we meet either the incomprehensible or our own, most deeply ingrained obsessions. We can see nothing else. Lem’s pessimism about humanity’s inability to step out of the confines of the self is a key driver for the book.

And that pessimism is reflected in a key plot point. Humanity notices that the Solaris ocean *lives* because the Solaris planet has an irregular orbit, designed to help it maintain an even climate as it orbits two binary stars. Such an orbit has to be a sign of a designing, controlling intelligence; and thus the quest to understand the Solaris ocean begins.

But such a drive to control is a very human trait. From the start, the Solaris ocean is tagged as something motivated by a very basic human driver – the need to thrive through environmental manipulation. At a base level, its actions can be read in entirely human terms.

But without that basic human behaviour there would be no book; the Solaris ocean would have gone unnoticed. In Lem’s terms, any attempt to show the fully alien is a contradiction in terms. Cosmic Narcissi, we’d never look up from the pool and see it.

A mirror to shine in

Seeing a ghost is like experiencing a fragment of someone else’s memory; an insistent, present, repeated moment broken out of all context. Fiction takes such fragments and sets them in a reasoned and coherent narrative and emotional context.

For example, there’s Jack Torrance in Stephen King’s novel ‘The Shining’. He’s trapped in the Overlook Hotel, surrounded by ghosts. The book presents him as being possessed by the hotel – but in fact, the hotel is possessed by him.

Torrance gives the disparate iconography sets of the hotel – the topiary animals, the boiler in the basement, the various phantoms of 20s gangsters and their hangers-on, the lift, the Indian graveyard – a nexus, a narrative reason-to-be.

He’s a locus of meaning that both justifies their presence and defines how they should act. ‘The Shining’ is a great Gothic masterpiece, using the apparatus of the supernatural to amplify the impact of and comment on the nature of one man’s profoundly flawed and destructive emotional makeup.

In real life, ghosts don’t do that; but then again, in real life very little does that. Fiction creates entire, self-absorbed imitations of worlds; these worlds serve to very precisely focus the reader’s attention onto a very small set of characters, providing the imagery and event structures that support and intensify interpretation of their actions and intents.

If ‘Gothic’ describes stories where externalised and highly artificial events and locations respond to and are inspired by internal emotional turmoil, then - read on one level - all fiction can be said to be Gothic. None of it’s real; and it’s all driven by the author’s need to express and amplify what (s)he understands his or her characters to be, and what (s)he wants the reader to find out about them.

Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li! And a nice cup of tea…

Writing daily here’s been a very interesting exercise, if only because it’s made me ponder writers I’ve got a lot out of it and think about why I’ve found them so engaging. But I haven’t written about two of my great teenage obsessions – M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft.

MRJ’s ghost stories – and Edwardian ghost stories in general – fascinated me as a teenager. I think it was the combination of the profoundly comforting, secure world that most of them begin, and the subsequent destabilisation / revelation of the limits of that world.

I see MRJ as the great poet of threatened repression. Read from that point of view, so much of his imagery is so resonant – the menacing bedsheets in ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad’, the terror implicit in people having fun together when you’re on your own in ‘Number 13’, and, perhaps most memorably, the mouth buried beneath a pillow in ‘Casting the Runes’ –

‘So he put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow: only, it did not get so far. What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being.’

Intimacy – or the prospect of intimacy – is deeply destructive to worldviews built on repression. The English are a famously repressed bunch; hence, I would suspect, the attractiveness and emotional power of MRJ’s haunted explorations of emotional frigidity at breaking point, as it’s exposed to the possibility of contact.

And what about HPL? My first reading of ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ is one of the great book experiences of my life. I read it when I was about 14, on a skiing holiday – arctic wastes in prose, arctic wastes outside the window, mountains shadowing both.

HPL opened up whole worlds for me – worlds I found oddly attractive. Reading any one of the ‘real world’ stories (as opposed to the out and out fantasies), I was always falling for the locations – Boston, Arkham, Old New York, and so on. Notwithstanding the cosmic horror and sanity blasting reality of HPL’s world, these are places I’d love to live in.

Partially, that’s because HPL’s universe is such a beautiful place – the romantic sublime in all its awesome power made wildly successful pulp horror fiction. In HPL, terror often comes from enforced scale shifts, from a sudden, panicked realisation of the true place of humanity in the universe, and the consequent utter meaningless of our lives.

But once you’ve got over that, what mysteries and wonders to behold…! Even if, by implication, you have to lose your humanity to do so – becoming an ageless toad thing to swim to Unknown R’yleh, or a strange cone-like creature in a globe spanning prehistoric, pre-human civilisation, or a disembodied living brain in a glass jar carried between the planets by giant, cosmic insects.

And it’s worth remembering that humanity itself can be a source of the terror of difference for others – the implied experience of the resurrected alien characters in ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ is fascinating, as is the protagonist’s changing response to them. He moves from terror to interest to respect to empathy, finally saluting the key characteristics that the profoundly alien and the profoundly human share.

‘Scientists to the last - what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn - whatever they had been, they were men!’

And of course to make the cosmic terrifying, it helps to have something cosy and homely to set it against. Hence also the appeal of Lovecraft’s earthbound locations – they need to be comforting and attractive, to make the rupture from them all the more upsetting. They’re nostalgia made stone; in literary terms, they function absolutely as idealised but artifical and eminently frangible Edens.

So that’s H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James; two writers that hypnotised me, both playing with innocence and experience and finding horror in the relationships and transitions between the two.

Seeing the world

At Arvon last week I was ranting – as you do – about John Burdett’s ‘Bangkok 8’, the only psychedelic transvestite Thai reincarnation police procedural you’ll ever need to read (apart, of course, from its sequel ‘Bangkok Tattoo’).

And, if that whets your appetite for Thai mythology, there’s much else out there – S.P. Somtow’s short stories and in particular his rather lovely coming of age novel ‘Jasmine Nights’ deal very directly with Thailand’s unreal realms, while Graham Joyce’s ‘Smoking Poppy’ is a much more oblique and restrained take on intersections between fantasy and reality. And that’s just for starters…

What’s interesting is how many of the characters in these novels perceive the fantastic. They take visions of past lives, strange ghosts, practising magicians, exotic curses, and so on, completely in their stride. Reading about such things may be a form of escape for us, but for them it’s the everyday world.

Ostensibly, that takes these books into the realms of fantasy, where Frodo is completely unsurprised by Gandalf’s existence and behaviour because he knows that wizards are real. But there are no hobbits in these books. They deal with authentic worldviews, rooted in direct experience, held by entirely non-fictional people who – if you step on a plane – you can go and meet and chat to.

Commonly, fantasy writing is seen as a form of escapism, but this kind of work points to an opposite function. It understands fantasy to include ‘things unexperienced’ as well as ‘things impossible’, reminding us again and again that there are many more ways of interpreting and engaging with this world than the overly reductive, rationalising modes we so easily fall back on.

Norming, performing

Thomas More notes of the Utopians that ‘they believe that the dead mix freely with the living… the sense of their ancestors’ presence discourages any bad behaviour in private.’ Observation is control; bad behaviour here is deviance from social norms, rather than anything more fundamentally immoral - and the observing dead ensure that those social norms are adhered to, everywhere.

Which made me realise how a sense of being observed is key to social control; and why, in certain kinds of religion, it’s very important that the deity is known to be omniscient. And that leads to ‘1984’, and Orwell’s treatment of Big Brother. Can ‘1984’ be read as religious as much as political satire? Really, it’s taking on any kind of oppressive social structure, however it’s dressed - political, religious, cultural, etc.

And that leads on to a very different kind of ‘Big Brother’. On reality TV, ‘bad behaviour in private’ is actively encouraged – conflict is drama, after all. The purpose of observation here isn’t to enforce a set of pre-existing norms; it’s to encourage the extreme, for our viewing pleasure.

So we’ve inverted Utopia, Airstrip One, and arrived at a place where observation is for the creation of extreme entertainment. Or are these the new norms that we’re meant to embrace? Over-reaction, exhibitionism and a slow process of knock-out until only one of us wins…

Mirroring the Fifth Head

An image from Gene Wolfe’s ‘The Fifth Head of Cerberus’ popped into my head this morning. Number Five, the protagonist of the first section of the book, catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror and for a second doesn’t recognise himself.

The book is very concerned with people seeing and describing themselves when they don’t really know themselves. It plays with this in a variety of different ways; amongst others, there’s a shapeshifting alien narrator who’s assumed another’s identity so completely that he isn’t aware of the joins, a wealth of buried relationships between characters, and indeed Five’s own relationship with his mysterious patrimony.

Verrry interesting resonances in the novel, but (taken slightly out of context) it’s also an intriguing way of thinking about the process of writing; of reading back over and reflecting that writing. So often you find subjects and themes that seem to have been entirely spontaneously generated, connections within the text that seem to have come from nowhere.

Writing a first draft, looking back over it, gives us a mirror filled with distance from ourselves; an artefact to peer into and be genuinely surprised by. In this context, that makes many of the characters in ‘Fifth Head’ writer analogues – people trying to explain the world to themselves, and through that to us, and along the way finding both familiarity and deep newness in the narratives they create.

‘Cities are slow computers’

…is today’s thought from the day from Matt Jones, talking very interestingly at the Interesting Conference on Saturday - suspect much online content will be going up about it over the next week or so, starting with Charlie Frith here (with links to other attendees) - and thanks to Russell for sorting it out! Not strictly a literary event, so a bit out of the normal subject matter here, but very, very thought provoking indeed.

Anyway, more on that later… most immediate impression, in its blend of diversity and obsession, acute professionalism and inspired amateurism, it felt much like a physical manifestation of a really interesting (and slightly random) afternoon’s net surfing.

Which also made me realise that the web is built round a geography of interest – unlike the real world, when you’re online what’s closest to you is what obsesses you the most. And again, Saturday’s conference was very much a literalisation of that.

And today I’m writing in telegraphese! In half an hour or so, I’m off to Yorkshire for a week’s writing workshop with Liz Williams and Graham Joyce. Should be very enjoyable, and hopefully will also launch a very substantial sharpening up of the novel. Not sure if I’ll have any web access over the next few days, so – until next Monday – farewell!

Scott of the Rantarctic

Well, despite a bacon, mushroom and brown sauce sandwich, and a rather nice cappuccino, I’m still hungover, so I’m just going to rant a bit, releasing my inner literary Richard Littlejohn (for non-UK readers, a noted right wing ranting journalist / loon) on the world.

We’re going to hell in a handcart!

If there’s one thing that winds me up, it’s the way that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s comment that ‘there are no second acts in American lives’ is taken to mean that there are no second chances in American lives. You see it quoted all over the place – such-and-such has returned triumphantly from failure, ‘disproving FSF’s famous dictum’, somebody else falls into obscurity, ‘proving FSF right’.

You couldn’t make it up!!

But – if you think about what the term ‘second act’ actually means in a narrative structure context – you realise that’s not what he meant at all! Classically, in the First Act you establish a goal for your protagonist, in the Second Act you create obstacles to the achievement of those goals, and in the Third Act you show what happens when those goals are finally achieved.

It’s Political Correctness GONE MAD!!!

So, when FSF said that there are no second acts in American lives, what I think he really meant was that there’s an expectation that there should be no barriers between the desire and the fulfilment of the desire. And that’s a very intriguing comment, perfectly describing the promises that much of modern consumer culture makes to us all. You want it? You got it. No effort needed, because there’s no longer a second act.

Now that’s much more interesting than no second chances.

And it’s OUR TAXES THAT PAY FOR IT ALL!!!!

Dystopia IS utopia

Flicking through the Ballard entry on Wikipedia just now, and I was interested to see that they describe him as a dystopian writer. On the surface, a not unreasonable judgement, but for me there’s something a little more complex going on there.

Ballard’s always explored – in a very engaged and fertile way – the destructive forces that make us who we are; our reckless engagements with technology, our roots in profoundly irrational drives that consistently overwhelm and make obsolete our more considered selves.

For Ballard, rationality is a convenient fiction, easily discarded. We love destruction, chaos, mayhem; otherwise we wouldn’t produce so much of them. Ultimately, our most creative response to partial, rationally driven structures - like, for example, classic utopias - can only be to break them. Being human means that dystopia IS utopia.