“Science fiction criticism, of course, is still very much in the Formalist stage. It is often obsessed with “good” and “bad” – it is a mode of review rather than of criticism. Its effectiveness, in the majority of cases, is questionable.” – Lavie Tidhar

“[S]ince it is in the nature of SF’s oxymoronic fusion of the rational and the marvelous to challenge received notions of reality – sometimes seriously, sometimes playfully – critical provocation is part of SF’s generic identity.” – Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.

I had hoped to write more about the subject of reading fantastika this week, but I would rather take my time to absorb the new material I’m reading on the topic. Next week I will return to this subject, with an eye to examining how cultural assumptions about metaphor color how we read different modes of literary discourse. This week I want to discuss a topic that, like the death of science fiction, frequently arises  like a hungry zombie looking for brains to feast upon: the problem of “SF criticism.” This problem is a virtual feature of the field of fantastic literary production, one that seems at once simple and knotty.  The “problem” is that some sense of omission or parochialism is discerned in the critical discussion of the literature by an observer who then critiques the criticism itself.  The quotation above from Lavie Tidhar, in a post on the critical facets of Adam Roberts’ fiction, codifies a common viewpoint on the state of SF criticism, that it is unsophisticated and often doing a poor job of critique. But what is the job of SF criticism, and how does that job relate to how readers perceive the genre and engage it?  There is plenty of criticism in the field that is not reducible to a mere review, but the object of “SF criticism”  is still often critiqued as not being either reverent or constructive enough. And so the tension continues.  The question is, however, what the de-parochializing SF (and, and, to an extent, the broader field of fantastika) criticism (which, to be fair, has been increasingly academicized and elaborated) might accomplish?  Is such a shift necessary?
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“Fiction, Dr. Oatley notes, ‘is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.’” – New York Times, 3/17/12

Last weekend the New York Times published a thought-provoking article on how our brains respond to words and stories. It discussed an array of studies that monitored the brain when performing assorted reading activities, noting what areas of the brain reacted to particular sorts of phrases. Two conclusions were drawn from these assorted projects: one, that our brain responds to written words, particularly action terms and metaphors, using areas “distinct from language-processing areas.” Two, that reading, in particular fiction, functions as a sort of social simulation that enriches our “theory of mind,” the ideas that we use to make sense of others’ actions and motives. “Narratives offer a unique opportunity to engage this capacity,” the article claims, and the author ends with this inspiring coda:

“Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined. “

There is a lot to think about in this article, and also in the more detailed studies that contribute to it. But it is not just “great literature,” as the NYT article concludes, that stimulates and “improves” us; stories, metaphors, even a well-chosen phrase can elicit a response from other parts of our brain. What is suggestive in these studies is that reading is not just the absorption of written communication to be stored away or reused. There is a lot more going on in the act of reading and in the experience of reading fiction, for better and for worse, if we follow some of the conclusions of these studies along their possible courses.
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” If we wrote fiction the way we talk about genre and mainstream most of the time, we would all be hacks, our prose full of the most crass and belabored cliches. Yet we persist in outdated, dangerous generalizations, and allow them to color our perceptions of reality. We refuse to engage with the individual in front of us, to communicate, and instead create badly-made fictions about them.” – Jeff VanderMeer

“…I think science fiction is — well, no, not important, yet still worth talking about, because it is a promise of continued life for the imagination, a good tool, an enlargement of consciousness. . . .” – Ursula K. Le Guin, from “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” in Gunn & Candelaria’s Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction

I wanted to start with these two quotations because they encapsulate for me a contradiction that colors how I consider writing, reading, and the understandings of fiction that result from these activities.  I heartily agree with Jeff VanderMeer’s notion that genre should not determine our perception of literature, but I also feel very deeply, as Le Guin does, that SF (and, for me, fantastika) as an idea provides fuel for my imagination. This is a paradox that I have been struggling with since I started writing about fantastic literature: the struggle between the truncation of convention and the potential for inspiration. As I try to talk about literature in general, and specific fictions in particular, I find myself caught in webs of signification spun by others (to steal from Clifford Geertz), and I realize that to not just understand the uses of genre, but to understand how they shape communication, there is a need to examine what stories we are telling with genre, instead of just trying to make the stories more believable.

Later in the essay from which I drew that quotation, Jeff VanderMeer talks about being on a panel where the idea of genre was used to do just what he talks about:  serve as a bad story about, in this case, a writer. This is not an isolated incident; the discussion of literature is filled with moments like this that use genre to label and characterize people, texts, and ideas. The ways in which we think about fiction are conditioned by the ways that we talk about fiction, and the use of genre as explication and designation conditions the discussion of literature by creating  boundaries around and characteristics for literary works, in a concentrated fashion. As I noted a few weeks ago, “We often talk about fiction in terms that simplify it,” and the most simplifying concept is that of genre.

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I think a lot about how humans read, and imagine through reading. This has led me to read more and more about how cognition works, how we receive and process what we read, and how our ideas of the workings of the imagination influence our understanding of texts and narratives. There are many theories of reading in general, and there are also notions of how we engage and comprehend certain textual forms, and more culturally-variable notions such as genre. In the study of fantastika (more specifically, SF), such understandings are very specific to the genre as different theorists and discussants conceive of it. The notion of cognitive estrangement is one of the most well-thought-out and commented on of these ideas, and, well, it bugs me. While there are some aspects of the idea that I find useful, it creates a limited view of how literature works generally and, in particular, what SF and most fantastic literature does.

Cognitive estrangement was first presented by Darko Suvin (the man who brought SF criticism the novum) as a formalized, narrow conception of what SF does, and thus what makes the genre distinctive. In the decades since he presented this idea (in most detail in his Metamorphoses of Science Fiction), it has undergone scrutiny and development, by both Suvin and other writers. and maintains an influential position in the discourse on fantastic literature.  What Suvin wrote in 1973, that cognitive estrangement is “the basis of the literary genre of SF” is true, if more nuanced and critically-examined, today. As Patrick Parrinder noted in his introduction to Learning From Other Worlds, a volume that examines this idea from a number of angles, Suvin’s conception has become “paradigmatic.”

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“Theory is often a pugnacious critique of common-sense notions, and further, an attempt to show that what we take for granted as ‘common-sense’ is in fact an historical construction. . . . As a critique of common-sense and an exploration of alternative conceptions, theory involves a questioning of the most basic premises or assumptions of literary study, the unsettling of anything that might have been taken for granted…” – Jonathan Culler, from Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2011)

“The mainstream (or mundane, as NS [Neal Stephenson] slyly calls it) is being, or has been, gentrified-reduced in status to one among many other genres. It’s the center that cannot hold, the mainstream which is breaking apart into tributaries.” – James Enge

One of the great obsessions in the literary field of fantastika is the discussion of what, exactly, we are reading/writing/identifying with/talking about when we use that term or one of the many others people invoke to represent their notion of the field. This is not old news; in fact, one could argue that this combination of definitional controversy and genre elasticity has been argued about since someone had the audacity to create a label for such literature. The debates have ranged from those dealing with the genre’s (however you categorize it) uniqueness to the idea that the genre is really part of the “mainstream.” Writers dispute the label for their fiction while others in the field dismiss genre labels as marketing categories. What unites all of these conversations is not just the subject of the debate, but the idea that definition is significant (even if wrong-headed or too narrow/broad/specific/imprecise) and requires constant discussion.
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“This is one of the effects of reading weird fiction: it does not dictate your imaginative path, but impels you to make your own.” – from “The Weirdness Addendum.”

At year’s end I finished reading the massive anthology The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. I’ve been digesting it ever since. It was a humongous capstone to an edifice of weird anthologies for the year that included their Odd? anthology and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities project. At the end of reading The Weird I found I needed a period of time to absorb what I had read, as I took a “devour the whole thing” approach to it. Now, with some time to reflect on it, I want to write about some thoughts and ideas that have resulted from that reading. Rather than write a standard review, which seems difficult to do, I want to reflect on. . . not what I have learned necessarily, but what that reading has done to stimulate my thinking and my imagination.
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 ”Although literary texts may be special, the instruments of thought used to invent and interpret them are basic to everyday thought. Written works called narratives or stories may be shelved in a special section of the bookstore, but the mental instrument I call narrative or story is basic to human thinking.” – Mark Turner

I have been thinking a lot about last week’s column, because  I feel I did half of the job the title promised the reader. I talked at length about the problem of reification and duality in how we think of the purpose of fiction, but I did not get into the “shading” very deeply. This week I want to talk more about that, partly responding to and building on comments from last week, and also bringing in some ideas I have been gleaning about the linkages between cognition and fiction, pleasure and imagination, and the struggle between understanding and perplexity.  Perplexity is an element in reading apprehension that, I am beginning to think,  gives works of fantastika a distinctive power by creating challenges for our cognition (some of which have gradually become less challenging) and effecting pleasure as we negotiate these challenges, even those that may be more prosaic than we would like to believe.
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“Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving.” – David Foster Wallace

“I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own.” – David Foster Wallace

This week I am going to rove far afield from the meadows and wastelands of fantastika, just for a little while. I am going to conduct a border raid into the realm of Literature which, of course, fantastika is allied to but often kept separate from by boundary disputes and ideological conflicts.
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“‘[T]he science fiction reading protocol’ should not be conceived outside of a recognition of the fundamental impurity of genre.” – Roger Luckhurst, The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard

Last week’s post on Protocols and The Spectacle of Reading Fantastika got a long response in the comments section from Jamie Todd Rubin (with some input from Paul Weimer as well). I had hoped to respond to them earlier this week but I have been fighting some mutant cold/flu chimera that waylaid me for several days. So, for this week’s column I want to use those comments as a springboard to elaborate and refine what I was driving at  last week. While I agree with some of what Jamie is asserting, I am increasingly unconvinced that examining the reading of SF (and fantastika) gains much insight from the use of “protocols” and I feel more strongly that this idea leads us away from a fuller understanding of the reading imagination and what the apprehension of fantastika can tell us about it.

The idea that a writer encodes the text with signals — “like a semaphore system” as Jamie put it — is a sound place to begin. All writing attempts to stimulate recognition effects in the reader’s imagination, but the goals and success can vary widely.  Good writing is evocative, either because it succeeds in its basic transfer of meaning (“I’ll be home in time for dinner”) and/or because it stimulates the reader’s imagination by creating fodder for the creation of additional meaning(s) through fantasization. Bad writing stimulates different effects in readers, generally ones unintended by the author. These are not hard-and-fast categories however; “bad writing” can generate pleasure and reflection, while “good writing” may seem overly elaborate or obtuse and they does not work for some readers. The subjective aspects of reading mean that no text appeals to everyone and that any individual discursive act can have a range of interpretations. Intentionality influences the engagement with and reception of the text in ways that both open up and limit the meanings we generate from a text as we read. The semaphore comparison works as an idea of how basic communication works, as each signal has a very specific meaning, but are other meanings communicated so rigorously and clearly?
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“SF is like a mystery where the world and the history of the world is what’s mysterious, and putting that all together in your mind is as interesting as the characters and the plot, if not more interesting. We talk about worldbuilding as something the writer does, but it’s also something the reader does, building the world from the clues. ” – Jo Walton

I love reading. I love it as much as writing, and for me, the two activities are intimately intertwined. I cannot imagine reading without writing about it, and I am unable to think of writing without the effects of my reading upon it. The play between the two of them is essentially hermeneutic for me. Reading and writing are not just in dialectical relation, not just complementary, but symbiotic, constantly feeding off of each other, sharing strength, and sometimes getting in each other’s way. Both are crafts to me, and exist as inseparable siblings in my imagination and in my cognitive practice.

For most people the distinction seems to be more rigid. Most of my students in writing classes could not understand why I made them read so much, and talk about their reading, and treat their writing as reading material rather than a ritual act for course completion. Many of the patrons of the bookstore I work at admire various sorts of literatures to read but see those works as distinctive products, and often see themselves as passive consumers, mere readers. I have always found this to ring untrue for me, because (a) reading is not a simple, passive activity, and (b) separating reading from writing seems artificial. I am not suggesting that everyone who reads should become a writer, but I do wonder, frequently, why we compartmentalize the two activities and then further rarefy them, mystifying one while treating the other as prosaic. Part of the distinction comes from the idea that one creates while the other absorbs, yet both rely on our imaginations, our aptitudes, and the ability to apply our knowledge and ingenuity to textual interactions. Both are creative processes, but how we use them to create and what they produce differs, and the seeming ease with which we read often overshadows its richness and the ways it contributes to our thinking, including that which we put into words for others to read.
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“We do not have an ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.”

- Philip K. Dick,The Man in the High Castle

Last week I charged myself with a sizeable task: to discuss Lavie Tidhar’s Osama in dialogue with two significant SF novels of the 20th-century: Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Joanna Russ’ The Female Man. I had also aspired to write about two recent short fictions as well, but after re-reading Dick and Russ I realized that I had more than enough to talk about. So this week I will sketch out some resonances that crossed my mind in the reading of these novels, and how this thinking has changed my perception of Tidhar’s novel. In the process of doing this I want to consider the novum they share and how these books simultaneously utilize and question it.

All three novels emerge from a common SF novum, that of the existence of alternate, parallel realities. Now, all fictions posit some sort of different world; every novel is on some level framing and positing its own actuality. Each work of fiction generates an understanding of the world and, in doing so, creates a subjective conception of “the real” from which its story proceeds, a context for the reader to identify. While all fictions create this effect, some do more than shift the world a touch in one fictive direction an imaginary town, an infallible detective, an improbably romance on the moors). Fantastic literature embraces and intensifies the break, sometimes by creating a completely distinct other-world, sometimes by hypothesizing a future arising from the combination of “our” present with some innovation or event. In the case of these three novels, a more complex middle ground is created, of other worlds that directly relate to ours in some way but that are not speculations of where we might go or discrete secondary worlds. These three novels explore parallels and alternatives to what we the readers understand as our shared history and reality.
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“For the first time, the books struck him as strangely unreal. He thought of all the attacks described. If you added all the wounded and the dead, he thought, they still wouldn’t amount to how many people died in a single month in car accidents in just one city. It was a war about fear, he thought, not figures on the ground. It was a war of narrative, a story of a war, and it grew in the telling. For some reason he thought of a hill of beans, which was a strange thing to think about. Lives in a hill of beans. He laughed.” – Lavie Tidhar, Osama, p. 151

I usually avoid writing reviews in the column, at least in the strict sense of the term, but I have been wanting to write about Lavie Tidhar’s book Osama since it came out this past fall, and given my response to the novel, I think it’s worth discussing at length. There have already been a number of reviews (and a roundtable here at SF Signal), so what I would like to focus on are some of the themes and effects that I gleaned from the text. It is, for me, one of the best novels of 2011; as I put it last week, it is a “heady, disturbing example of what fantastika can be.” The mixture of terrors and anxieties, the growing sense of displacement contrasted with various textual elements, and in the end, the failure of mimesis to assuage the reader all contribute that feeling of heady disturbance and make the novel an affecting work of literature that is less about the figure of the title and what he directly represents than  it does a larger point about how we relate to reality through stories.
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My last column of 2011 was a summary of sorts, but as I begin the second year of writing “The Bellowing Ogre” I want to reflect a bit more on what I read and what I gleaned from my reading in 2011. I find that, especially in the blog-realms, we move from topic to topic and story to story so quickly that rarely does anything seem to settle in a way that encourages reflection. What you see in great profusion at the end of each year are lists: Top Ten Lists, “Best of” Lists, and other compendia of recommendations for reading. Some of these lists are interesting to read and ponder over, but as I read and write more, I find the idea of “Best” and “Top” lists to be less efficacious, except as conversation starters (although I have concocted a few such lists in the past, most recently in an SF Signal Mind Meld). Rather then pointing out some favorites of the past year, I would like to discuss some of the fiction that educated, invigorated, and enlightened me during the past year.
Reading for me in 2011 was an educational experience in many ways: I read more fiction last year than I had since my undergraduate years in the early 1990s. I read more authors that were new to me than I had since high school. I ranged more broadly across borders of genre and subject, but came back to a few sorts of stories towards the end of the year, mostly weird fiction. I tried to read fiction from many different sources and read a lot more short fiction both online and as e-publications. The significance of all this is that my level of exposure to different angles on genre, of voices and standpoints, and of types of narrative was more diverse than any previous year. 2011 was a great year to be a reader of fantastika as new venues proliferated and more stories, rigorous and playful, appeared in print and on the screen.

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“The literatures of the fantastic are not metaphors. They are the tale itself.” – John Clute

When I started writing this column in January, I had no idea what it was going to be about. I wanted to write a weekly column to chew over issues of genre, reading protocols, and the literary field of production as I saw them. Now, almost a year later, I am still not sure what it’s all about, but I have learned a lot about commentary and criticism and the imagination and reading and reflection through the writing of it. As the year winds down and I prepare to take a few weeks off (less for the holidays than to work on other stuff and spend more extra time with the kidlet), I want to consider what I have learned from a year of writing about fantastic and weird literature and at the same time talk about some of the fiction that has helped shape my thinking.

So far this year I have read about 50 books, scores of articles, several dozen individual short stories, and a lot of blog posts. Most of that reading was for this column or for reviews and articles for publication, so this year was much more about reading for writing. That lensing was a significant shift for me; while I had often read as a writer (of fiction and as student), this year I read to think about reading and writing as a practice, as a social act, and as an imaginative exercise. Looking at my reading from this angle turned out to be very educational; instead of reading as an undifferentiated (yet very subjective) “writer” I was able to think about the processes and ideas that surround that position. This has gradually altered (mutated, perhaps) my ideas about genre, narrative, and the interplay between texts and their reception, and I think begun to enrich how I read and write.

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“The problem is that this is a book that means well towards sci-fi; Atwood wants to take it seriously, and wants her readers to take it seriously, yet she can never quite conquer her own ambivalence towards the genre.” – Paul Kincaid

“It may be that like a lobster in a trap who cannot find the exit door, Atwood cannot work her way out of the perplex of ill-judged subjectivity in which she had trapped herself: perhaps because, as with any statement of belief as opposed to argument, her “definition” of SF is as unfalsifiable as any sermon.” – John Clute

“Margaret Atwood is bedeviled by genre — or possibly by others’ notions of genre.” – John Williford

When I reviewed Margaret Atwood’s In Other Worlds several weeks ago, I was perhaps too kind to the work. At least, once I finished my review and started reading others, that was the impression that I obtained. While most reviews had something laudatory to say about the author and the book, there was an overt disappointment with both at the same time. Many reviewers, particularly those from the SF/Fantastika field, were unhappy with her explanation and explication of the difference between “science fiction” and “speculative fiction.” Even extremely positive reviews, such as Ryan Britt’s at Tor.com, admit that, while they found her ideas to be fruitful and informative, “[t]he conclusions another reader might draw from this engaging book may be different than the ones I outlined.” Atwood herself, as Britt also notes, wrote that it is “the reader, rather than the writer, who has the last word about any book” and that is evident in the response to this book, something that Atwood certainly knew would happen.

A re-reading of the first part of the book, where much of the discussion of SF and imagination takes place, inspires me to think that Atwood is not interested in current debates over the definition of genre or the contemporary constitution of the literary field. This book is not an apologia for her stance, nor is it some revelatory confessional about her secret history with SF. This is a book designed to show the reader what is going on in Atwood’s head and what effect her encounters with SF have had on her creative process and her own writing, and how these inform her critical position, which she admits in the book is not an academic one. This book is not designed to answer the Big Question of SF’s relationship to the human imagination, but serves rather as Atwood’s own very personal take on what she had learned about the human imagination from her experiences in reading and thinking with SF. This book is not a rapproachment or a deep analysis; it is a collection (of pieces written over a number of years) brought together to show readers where Atwood is coming from, and to demonstrate the human imagination’s workings through the writing and thinking of one author.

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“SF, along with fantasy more broadly, sets out to extrapolate imaginatively from the world.” – Adam Roberts

“”It is often asserted that ‘Fantasy,” a particular brand of fantastic fiction that became a publishing industry in the wake of the success of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and ‘Science Fiction,’ brand of fantastic literature invented , or re-invented, in the USA in the technophile 1920a, have little in common. [...] But one thing science fiction and fantasy certainly have in common is the imaginary world. . . .” Gwyneth Jones.

“Fictive neologies have a paradoxical function. They conjure up a sense of the inevitability of a new thing. . . . Yet fictive neology also displays that it is fiction. ” – Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.

In the comments section for last week’s column Paul Weimer brought up an idea that has been rolling around in my head for awhile:

“I wonder, John, in the seemingly crapsack world of a present we seem to be falling into, if that inspiration is more easily found these days in fantasy than in science fiction, and that’s one reason why fantasy is currently ascendant over its sister genre. If the future looks bleak and smaller, than a truly and completely imaginary world allows for more stories that invoke in readers (and dare I say the writers) that effect you describe far more easily.”

Sue Lange noted that, generally speaking, the difference might be that “science is not as popular as spiritualism which fantasy invokes.” At first her observation seemed quite commonsensical, and it is an argument that has been made quite often before. “Hard SF,” for example, often has a specific learning curve and a significant focus on scientific ideas, and that may not be something that interests a wide range of readers. And yet, I think that is only the starting point for considering why “Fantasy” seems to be ascendant, and making this comparison leads to several questions. First, if people are avoiding science fiction because of science, what does this signify about the contrasting popularity of Fantasy? Do purer fantasies, fictions that are more metaphorical or phantasmagorical, create inspiration more readily? And how does this all relate to our “seemingly crapsack world” anyway? I can’t answer all these questions in a single column, but I want to point out a few more things about the idea of vivification, and about imagination and the work of fiction, that might begin to address them.

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“We’re in a strange relationship with our fiction, you see. Sometimes we fear it’s taking us over. Sometimes we beg to be taken over by it . . . sometimes we want to see what’s inside it.” – Dr. Horne, from “Planet Fiction,” in Planetary: The Fourth Man.

It initially seems odd to say that we have “a strange relationship with our fiction.” Thinking of a text as something that you have a relationship with may seem ludicrous at first, but what Warren Ellis (through Dr. Horne) implies is not just that we have a proximity of some sort to fiction, but that we experience a consociation with fiction. We bring ourselves “into or establish association, connection, or relation” with fiction. More than that, we often actualize a dynamic relationship with it, one with emotional and even (broadly) sensual aspects to it. Our relationship to fiction is strange because it is more like our relationships with people than almost any other object or concept we encounter, This kind of narrative creates not just discursive effects, but imaginative and emotional affects.

I think that, for a number of reasons, this dynamic is intensified in fantastika (in its widest definition). I am not sure that it is most intense(romance novels generate vast amounts of affect as well), but the relationship with fantastic fiction often propagates not just intensity but a multifarious sociality. Fantastika does not just give us stories to experience alone and together, stories to exchange and argue about and bond over, but creates a peculiar and often powerful relationship with specific fictions and with fiction in general. We create a dual vivification in this relationship; we “bring life to; animate, quicken” texts while these texts “enliven, brighten, sharpen” our imaginations. Of course, the texts do not do this “themselves;” in the process of making them live, we enliven ourselves through them.

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Last week I wrote about the idea of the ineffable and how it relates to fantastic stories. This week I want to attempt to demonstrate what I meant by looking at some stories and trying to tease out their metaphorization of the ineffable and the effects of its presence and/or absence. At the end of my last column I concluded:

“Determining the relationship of a story to reality tells a tale in itself; deciding on the most fitting spatial metaphor to “bound” a text inserts it into a narrative. We understand fiction through other fictions; we use prior experience, assumptions, preconceptions, and our skills as readers and cultural creatures to make sense of texts, and we do that by not just engaging the selves and structures we uncover in the text, but by creating another story in our own minds. In order to do that we must somehow incorporate what does not make sense, either by dismissal, reinterpretation, or by acknowledging that the ineffable is a presence that cannot be encompassed and that alters our reception of the text. Metaphors of obscurity, mystery, and the indecipherable facilitate this, intensify the experience, and sometimes derail the process of understanding, but their presence is necessary or neither the fiction upon the page or the one in the reader’s mind will cohere.”

We often think of “coherence” rather narrowly, in structural or progressive terms. Weird and fantastic stories often require more than such a strict following; coherence comes from readers filling in gaps, setting aside judgments, and inserting other stories and their own conceptions and desires into their interpretation of the text. That brings a significant level of subjectivity into play, which I think is precisely why some people love weird and fantastic fiction so much, why challenging and difficult fiction has such appeal for some readers. I hope that this little critical/exegetic exercise will demonstrate one person’s perspective on that appeal.

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“I once wrote an essay titled ‘In the Night, In the Dark: A Note on the Appreciation of Weird Fiction.’ Toward the end of this piece, I asserted: ‘By definition the weird story is based on an enigma that can never be dispelled….’ Semantics aside, the important thing to me in a so-called weird tale is an impenetrable mystery that generates the actions and manifestations in a narrative.” – Thomas Ligotti

“[T]he image of a literary work as a piece of disputed territory over which two or more parties have battled . . . has seemed particularly valid. But even this metaphor suppresses reference to the changing, growing, living quality of such works.” – Michael Hanne

Readers employ many different terminologies to delineate and make sense of texts, from genre writ large (prose varietals, poetry, etc.) to fine distinctions of structure and meaning. Some readers prefer basic categories while others find more enjoyment in complex and detailed descriptions, depending on their intentions and agenda for reading. There are two sorts of distinction that are usually made immediately: real versus unreal, and what “boundaries” the given text lies within, borders upon, and/or crosses. Employing these distinctions make it, on the surface, easy to portray a text in a codified way, to quickly communicate to someone else the essential qualities of a book: its relationship to the real and its location in the conceptual terrain of narratives. Genre-mapping, both in terms of marketing categories and tropic indicators, defines form and content quickly and efficiently, if often incompletely.

I hear this in the bookstore frequently: when not asking for a specific title, a patron will ask for a book based on one of these two characteristics. “Where is your literature/non-fiction/poetry?” “Do you have a science fiction section?” “Are romances in their own area?” When looking for a specific book, patrons assume its location in the store based on these two notions. For example, Charlaine Harris’ books are looked for in SF, Horror, Romance, Mystery, Literature and, more recently, in Media (Television). Some patrons are actually surprised to find them in Horror. When I ask why, the consensus is that they are not “about” horror. They are about relationships, about suspense, about “real stuff” as one patron told me last week.

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Last week I discussed what I thought was a keen idea worth exploring: the notion, taken from Alan Palmer’s book Fictional Minds, that “[r]eaders create a continuing consciousness out of scattered references to a particular character and read this consciousness as an ‘embedded narrative’ within the whole narrative of the novel.” I found a useful contrast between the protagonists of two recent novels and discussed in broad terms the sense of self that emerged from each narrative and speculated about the implications for fantastic literature. In the comments, my friend and colleague Felix Giron brought up an issue that I had not considered in the piece. As she stated in her comment:

“What I am reminded of is, however, that this sense of self is still powerfully influenced by ideas of autonomy and, in many ways, self-sufficiency. This seems to synergize with the ideological concept of the individual and the social and literary context first connected to that idea. Thus the increasingly autonomous and distinct “individual” has a close relationship to “the novel” (whatever that is) and the narratives associated with it. My question is whether the connection you’ve made here between fantastika and the idea of the self is more open than that between the novel and the individual.”

This point, and the question connected to it, crack open the idea of what the sense of self is and its link to the sort of narrative that we call a novel. The more I think about this, the more I wonder about what fantastika has to offer in terms of creating distinctive, insightful, and compelling modes of selfhood within fiction. In general, fictional narratives work to create the boundaries of identity and the parameters of selves that undergird them. A novel is a narrative that is not just fictional, but a particular type of fiction. The form has a range of styles and possibilities linked to the general idea of “a novel” and to the specific productions of it, and what novels produce more than anything else are selves that the reader can relate to and dialogue with. Like ethnographies, novels “enact the process of fictional self-fashioning, in relative systems of culture and language.” What, then, is the link between a sense of emergent self and consciousness in that form, and what distinctive effects can fantastika employ to enrich or complicate both the link and the form?

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