Crossing Lovecraft

Today as it turns out is looking very hectic, and I’m out and about tonight, so instead of a long typed-in-the-evening post about Hal Duncan (I’m going to a talk on Norse Gods, etc), here’s a short rant about H. P. Lovecraft.

Not so much about Lovecraft, in fact; more about August Derleth’s misappropriation of the Lovecraftian mythos. I’m currently ripping through his pulpily enjoyable ‘The Trail of Cthulhu’ and was - unsurprisingly - enjoying it in a pulpy kind of way until I came across this:

‘ …the striking parallel which forced itself upon me, a divinity student, a parallel which could not be overlooked, was plain - the similarity between the tale of the revolt of the Great Old Ones against the Elder Gods, and that other, more universally known tale of the revolt of Satan against the forces of the Lord.’

Well, where do I start? At a stroke, Derleth breaks the fundamental nihilism of Lovecraft’s vision, replacing his driven obsession with the minute insignificance of humanity with a narrative that rescales human morality as a fundamental operating principle of the entire cosmos.

I’m not sure what puts me out more - the arrogance of the change in scale, or the casualness with which HPL’s entire worldview is discarded. Both are equally disconcerting - and both make me wonder if this is a book I particularly feel like finishing, now.

Becoming Norma Desmond

Out and about on Wednesday night (at an event run by the estimable Poet in the City, which everyone should know about – they do fantastic poetry events round the City of London), and, as it does in pubs, the conversation turned to fantasy and sf.

As it also does when you’re around people-whose-genre-is-literary, someone came up with the question – ‘why do you write genre fiction when it has nothing to do with reality, and therefore has no point to it?’

Of course this is a red rag to a bull for me; my answering rant went on for about half an hour. In fact, it only ended when I paused for breath and noticed that the bar staff were putting the stools upside down on the tables and everyone else had left.

One of the points I made was that modern literary fiction is a pretty late arrival on the literary scene, really only beginning in the 19th Century. Fantasy has been around forever, from Homer on.

But thinking about it, that’s not such a good point after all. Much of the writing that foreshadows or powers the modern fantastic – archaic Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Norse and other myth cycles, Christian narratives from ‘Paradise Lost’ to ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’, Renaissance magical tracts, and so on – were written as fact.

For their original creators and consumers, they weren’t fantasies at all; they were factual components of a coherent and internally consistent worldview. We use them as source material for fictions that know they’re fiction, but that’s absolutely not what they originally were.

The modern Western European worldview is a profoundly scientific one. So, it favours narratives that engage with reality in a way that’s based on quasi-scientific observation. Seen in this light, fantastic narratives can be seen as a hangover from an earlier, discredited way of understanding the world.

From this point of view, Fantasy writing becomes Norma Desmond; a glamorous, pointless relic. In ‘Sunset Boulevard’, she’s a leftover from the great days of silent movies, eking out a ghostly living in the LA of the 50s.

And if we look at Fantasy like this, then Norma Desmond becomes a very relevant figure. She’s a useful index of how less conscientious critics can perceive the genre; and her personal trajectory is an incredibly potent warning against both bombast in general (‘I AM big. It’s the movies that got small’) and the specific genre sin of letting fantasising become an end in itself, rather than a mirror with which to confront the world.

And so, to conclude, here’s Norma herself in the final moments of the film, in all her deluded, tragic magnificence. Broken, maddened and desperately alone, a murderess about to be arrested, a haunted and futile relic of a forgotten world, she steps in front of the cameras and stops the show, one last, unforgettable time.

‘50% Homme. 50% Dieu. 100% Sauveur.’

This week’s conversations about Gnosticism made me remember a slightly, erm, punchier take on the Messiah. So, from the early 90s, here’s the continental take on it all. Stallone stars in ‘Jesus II - The Return’, from French comedy heroes ‘Les Inconnus’. Oh, and this version is subtitled…

Breaking out of heaven

Non-realist writing is about the creation of transparently fictional, secondary worlds for the mind, imagination and emotions to play in. One of the joys of such worlds comes from the suspension of disbelief needed to enter them. Put simply, you can pretend that they’re real – a complex joy, but a joy nonetheless.

It’s easy to forget that we create fictions of the world around us in day to day life, as well. We build narratives around work, around play, and enter into them wholeheartedly. Here, too, there’s suspension of disbelief; we forget the wider possibilities of the self as we settle ourselves into the restrictive, consensual limits that daily life creates.

It’s when we forget that these limits are defined by a fiction we’ve created that problems happen. We come to believe that the story IS the reality, that we have no choices in a given situation; but that’s rarely, if ever, true. There is no story that cannot be reframed, no narrative that cannot be stepped out of.

There’s an interesting mythical take on this, as well. In the Christian narrative, we fell from heaven so we could have choice. Such a shattering birth has ensured that free will is a core component of our lives. We can never lose as much as we’ve already lost through exercising it; and so, we are absolutely free.

Matrices old and new

I’ve been pondering The Matrix movies lately. Key pieces of plot and character information were offered in animes, computer games, and so on. Back in the day, I thought this was lazy and exploitative. Now, I think I was wrong.

Narrative is getting old school. For thousands of years, the great public stories were built on mythology. Mythologies are inchoate tale masses, springing to life when the simply defined character traits of their protagonists encounter the rich complexities of life.

That narrative breadth was reflected in the variety of media employed to communicate those mythologies. Over the years, their stories were told orally, enacted ritually, depicted through sculpture, painting, illumination, even sung.

Narrative units were excerpted for use in churches or temples, in the house or workplace, or even just on personal amulets or altarpieces, giving a particular devotional emphasis as necessary.

By presenting a single story through multiple different media, that could be engaged with individually or taken together to form a whole, the Wachowskis were tapping into this very ancient set of narrative techniques.

They’re not the only people to do it. Throughout genre writing, this kind of multiplicity is being actively engaged with.

Take the Hellboy franchise, for example – now including comic books, novels, cartoons and feature films. Or the richly populated Star Trek universe, which can be explored through everything from the original episodes to fan fiction, boardgames to a (rather strange) small museum in Las Vegas.

What’s interesting is why it’s genre writing that’s working like this; and why (for a couple of centuries at least) fiction pulled away from this kind of multiple narrative.

Genre fiction’s always been at home with the episodic, the multiple; rooted in short stories, television series, radio serials and even comic books as much as in novels, it comes ready tooled for these kinds of story telling methodologies.

Over and above this, it’s enjoyed by a highly active – and very creative – fan base that’s very comfortable with reworking favoured narratives according to personal need.

And why did we step away from multiple narratives in the first place? For me, it’s linked to the rise of the literary novel as a discrete art form. Such novels are understood to present unique narrative universes, created by and under the control of single, named writers.

Only Dickens can write like Dickens; only Cervantes can write Don Quixote (tho’others tried and failed, as Cervantes successfully managed to defend his own turf against them). This kind of emphasis on individual, highly personal world creation militates against the kind of shared narratives I’ve been talking about.

So what’s going on? How to conclude? Really, by pointing out that genre writing is helping maintain a very ancient narrative tradition; and that literary writers are not the sole arbiters of what fiction is, and how it works.

The Archers and their target

‘A Matter of Life and Death’ shows us two broken utopias. The most obvious one is heaven; a perfect machine that cares for all who enter it. Stress and shock are balmed on entry. Enmities are forgotten. Grief seems not to exist. There’s even cricket on the radio.

But it’s a fragile utopia; it can be broken by something as predictable as fog over the channel. Lost in the weather, a collector of souls misses his target, allowing the film’s protagonist to stay alive beyond his time, and fall in love.

As ever, it’s only when the utopia is broken that the drama can begin. The restoration of utopia means the breaking of hearts. How can the two be reconciled? They can’t, and so utopia remains perfect by admitting the possibility of its own imperfection.

What’s interesting is the implicit cause of that break. It’s the first mistake in a thousand years or so. Fog, one assumes, wouldn’t normally have such a catastrophic impact on the collection of the dead.

But, as the film tells us, this is an unusual night; there has been a thousand bomber raid over Europe – and, for every bomber, thousands upon thousands of deaths.

And so the film begins as the machineries of Heaven – overloaded by the vast quantities of souls they presumably have to capture – creak and break apart. The film presents as a comedy, but buried beneath it is buried vast tragedy; the dead lost to world war.

Utopia hasn’t been broken by a mistake. It’s been broken by us, pushing and pushing at it until that mistake becomes inevitable.

Oh, and what’s the second broken utopia? It’s this world, broken by loss – an emotion and an action that the film absolutely and rigorously represses.

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.

Monk ponder work

The dissolution of the monasteries made monks of us all, taking the monastic organisation of time and labour in pursuit of transcendent ends and releasing it into Northern European society as a whole. ‘Laborare est orare’ (itself all verbs, all doing) is made the founding principle of modern society; now our expectation is that work itself can and should be a transcendent activity, a fulfilment in itself.

Angel passage

Reading De Nerval, who made me wonder what sins angels are seeking to expiate by helping us. Perhaps they’re really the fallen ones, while devils are sent from the heavens to test us?