I’ve been reading a lot about reading recently, and it struck me the other day that a lot of the scientific research on the topic (at least, what I have read so far) doesn’t care much about the format of what is being read. Most experiments focus on individual words or short-form prose and are interested in either tracking identification of symbols or uncovering a psychological effect (such as Maya Djikic’s recent experiment with fiction and ambiguity). When genre or form are evoked the major criterion seems to be whether the selection is fiction or non-fiction. It seems to me that such an approach misses something about the act of reading by not considering the effect of formatting and presentation of the words, of the spatial and physical setting of the words.
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“It is unfortunate to me that we have to classify reading fiction as anything other than what it is. Why must it be escaping “from” something? If it has to be escapism, aren’t we escaping “to” something? Does the distinction matter? I’m not sure.” Carl V. Anderson
“Escapism is a social practice and a cultural stereotype, not an inherent characteristic of the fantastic. It is an exaggeration of the word escape itself, which does not mean ‘to lose oneself in another world,’ but to elude something that constrains you.” from “The Inevitable Reduction of the Imagination and its Opportunities: A Brief Exploration“
The last time I wrote about escapism I was trying to get a better handle on the term and its implications. As a response to that column, Carl V. Anderson asked a very pertinent question about the literary idea of escape: what are we escaping to? I’ve thought about this on and off but it wasn’t until I read Foz Meadows’ article at A Dribble of Ink last week that something clicked in my thinking about this idea. Or, more to the point, altered my perspective on the dynamic aspect of this idea. Meadows’ piece starts slowly but builds to a very incisive conclusion:
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“By ‘exhaustion’ I don’t mean anything so tired as the subject of physical, moral, or intellectual decadence, only the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities–by no means necessarily a cause for despair.”
“And as in the original John Barth essay, exhaustion is not meant as a term of despair, but as a call for people (and that means all of us, writers, editors, publishers, critics, readers, gatekeepers, whatever) to think a little more seriously about what we want science fiction to be. ”
Exhaustion has been on my mind a lot lately. It has been present personally as I try to improve my health, work, and just live my life. I have felt a little exhausted in terms of writing, somewhat paradoxically as I have a queue of reviews and stories and chapters to write. And I have been thinking a lot about literary exhaustion, particularly the problems of SF as “exhausted” that Paul Kincaid recently put forth and “fantasy” as often conservative (and thus limited and unlikely to innovate), which I think falls under the rubric of “exhausted.” Both of these ideas posit a profound dysfunction within each genre rooted in the “used-upness” of conventions and their potential to relate something fresh to the reader. This week I want to consider the idea of exhaustion as a way to think more usefully and critically about these problems, which I believe are actually inevitable opportunities for writers and readers to invigorate the stories they create and engage.
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“[R]eading is as much a strategic enterprise as the work itself. To read, then, is to engage in one set of strategies in order to decipher another set.” – Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature, p. 185.
“Imagination and reality can be in cahoots, not at daggers drawn.” – ibid, p. 127.
I’ve been ill for the past several weeks and not writing very much, but I have been doing some reading, and I just finished Terry Eagleton’s new book The Event of Literature. It is a sometimes snarky, often erudite discussion of what literature is and is not, and a wide-ranging discussion of ways to conceive of literature and the significance of doing so. As I read I couldn’t help but think not just of the idea of literature writ large, but of the subset of fantastic literature. Reading the book (which I recommend to anyone who wants to think more about the meaning of literature, the self, and the life of the mind) stimulated my thinking on the nature of fantastic literature, and what I want to do this week is to present some of those thoughts and consider how they might relate to the reading of fantastika.
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I enjoy following debates both large and small about the vitality or exhaustion of genre fiction; they can tell you a lot about how literature is received and related to by readers. Muses know I love a good debate about the death of SF or the power of fantastic literature, but this week I want to engage with stories rather than polemical positions. I’ve been reading a lot of short fiction collections in the fantastic vein recently and what I’ve found in them is a vitality and pushing of boundaries that is, for me, what makes fantastic fiction exciting and intriguing. What these collections demonstrate is that that fantastika, in the broadest sense, is still fertile ground for wonderful, challenging stories.
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“Dreaming is impossible without myths. If we don’t have enough myths of our own, we’ll latch onto those of others — even if those myths make us believe terrible or false things about ourselves. Tolkien understood this, I think because it’s human nature. Call it the superego, call it common sense, call it pragmatism, call it learned helplessness, but the mind craves boundaries. Depending on the myths we believe in, those boundaries can be magnificently vast, or crushingly tight.” – N. K. Jemisin
“[I]t is a quintessential if not defining characteristic of epic to refer back to and revise what went before. . . .” – Catherine Bates, The Cambridge Companion to the Epic
I’ve been following the discussion that arose at the end of last week when someone at Gollancz tweeted a serious, if somewhat loaded, question:
A lengthy debate spread across the Vales of Tweet with many responses, including my own:
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”All fantastic genres make some use of fictive neology. Heroic fantasy invents words to evoke the archaic origins of its worlds. Phantasmagoric satire delights in wordplay that simultaneously masks and insinuates the objects of its derision. Gothic and supernatural tales invoke esoteric and folkloric terms to create the sense of a concealed or forgotten past. SF is distinct, in that its fictive neologies connote newness and innovation vis-à-vis the historical present of the reader’s culture. They are fictive signa novi, signs of the new.” – Istvan Csiscery-Ronay, Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, p. 13)
I love words. I love common words, complicated words, obscure words, archaic words, and I especially love made-up words. As Dr. Csiscery-Ronay points out above, one of the foundations upon which all fantastic genres (and, in the book cited, SF in particular) are built is invented words in some form of fictive neology. In science fiction there is a lengthy (sometimes rich, sometimes irksome) history of neologisms, while in the fantasy genre there are plenty of invented words, some of which could be described as pseudowords, “a pronounceable word-like item (letter or sound sequence) that lacks semantic or pragmatic content (i.e., meaning).” Of course, there is overlap in these tendencies; plenty of SF stories have characters and places with strange names, and some fantasy work create neologistic vocabulary. Both utilize chimerical names and terms, and this is something that readers of the literature find pleasurable. But why?
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On Monday the latest SF Signal Podcast went live, and I was on it. The topic: 2013 Hugo Ballot Suggestions. With January 31st the deadline for joining LoneStarCon to be eligible for submitting nominations, it seemed like a very good opportunity to participate in the conversation about them, especially since I was not going to be able to formally contribute to the process (due primarily to financial considerations). But I had read some great fiction in 2012 and wanted to give those stories a boost, so I volunteered to be on the podcast even though, as some of you know, my attitude towards awards is rather conflicted. Despite that, I wanted to put forth some suggestions for people to ponder.
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“There is something strangely self-undermining about the idea of utopia. Since we can speak of what transcends the present only in the language of the present, we risk cancelling out our imaginings in the very act of articulating them. The only real otherness would be that which we could not articulate at all. All utopia is thus at the same time dystopia, since it cannot help reminding us of how we are bound fast by history in the very act of trying to set us free from that bondage.” – Terry Eagleton
“[A] fictional world is a parasitic world.” – Umberto Eco
“World-building” is a vital component of fiction, one that is especially obvious in the fantastic varieties of literature. Critics, authors, and readers discuss the practice frequently, trying to grasp how it works, extolling its virtues and bemoaning its problems. In fantastika, particularly the SF and fantasy categories, world-building is assumed to be of primary importance and singular significance, used to project a plausible future or generate a richly-textured secondary world that sets each production apart. Every work of fiction, however, is an exercise in world-building to some extent, because every work of fiction generates an understanding (or sometimes multiple understandings) of the world, and every reader conjures a sense of world from their interpretation of that understanding. That is, readers elicit the workings and contexts of human existence in a given fiction; the world is, after all, the conditions of existence that surround us. Yet world-building is not just about conceiving of those conditions within a fictional framework; it is a reflection of the ongoing human impulse to create a world out of the realities our senses and imaginations encounter, to assert that what we confront is an organized milieu with graspable patterns.
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Last week’s column was a discussion of the best books of the past two centuries, and it got me thinking about the usefulness of such lists. Since this is my last column for this year, I considered doing a “Best of 2012″ list, but it seems repetitive given the deluge of such lists that are already available (see Paul di Filippo for one great example). And while the lists from last week stimulated some discussion, I don’t think a list will serve for demonstrating what I gleaned from this year’s offerings. Instead, I would rather discuss what I learned this year and what pieces of writing affected me. I did something similar last year, but this time I want to talk more about not what I enjoyed but what had a discernable effect on my thinking, my writing, and the contours of my imagination. I was looking for something all year, and where my gaze lingered I found great writing and a lot to ponder.
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“I am not with you when you read. The voice you hear is your own. I am giving you a frame: you are the one imbuing it with beauty.” – Robert Jackson Bennett
The votes are now in for Locus Magazine’s ambitious online poll asking for readers to rate the best fantastika of the 20th and 21st centuries. Some other folks have posted their lists and I thought I would post mine, and discuss why I made some of the choices on my list. As I started listing candidates I found myself thinking about what “the best” means to me and what works qualify. I re-read and compared stories to see if they were exemplars of the form. I pored through shelves of books to find more novelettes (which, as Ian Sales noted, is “an entirely arbitrary and useless category.”) and pit favorite stories against each other in my mind. But eventually I found myself wondering, with all of this reading and comparing, what “the best” was, and if that was what I was really trying to find.
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A few weeks ago I attended Darkover Grand Council Meeting, a Science Fiction/Fantasy convention held in the Baltimore area. This was the con’s 35th year and it offered a bountiful variety of activities, from music to crafts to meditation sessions to a regency ball. Of course, the convention also had several tracks of programming that included many panel discussions on topics ranging from “Placing Your Story in the Here and Now” to “What Comes After Zombies.” I spent most of the weekend attending panels, and I was struck by how different they were from the panels at what I consider to be my home convention, Readercon. This led me to spend some of my time thinking about the nature and utility of convention panels for fantastic literature. As I listened, took notes, and let my mind drift amongst the ideas, good and bad, that the panels produced, I wondered what use the con panel has in our hyper-connected age, what a panel can offer an audience and what makes them fall short sometimes.
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After talking so abstractly about criticism last week, I felt that delving into a book was necessary for this week’s column. My choice is Jeffrey Ford’s Crackpot Palace, a book about which I am sure I could pen a lengthy thesis. It is his most recent collection of stories and demonstrates his versatility as a writer, ranging from SF and heroic fantasy to unsettling surrealism and earthy realism. To show my bias from the start, I think it is one of the best short story collections of the year, even though a few of the stories fell flat for me. Ford applies his prodigious writing skills to the creation of stories whose fantastical elements seduce and disrupt the reader’s expectations. Ford can read like great American literature or SFnal pulp, but there are always shadows and depths that run through his tales, and they can be treacherous or enlightening as you fall into them.
Regardless of any genre affectations or fantastical content, life is inherently strange in Ford’s stories. One of Ford’s great strengths is that his writing slyly leads you to embrace what is happening, not by normalizing the strange and marvelous but by creating a tone that makes the fantastic inseparable from the seemingly innocuous writing. To be anchored to the illogic of the world presented, the reader must not merely see through a character’s eyes so much as coalesce how they experience and shape the story of the world being told. A sense of place is channeled through the characters’ actions and responses to be felt and assembled by the reader. This is not a unique method of creating a feeling of being elsewhere in a story, but Ford is particularly masterful at its execution.
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“As a critic I am not in the business of providing purchasing advice, but neither am I in the business of attempting to read the author’s mind by establishing the facts about a text. As a critic, I am engaged in the construction of conceptual edifices. I bring to bear theories and asserted truths ripped from the world and my own imagination and crash them into the text of a book or a film like a runaway train into an orphanage.” – Jonathan McCalmont
Like discussions of genre and relevance, there is a perennial resurgence in the discussion of criticism in the field of fantastic literature. In fact, it seems to arise whenever a particularly sharp review or post makes the rounds. The recent flurry of writing about the “exhaustion” of SF comes right to mind, but the question about how we should examine and debate literature is asked constantly. Fans, authors, and others in the field frequently inquire as to the proper nature of criticism, its bounds, and its utility to the field.
I think all of these questions fail to see what criticism often is, and what it can do.
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“If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it’s probably because at some level you find “reality” a bit of a disappointment.” – Joe Queenan
“[D]espite the striking parallelisms in the logic of their understanding, fiction cannot be strictly identified with metaphysically possible worlds.” – Thomas G. Pavel
I’ve been thinking more about the “exhaustion of SF” issue this week, and some of the conclusions that have emerged from that conversation. One of the aspects of it that still bugs me is the conservative overtone that seems to mark a desire to go back to a prior interpretation of the genre of SF, or at least to a framework for writing such stories. In a comment to my column Jonathan McCalmont clarified that what he was proposing was a return to the “garden of ideas.” I like this metaphor, but I am still leery of coupling it to the representation and application of more rigid genre ideas and tools to contemporary fantastic literature. I am always suspicious when someone promotes the idea that literature should stick more closely to possible worlds (see for example Margaret Atwood), because this denigrates, intentionally or not, the impossible in fiction, and we need to not just write about improbable or impossible things, we need to celebrate them and take them seriously.
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“And so life started to become an adventure, in a way we had never known before.” – Gregor von Rezzori
I’m shifting gears this week to get a bit more traction on other stuff, and to take a break from heavy topics. I moved recently and I have been slowly unpacking my library and re-acquainting myself with some old favorites, not all of which are fantastika. Some of these books are surreal or fabulous, and demanded that they be written about. So, I want to discuss some books that aren’t “genre” in the strict sense of the term, but that are challenging novels which admirers of fantastika might find pleasure and reflection in reading. Some of them are openly fantastical, others subtly so, but what they each have is some resonance with the sensibilities that I find in the best fantastic fiction and in great literature generally. They are strange, perplexing, rhapsodic and open to possibilities; they are fables, carnivals, and enigmas that require you to imagine the world differently and see it through some very distinctive eyes.
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“I do not think I could write SF if I were not disenchanted with large areas of the field. Those areas of disenchantment are precisely the interesting interfaces where I can begin to feel my imagination doing useful work. So in that sense if I would be a bit worried if everything was all right with SF. I don’t think it is – but then, I don’t think it ever has been. Rather than perceiving a particular crisis affecting SF now, I see the field as being in a constant state of stagnation and renewal, constantly exhausting itself, constantly hitting new seams.” – Alastair Reynolds
“The problem may be, I think, that science fiction has lost confidence in the future. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it has lost confidence that the future can be comprehended.” – Paul Kincaid
I was all set to write more about possible worlds in light of clearly impossible ones (such as those of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wind Drinkard) and ones that play with the idea of possibility themselves (such as Ekaterina Sedia’s The House of Discarded Dreams), but the internet is afire with discussions about Paul Kincaid’s recent essay in the LA Times Review of Books on SF’s “exhaustion.” Having read his piece, an interview with him, and some of the responses, I wanted to examine the core of his argument, and that of Jonathan McCalmont, a responder who agreed with and expanded on Kincaid’s critique. Each characterizes “the genre” with broad insinuations about its ideals and characteristics, and agree that “the genre” is not living up to its potential. My question is: does this approach get to the problem they see, and if not, how does that change the nature of the problem?
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“[A]ny existential statement – a statement, for example, beginning ‘Once upon a time there was…’ – always implies a world, because it implies a universal statement.” – Simon de Bourcier
A couple of years ago I wrote a piece for the Apex Publications blog on “other-worlding,” the process of creating a place and time different than the one we as the reader currently occupied. It was a very naive bit of writing (that disappeared with the blog), but that theme of understanding how writing creates a world, and how readers enter into it (or not), has been one that I keep coming back to as I try to understand how reading works, because every work of fiction posits a world that the reader comprehends through their interpretation of the clues the writer has encoded in the story. A world is constantly implied in all fictions, and the question is: what ideas and angles of inquiry can open them up to more understanding both in their construction and their effects?
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“Because the day nourishes dry dreams and wounds your angelical being, you will set off in search of night. . . .” – Jaime Sáenz
Reading is a peculiar experience. It is a practice that simultaneously invites ideas inside our heads while allowing us to create a sense of displacement through them. Even as we take symbols and concepts in we are shifting ourselves conceptually and affectively. Reading can transport us to magical realms, make us believe that we share kinship with millions of people we have never met, or relate to us the minutiae of the everyday world. The power of reading is that it conjures things in our minds that are not there, and allows the possibility of experience and emotion and contemplation to occur in the process.
I moved recently and I have been slowly unpacking my library. As I take books out and organize I’m struck by the memories that many of the books call up for me. From classic adventures to philosophically resonant writing, I find that the fact of a book in one’s hand brings back recollection’s of a book’s feeling, of the displacement that it created as I read it. Some of the most powerful feelings come from the books that instigate one of my favorite reading experiences, a sensation of disruption combined with a pleasure gained from a text that challenges my reading skill and my ideas of the real and the felt world. I often find these experiences in fantastic or weird fiction, but the essential quality that creates this sensation is one of else.
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” The stories we tell about reading need to bound a potentially unending process of interpretation and imagination, even when we do not complete a reading. Or, come to the end of the text.” (from last week’s column)
“[S]tories are never just stories. They are communications and affect both their authors and to whom they are addressed.” – Vincent Crapanzano
In the time between this column and last week’s I’ve had a little revelation: I am still thinking about the reading process incorrectly. I talked last week about failure in reading, and about how we as readers create stories to relate our reading experiences. Many of those stories are told in the form of a casual fable and both arise from and address our own concerns with self-representation and our relationship to the literature we read, and don’t read. But only some of them are characterized or appear as failures per se; many of them are about a lack of consummation, of not completing a reading for some reason. Thus, to call them all failures is excessive.
I bring this up because it is easy to summarize and even essentialize unconsummated readings, especially when the stories we tell about them are brief, commonplace, and often cloak other meanings behind them. Last week I talked about a book that I have so far failed to complete and that I feel is a failure on my part to finish. But there are many other ways that we make sense of and integrate unconsummated readings, and this week I want to talk about another book and why I did not finish it, what stories I have told myself about why I did not do so, and what meanings I found beneath those stories once I examined them more closely.
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