Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (13 page)

SF is about confronting the strange in order to understand it and push the boundaries back but fantasy is either about enjoying the experience of strangeness (as in M. John Harrison’s Viriconium books) or bludgeoning it into submission in favour of a frequently politically dubious status quo (in the case of epic fantasy).

Jonathan McCalmont

These sort of hoary old chestnuts which conjure miserably limited
Genres
of
Science Fiction
and
Fantasy
in their assertions as to what the two are “about” are unsustainable even as broad generalisations. Countless works wearing the rackspace label of
Science Fiction
are deeply reactionary in their response to the strange, fascistically heroic adventures in which the aliens serve exactly the same purpose as Tolkien’s orcs: unknown-as-enemy; Other. Countless works of fantasy, conversely, use the strange precisely to conceptualise what lies beyond our understanding. They are very much
not
fantasias.

And when we get into specifics? It is
deeply
problematic—to put it charitably—to view the Viriconium books as ultimately sensationalist pleasures, when Harrison’s fiction is so self-evidently designed to disrupt and defy any attempt at passive immersion, to refuse the comfort of givens, to continually force the reader to face the unknown in the text and deal with it. Hell, it is quite simply
complacent
to construct one’s
Science Fiction
out of privilege in this way, as the more serious and committed form, boldly pushing forward to challenge the unknown and find answers (as opposed to, say, consciously or unconsciously manifesting knee-jerk right-wing American paranoia over enemies within and without—c.f.
The Puppet Masters
), while presenting fantasy as a reactionary enforcer of the social order (as opposed to, say, a cutting critique of the early twentieth century class system and the impact upon it of populist but essentially totalitarian ideologies—c.f.
Titus Groan
).

But let’s just dispense with the weary eye-rolling at the interminable obliviation of the Contingency Slip Fallacy, the Paradigm Shift Caveat, the seductive snake-oil of the ma
rvellous evidenced by their persistence, and the reality of dodgy cock-fluffing that results. One could point again and yet again to the
innumerable
exceptions to the essentialist claptrap…but suppose instead we just strip away the shit and the shinola so quality isn’t even an issue. Suppose we strip away all the clunk-click assemblage of off-the-shelf clichés, the adolescent wank-reveries based on techno-magical MacGuffins, there to be found under either rackspace label. Suppose we put to one side also all that slippery stream of stuff that runs from Ray Bradbury up through writers of the New Wave such as M. John Harrison all the way to Kelly Link, the stuff that is perpetually elided, it seems, for the sake of bogus closed definitions. Suppose we forget for a second that the shitty bulk of all
Science Fiction
,
Fantasy
and
Horror
is, to all intents and purposes, simply formulaic
Modern Pulp
product, while the shinola is, to all intents and purposes, simply strange fiction of a range of complex flavours. Suppose we forget that for a moment.

There
are
two oppositional aesthetics in the field, both products of the Enlightenment and each associated with one side or the other in its most specialised form—the Rationalism associated with
Science Fiction
and the Romanticism associated with
Fantasy
—indexed by the words
hard
and
epic
.
Hard SF
and
Epic Fantasy
—both of these forms have been conventionalised, proscribed and prescribed, such that they constitute valid
Genres
in a way that science fiction and fantasy do not.

Those two grandes dames do make a lot of noise, and people do listen to them. If they don’t and can’t circumscribe science fiction and fantasy, readers and writers do perceive them as the centres of their respective genres, in a sort of “fuzzy set” model where both science fiction and fantasy lack clear boun
daries but each congregates around a different centre. Within that great ongoing drunken wedding party of this vast divided clan, the two of them sit there, Old Granny Campbell and Great Aunt MacDonald, holding court at separate tables, their arms folded, their gazes severe, each with quite distinct notions of how things should be done.

—Use your head, m’boy! says one.

—No, says the other, it’s the heart that matters!

Even if most of the field is intermarried, interbred, even if many of us don’t really give a damn about those dotty old maids with their outmoded ideas on science and magic, they insist that us young ’uns must pick sides. If they and their devotee broods want to feud, I’m loath to come between their bickering by challenging their wild fancies of what conventional template is the Esse
ntial Truth of the Inherent Nature of this or that side of the Inarguable Divide. But with their tribalist dogma corroding discourse with a false dichotomy, I see no option but to take a stand, dismiss all that essentialism for the tosh it is.

Bollocks to it.

The division of aesthetics is there, yes. And the aesthetics those old maids have aligned themselves with are cut deep enough in our culture that the field can’t help but be affected by the real centuries-old rift—that between Rationalism and Romanticism. But that dichotomy is artificial and obsolete, has been from the start. So one group sits at the booths in the SF Café, while the other sits at the tables; one comes and leaves through the Nth Street door, while the other enters and exits through the door onto Avenue X. Who gives a fuck?

That sign which used to read
The Science Fiction Café and Bar
? You know, they tried out a few variants before they settled on that:
The Fantasy and Science Fiction Diner
;
The Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Bistro
;
The Weird Fiction Greasy Spoon
;
The Café Fantastique
;
The Science Fiction / Fantasy Snack Shack
.

The marriage of the two aesthetics, the weird fusion of cuisines, is what made it vital in the first place, a viable concern.

Contrary to the hogwash spouted by our Grumpy Old Gits, Great-Uncles Campbell and MacDonald—changing up with a gender flip for equality’s sake—the feud has little to do with the novum versus the chimera, and sod all to do with engagement versus escapism. Or to lay bare the sweeping hauteur on one side, it has sod all to do with some nobly intrepid essence to the mob of fictions grouped under one banner versus some whipping boy of an Othered opposite onto which one projects the grave sins, false and real, one is demonstrably in denial of: the sensational(ist) relish of incredible and/or marvellous strangeness as an end in itself, which is a phantom sin of neurotic intellectualism anyway; the craven brutality of will-to-power wet dream, which is all too real on both sides. This is to say, collapsing all fantasy past even fantasia to an imaginary
Fantasy
is a shameless smokescreen.

At its depths, you see, the division is a direct analogue of that between the
Romantic
and the
Neo-Classical
movements in painting, that schism in post-Renaissance art, that sifting of the aesthetic techniques of broad-brushed Rembrandts and tight-lined Raphaels, of airy Titians and earthy Brueghels, these techniques born from a new world of new technologies and new politics—oil-based paints, burgermeister patrons, a world where even if the subjects weren’t new—Vermeer painting a cleaning lady—the approaches were. This schism resulted in Jacques-Louis David on the one hand and Eugène Delacroix on the other, in
Neo-Classicism
with its emphasis on the ordered and
Romanticism
with its emphasis on the sublime. It is this same division that, in the marketing category of
Science Fiction
/
Fantasy
, where the reality of marriage is indisputable, gives us the conflicting emphases on futurology and fantasia, the aesthetic of the logical and the aesthetic of the sublime.

In writing, that
Romantic
idealisation of the sublime gives us the archetypal flights of fancy, rakish wanderers, rebel poets and all the epic wildernesses we will eventually see in
Epic Fantasy
, while the
Neo-Classical
idealisation of order gives us the novel as social study, as empirical observation, and all the solemn restraint we will eventually see in
Hard SF
. Passion and Reason—the prevailing themes of the Enlightenment, the Age of Revolution. Both Delacroix and David painted scenes from the French Revolution—
Liberty Leading the People
, and
The Death of Marat
. These paintings illustrate the difference of the two aesthetics rather neatly.

There was a third aesthetic however that developed in the dialogue between these—the modernism (or modernity) of Caravaggio, who was fusing
Romantic
chiaroscuro and
Neo-Classical
formality long before these terms were even in use, who painted sublimely ordered scenes, who used a dead whore dragged from the river as his Magdalene, thieves and peasants for his saints. His work is fiercely passionate and coldly reasoned all at once. A pretty boy Bacchus, in a Caravaggio painting, is at once the Greek god himself and an urban hustler from the streets. Caravaggio plays the sublime and the logical off against each other. The sublime is Yeats’s “terrible beauty,” born in the collision of monstrum and numina, but Caravaggio comes to it as anatomist, rendering the wild passion of a decapitation in the most coolly ordered composition.

A thoroughly modern molly, Caravaggio in his work embodies the re-scaling that was going on, the re-evaluation of God and Nature and Human
ity’s relationship to them both. The first modern(ist) painter, he is distinct from his Renaissance forebears in the sheer humanism of his work, and distinct from the schismatics who follow, never surrendering to the idealisations that set the
Romantics
and the
Neo-Classicists
at each others’ throats. He leaves it to the
Romantics
to blather on about the worth of bold colour over clean line, leaves it to the
Neo-Classicists
to witter on about the value of clean line over bold colour. Passion versus Reason—the world of Western Art spends centuries bickering over which is better, centuries of Royal Academies and revolutionary outsiders, of worthy High Art and vulgar Low Art, of intellectualist Literature and sensationalist Genre…and somewhere along the way that hoary old argument of Reason / Passion ends up in
Science Fiction
/
Fantasy
. As if that’s all there is. As if there’s scientifically rigourous rationalism or weirdly wild romanticism, and ne’er the twain shall meet.

—Fuck that shit, says Caravaggio.