What an oddity this book is. Tinniswood was, in his day, a quite successful comic novelist, writing mostly in Northern-English realist mode. He also adapted some of his books into fairly big-time TV comedy dramas. Perhaps his biggest hit was I Didn’t Know You Cared which ran for four BBC series from 1975–79: an ensemble piece about a large and varied Yorkshire family, character-based comedy and local colour. My father still sometimes wheels out one of the show’s catch-phrases: deaf old Uncle Staveley’s “I heard that! Pardon?” Tinniswood had other TV successes, several long-running radio drama series, and also wrote a great many cricket-related stories: Tales From A Long Room (1981) was the first of nine such collections. He died in 2003.

The Stirk of Stirk is an entirely uncharacteristic Tinniswood. It’s a kind of fantasy novel set in a version of medieval England. The titular character is a Scottish warrior-nobleman, stern and unbending; he rides about with two companions, a dwarf with an enormous head who appears, from his dialogue, to be Welsh and a gigantic Black man who is a congeries of ghastly racist stereotypes: physically strong, hyper-sexualised, none-too-bright and prone to calling the Stirk of Stirk ‘bass’ and saying things like ‘man, man, what’s this?’ and ‘you idle cotton-pickin’ doggone sonofabitch’ and ‘oh, baby, yipperooooooo!’ These three are, in effect, bounty hunters, searching for Robin Hood, who has a price on his head — they find him almost at once, an elderly, miserable and utterly clapped-out geezer, living with ‘Maid Marion’, his young catamite. Unlike the monstrous racism of the Giant’s character, Tinniswood doesn’t indulge in as much homophobic tittering at this circumstance as I might have expected. He does, however, give us great scads of unreconstructed 1970s sexism: busty women of various kinds lubriciously described in various states of undress and ravishment. The style is dialogue heavy, a cascade of short, often one-sentence paragraphs, peppered with repetition and occasionally with arch narratorial interjections. It looks like this:

And sometimes, I’m sorry to say, like this:

My mother, who had I think several of Tinniswood’s regular novels, bought the paperback of this sometime in the late 1970s, which is when I first read it. I suppose I did so because at that stage — I was, twelve, maybe? — I was an obsessive reader of Tolkien and his imitators, and it looked like a Fantasy novel. It is a Fantasy novel too, although of a very different stripe to the standard commercial post-Tolkien heroic gubbins with which I was familiar.

The thing is, bits of this novel have, for whatever reason stayed with me. Here’s one: the Stirk, his companions and Robin Hood and Marion (now their prisoners) are stranded in a snowstruck wood: the dwarf finds some hibernating hedgehogs, lights a fire, rolls the beasts into balls of mud and bakes them in the flames — when the mud has hardened he cracks each ball open, thereby breaking off the spines embedded in the mud, revealing the hedgehogs’ well-cooked flesh inside — everybody cries with delight at how delicious this meal is. For whatever reason, it’s a little scene that has lodged itself in my head. Some of the sex stayed with me, too (I was at an impressionable age) but the main thing that has never left me is the novel’s surreal ending.

So, the Stirk and his companions, after various peripatetic adventures involving sinister monks, strange beasts, violent Vikings, shapeshifting nuns etc, are captured by the evil Sir Ogden De Mobberley. He tortures them and then ties them to posts in his castle’s arena where they will be killed by a gigantic, malevolent red bull. But the Black Man saves the day, and this is how:

A hideous horrendous howl came from the throat of the giant.

His eyes rolled. His head tossed from side to side.

His eyes rolled. His head tossed from side to side.

A scream. A shriek …

Everyone in the castle froze.

Motionless. Rigid. Mouths open. Locked.

And bound to the stake the giant writhed.

He thrashed. He squirmed. He screamed.

And from his great pink gash of a mouth there flew a crow.

And another.

And more. And more and more and more.

Soon the sky was filled with enormous monstrous black crows, which grew larger as every second passed.

They blacked out the sun.

Pitch blackness in the castle.

Total darkness over the surrounding lands.

Time stopped. [186]

The Stirk and his companions escape under cover of this darkness. But the sheer oddity of this scene, entirely unprepared-for in the earlier sections of the novel, really lodged in my imagination.

Anyway, I was writing a History Fantasy recently (now published! available in all good bookshops etc) , and remembered this novel. Curious, especially since it is as unlike the mainstream of post-Tolkien Fantasy tradition as it is unlike the Pratchettian comic-Fantasy mode, I picked up a copy for peanuts on eBay (ridiculous how cheap old books are nowadays) and re-read it. In many ways this was a disappointing experience: the unleavened racism and sexism have aged catastrophically, and the book seems, on a reread, lesser than my inchoate memory of it. But the strange potency of that denouement, the crows flying out of the black man’s mouth, still has its power, I think. I didn’t, in the end, include any mention of it in my History, mind.

I also tweeted some thoughts, having finished the book.

The Stirk of Stirk (1974) was originally published in Adam’s Notebook on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

:1:

Is there anything the novel can’t do?

Since I write novels, I’m predisposed to want to answer that question hopefully. But I do wonder. The question, why hasn’t there been a novel about …?, whether implicitly or explicitly framed, suggests the form could tackle anything. Why hasn’t anybody written a whodunit set in the Hittite Empire? Why hasn’t somebody novelised Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding? Should I write an 80,000-word novel-version of St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul? And indeed, beyond the ‘should I?’ is the deeper question: ‘can I’? Is it even possible? Maybe there are some things fundamentally immiscible with the form of the novel.

For all its contemporary artistic dominance (the novel bestrode the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries like a colossus and although it has ceded its dominance to screen narrative nowadays, these newer forms — cinema, and latterly TV — have appropriated many novelistic features to their art) — for all, I say, its contemporary dominance the novel is a relatively recent arrival. Prose romances stretch back to the Ancient Greeks, but ‘the novel’ is a basically 18th- and 19th-century development, and although it has now spread globally it still manifests a particular, European, bourgeois-Protestant logic.

Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel is half a century old now, and whilst there are reasons to be dissatisfied with it (especially its near total neglect of female writers) Watt’s fundamental thesis remains (I think) sound: viz., that ‘the distinctive literary qualities of the novel’ relate directly to ‘those of the society in which it began and flourished’, and that it’s a form that rises in step with changes in the reading public, of the rise of economic individualism, and of the ‘spread of Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist or Puritan forms’ [Watt, 7, 60]. It starts, in other words, as a bourgeois mode of art that sells to a rising middle-class, focusing on things that mattered to them and reflecting their values back. So: individualized, self-reliant characters. So: detailed descriptions of material possessions (houses, furniture, clothes etc), and a particular emphasis on courtship narratives as framed in terms of prosperity. So also: the mode’s hospitality to Bildungsroman, a spiritualisation of economic growth and return on investments. Students are, in my experience, sometimes hostile to Watt’s thesis because they are disinclined to ‘reduce’ such human experiences as ‘love’ and ‘spiritual growth’ to socio-economic bases in this manner. To such people I would say: suck it.

If this argument is correct then we might expect the novel, as a form, to work for some things better than others; and we might even argue that there are some things that the novel is just really poor at capturing. And rather than continuing to talk in these windy generalisations I’m going to ask a specific question: can the novel do tragedy? It’s clearly, of course, possible to write a novel in which characters suffer and die, and even to reproduce, should you be so minded, the lineaments of a Sophoclean or Shakespearian play in prose; but does tragedy, as tragedy, work in the novel? This seems to me at once a question about the specific form of the novel and a question about our larger cultural addiction to happy endings and disinclination to follow the pity and the terror to its logical catharsis-end (The Lion King is Hamlet, yes; but it’s Hamlet-With-A-Happy-Ending, which is in a very large sense to miss the point of Hamlet). Terry Eagleton agrees with Henri Peyre that the novel as a mode simply isn’t hospitable to tragedy:

A tragic theatre bound up with the despotic absolutism, courtly intrigue, traditional feuds, rigid laws of kinship, codes of honour, cosmic-world-views and faith in destiny gives way to the more rational, hopeful, realist, pragmatic ideologies of the middle class. What rules now is less fate than human agency … The public realm of tragedy, with its high-pitched rhetoric and fateful economy, is abandoned for the privately consumed, more expansive, ironic, everyday language of prose fiction. And this … is certainly a loss: some critics, as Henri Peyre suggests, blame the death of tragedy on the novel, which “captured the essentials of tragic emotion, while diluting and often cheapening it.” [Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: the Idea of the Tragic (Blackwell 2003), 178]

Eagleton thinks that tragedy qua tragedy depends upon precisely that public, focused, elevated authenticity that has been dissolved away by the privately consumed art of the novel: which is, of course, more expansive, ironic, told in everyday language and concerning ordinary people. Maybe he’s right.

One way to address this question would be to look at a specific case study. OK; but, casting around, it starts to dawn on you (or at least, it did on me) that proper examples are thin on the ground. Perhaps that’s already a kind of confirmation. Richardson’s Pamela is a twisted sort of courtship novel and though laugh-free, and very inadvertently creepy, ends comically in generic terms. Richardson’s slumberously vast Clarissa ends with Clarissa’s death, but I’m not sure we can genuinely make the case that it generates properly tragic momentum. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina lacks the tragic focus of, say, the Antigone, not just because Tolstoy is committed to balancing Anna’s downward path with his account of Levin’s upward one, but because its one main purpose is to create a widescreen portrait of a whole society, which necessarily diffuses the tragic focus we find in Sophocles. I could discuss Thomas Hardy’s Casterbridge mayor, probe his Pure Woman or peer into the obscurity of his Jude (although that Hardy himself abandoned writing novels after this latter and devoted himself to writing poetry suggests that he wasn’t convinced what he’d been doing was really working). But instead I want to say a few things about George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860). I want to concentrate on that novel because it is Eliot’s conscious, deliberate exercise in re-writing Greek tragedy as a contemporary English novel; and because Eliot is a great writer.

:2:

Shall we call The Mill on the Floss a tragedy? It certainly ends unhappily, with the deaths of its two main characters, siblings Maggie and Tom (‘the bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means’ as Stoppard’s Player so pithily puts it in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). And we can go a little deeper. Eliot was a particular fan of Sophocles, and there are several ways in which she set about crafting her novel to transfer, from Greek into English, from drama into this new mode of fiction, a quasi-Sophoclean heft and expressiveness. She particularly loved the Antigone, and we can intuit reasons for that in her private life: openly living with the already-married George Henry Lewes put her beyond the pale of many in polite Victorian society, and her own brother Issac, with whom she had been extremely close as a child, cut off all communication with her. After decades of happiness together, Lewes died in 1878. A couple of years later, in 1880, Eliot married a young admirer called John Cross. Only then, with breathtaking and priggish self-satisfaction, did her brother re-open communications with his sister. The pompous little letter he wrote to her is in the BL now:

So, yes: we can see why Sophocles’ great play, with its potent swirl of pseudo-erotic connection between sister and brother superseding the conventions of society at large (even unto death) and its portrait of a wilful individual woman following her heart rather than giving-in to the pressures of convention, spoke so directly to Eliot. She often wrote about it. In her ‘The Antigone and its Moral’ [The Leader (March 29, 1856)] she defined the central problem in Sophocles’ play as lying between ‘reverence for the gods’ and ‘the duties of citizenship: two principles, both having their validity, are at war with each’; the conflict between ‘the strength of man’s intellect, or moral sense, or affection’ and ‘the rules which society has sanctioned.’ Her essay draws a general conclusion: ‘whenever man’s moral vision collides with social convention the opposition between Antigone and Creon is renewed.’

There’s a lot to say about Eliot’s preference for Sophocles over Aeschylus and Euripides, but there’s one thing that’s peculiarly relevant to Eliot’s project as a novelist I think, and it goes back to Sophocles’ great innovation in the drama itself: Aeschylus, we’re told, was the first writer to introduce a second actor on stage. Before him plays had been a single actor interacting with the chorus. Sophocles, though, is the first dramatist to introduce a third actor and suddenly, we might say, things start to get interesting. George Eliot, certainly, was fascinated by the dramatic, ethical and expressive possibilities of this triangulation, and it is the fundamental interpersonal structure of The Mill on the Floss: Maggie Tulliver, her older brother Tom and their father; Maggie, Tom and little Lucy (whom, in a fit of childish jealousy, Maggie pushes in the mud); Maggie, Tom and sensitive, hunchback Philip Wakem, at least until their father’s ruination at the hands (as Tom sees it) of Philip’s lawyer father makes him put an end to Maggie and Philip’s burgeoning relationship. Then, as the novel moves into its final straight, the story focuses on Maggie, cousin Lucy and Lucy’s fiancé Stephen Guest, a more conventional love-triangle.

This final situation brings to the fore the main (as it were) triangulation of the novel: one, Maggie; two, the object of her love — the sexual connection she has with Stephen, the spiritual and intellectual connection she has with Philip, and three, her larger context; family, or social, powerful represented by the blood connection she has with Tom. The main theme of the novel, of course, is that Maggie comes into conflict with larger, impersonal but restrictive forces, of economic necessity, gender oppression and, when she runs away with Stephen, moral disapprobation; and this is most forcefully manifested in Tom’s individual disapproval, just as the worst aspect of Eliot’s (patchy, in truth) social ostracism was the way her beloved brother Isaac cut her:

At the center of The Mill on the Floss lies the human dilemma from Sophocles’ Antigone that George Eliot believed to be permanent: the conflict between the conventions of society and individual judgment. An honourable but conventional person, Tom Tulliver, clashes with his more imaginative sister Maggie over these opposing claims … Tom seeks conventional honor in exacting middle-class conventionalism; but Maggie seeks honor in her ideals of love and charity. In many ways Tom symbolises the Old Law, Maggie the New. [David Moldstad, ‘The Mill on the Floss and Antigone’, PMLA 85 (1970), 527–31]

Eliot also works structurally, as it were: setting out in this novel formally to reproduce the structure of a Greek drama.

So: Attic tragedy follows a particular formal pattern. There’s an opening speech by a character or a god, that sets the scene: this is called the parodos. The bulk of the play consists of stasima (a stasimon is a choral ode) alternating with episodes (epei(s)-odia, between the odes, you see) in which two, or in later tragedy three, actors interact with each other and with the chorus. Things end with an exodos.

How many episodes? In Greek drama there could be as few as three, or as many as six. In Seneca and Roman tragedy, largely copied from the Greek, the number of episodes was mostly five, which is where Renaissance theatre derives its convention that a play should have five acts; but Eliot is very particularly not copying Shakespeare or even Seneca, but instead going back to the Sophoclean source. So: Floss has a parodos in its first chapter, whose narrator (‘I remember those large dipping willows, I remember the stone bridge…’) takes the role of chorus. The episodes of the story are interspersed with stasimon-like commentary by the narrator. There are 6 episodes: [1] Maggie’s youth; [2] the family’s loss of the Mill; [3] Maggie’s friendship with Philip; [4] Tom’s recovery of the fortune, Tulliver horsewhipping Wakem and dying; [5] Maggie’s affair with Stephen; [6] the Flood. In each case Eliot interposes narrative with observation, commentary and sections of what amount, almost, to prose poetry in describing the world she has created. The exodos is Eliot’s ‘Conclusion’.

The Greek element exists beneath the surface, as it were, of a thoroughly and minutely realised English idiom — the same idiom that Eliot would refine and hone, without classical underpinning, ten years later for her Realist masterpiece Middlemarch. In this earlier novel, though, Eliot is doing sophisticated things with the Greek mode of externalising interior states and the novelistic mode of internalising them. So, for example: Philip Wakem is physically deformed, but Mr Tulliver is emotionally or psychologically deformed, a fact reflected in his surname, since the Greek τυλιος, tulios, from τυλη, means ‘lumpy or hunchbacked’. Eliot plays many such Greek games in her novel. ‘St Oggs’ is a perfectly English sounding name, perhaps related (we might think) to the Gaelic ‘Ogham’. Then again we might want to note that the Greek: ὄγκος, ogkos, means ‘pride, self-importance, pretension’, as well as ‘swelling, tumour’. ‘The Floss’ is another very English sounding name, from the Old-English for ‘flow’ [cf the German flosz, river]. But then we turn to the Greek verb φλύω and find that it means ‘to boil over, to bubble up, to overrun’, but also ‘to babble, to fill up with words’, both of which are peculiarly appropriate to this work.

Then again, not every critic has seen Maggie as a straightforward Antigone.

Clearly Maggie shares Antigone’s strong-minded rebellious spirit, and her “sisterly piety”, and she too is torn by opposing principles “at war with each other.” But when we consider Maggie’s case she seems to be divided by principles of a very different kind to those exerting their contrary influence on Antigone. Opposing Maggie’s version of “sisterly piety” and “reverence for the gods” … are not the “duties of citizenship” as for Antigone, but rather other forms of feeling, or in Eliot’s vocabulary, varieties of sympathy: her compassion for Philip Wakem and her passion for Stephen Guest. [Josephine McDonagh, ‘Eliot’s Early Novels’, Levine (ed) The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (2001) 53–4]

‘Maggie’s dilemma,’ argues McDonagh, in a point to which I’ll return in a moment, ‘seems reducible to a conflict not of laws or duties but of feelings, and indeed feelings for opposing men; the father and brother versus the friend and the lover’. It’s interesting, and may or may not be significant, that Mill on the Floss contains no references at all to Antigone. Maybe Eliot felt she didn’t need to spell out explicitly what was so obvious; but that doesn’t seem to have been her practice elsewhere. Take Philip Wakem, the intelligent, sensitive crippled boy whom Maggie rejects (because he’s ugly, and then because her brother tells her to) but whose quiet, empathetic intellect proves essential to Maggie’s own spiritual growth. It seems clear to me that he is called Philip in allusion to Sophocles’ magic cripple Philoctetes; and it seems that way in part because Eliot all but lays it out. When they are still children, Tom injures his foot, and during his convalescence he, Maggie and Philip become close (although after his recovery Tom distances himself from Philip again):

After that, Philip spent all his time out of school-hours with Tom and Maggie. Tom listened with great interest to a new story of Philip’s about a man who had a very bad wound in his foot, and cried out so dreadfully with the pain that his friends could bear with him no longer, but put him ashore on a desert island, with nothing but some wonderful poisoned arrows to kill animals with for food.

“I didn’t roar out a bit, you know,” Tom said, “and I dare say my foot was as bad as his. It’s cowardly to roar.”

But Maggie would have it that when anything hurt you very much, it was quite permissible to cry out, and it was cruel of people not to bear it. She wanted to know if Philoctetes had a sister, and why she didn’t go with him on the desert island and take care of him.

One day, soon after Philip had told this story, he and Maggie were in the study alone together while Tom’s foot was being dressed … “What are you reading about in Greek?” [Maggie] said. “It’s poetry, I can see that, because the lines are so short.”

“It’s about Philoctetes, the lame man I was telling you of yesterday,” he answered, resting his head on his hand, and looking at her as if he were not at all sorry to be interrupted. Maggie, in her absent way, continued to lean forward, resting on her arms and moving her feet about, while her dark eyes got more and more fixed and vacant, as if she had quite forgotten Philip and his book.

“Maggie,” said Philip, after a minute or two, still leaning on his elbow and looking at her, “if you had had a brother like me, do you think you should have loved him as well as Tom?”

Maggie started a little on being roused from her reverie, and said, “What?” Philip repeated his question.

“Oh, yes, better,” she answered immediately. “No, not better; because I don’t think I could love you better than Tom. But I should be so sorry,–so sorry for you.”

Philip colored; he had meant to imply, would she love him as well in spite of his deformity, and yet when she alluded to it so plainly, he winced under her pity. [Mill on the Floss, 2:6]

Poor old Philip! But maybe this sort of textual specificity is not something carried systematically through the novel. Indeed elsewhere Eliot pokes mild fun at Tom’s tutor, the Rev. Mr. Stelling, who ‘was so broad-chested and resolute that he felt equal to anything’ and who was certain he ‘would by and by edit a Greek play, and invent several new readings. He had not yet selected the play, for having been married little more than two years, his leisure time had been much occupied with attentions to Mrs. Stelling; but he had told that fine woman what he meant to do some day, and she felt great confidence in her husband, as a man who understood everything of that sort’ [Floss, 2.1]. This is a dig at scholarship, of course, rather than tragedy as such, but it stages the larger issue: the Rev. Stellings domestic duties, insofar as they come into conflict with his Attic ambition, take precedence. The novel is much more a domestic, private mode than it is a tragic, public one, we might say.

Early in the novel Eliot is explicit on precisely this matter. Young Tom and Maggie are entertaining their younger cousin, pretty little Lucy (who will go on, when grown-up, to plight her troth with handsome Stephen Guest). The kids are supposed to stay in the garden, but Tom wants to look at the pond and leads the two girls astray to see if they can find any water-snakes.

“Here, Lucy!” he said in a loud whisper. Lucy came carefully as she was bidden, and bent down to look at what seemed a golden arrow-head darting through the water. It was a water-snake, Tom told her; and Lucy at last could see the serpentine wave of its body, very much wondering that a snake could swim. Maggie had drawn nearer and nearer; she must see it too, though it was bitter to her, like everything else, since Tom did not care about her seeing it. At last she was close by Lucy; and Tom, who had been aware of her approach, but would not notice it till he was obliged, turned round and said,–

“Now, get away, Maggie; there’s no room for you on the grass here. Nobody asked you to come.”

There were passions at war in Maggie at that moment to have made a tragedy, if tragedies were made by passion only; but the essential τι μέγεθoς which was present in the passion was wanting to the action; the utmost Maggie could do, with a fierce thrust of her small brown arm, was to push poor little pink-and-white Lucy into the cow-trodden mud. [Floss, 1:10]

The Greek, τι μέγεθoς, means ‘that greatness, magnitude’ or ‘necessary sublimity’. Little kids may feel with heroic, or tragic, intensity (do indeed feel, I’d say, with an intensity of which adults are incapable), but they can’t do anything very much, and that means that their little dramas can never be properly tragic. And what Eliot considers true of children, scales in her telling to adults as well. We are not heroes, she says; we are ordinary, middling people. Tragedy does not describe our sorrow, even when that sorrow is very acute. Here is Floss’s narrator on the plight of Tom and Maggie’s father, whose pride and obstinacy bring him to financial ruin, and take somatic form in an apoplexy that leaves him bedridden.

Mr. Tulliver, you perceive, though nothing more than a superior miller and maltster, was as proud and obstinate as if he had been a very lofty personage, in whom such dispositions might be a source of that conspicuous, far-echoing tragedy, which sweeps the stage in regal robes, and makes the dullest chronicler sublime. The pride and obstinacy of millers and other insignificant people, whom you pass unnoticingly on the road every day, have their tragedy too; but it is of that unwept, hidden sort that goes on from generation to generation, and leaves no record, — such tragedy, perhaps, as lies in the conflicts of young souls, hungry for joy, under a lot made suddenly hard to them, under the dreariness of a home where the morning brings no promise with it, and where the unexpectant discontent of worn and disappointed parents weighs on the children like a damp, thick air, in which all the functions of life are depressed; or such tragedy as lies in the slow or sudden death that follows on a bruised passion, though it may be a death that finds only a parish funeral.

Poor old Mr Tulliver, who evokes in us neither pity nor any sort of terror. Perhaps it’s not that Gray’s mute inglorious Milton is denied his public eloquence and glory by the mere happenstance of being born to ordinary parochial life, but rather that ordinary parochialism ontologically contradicts greatness as such — not that Gray’s villager might have written Paradise Lost if only things had gone a little different to him, but rather than a Milton who doesn’t speak gloriously isn’t Milton in any meaningful sense at all. Indeed, isn’t it within the bounds of possibility that Gray is celebrating, rather than lamenting, this silent ingloriousness? The next line mentions Gray’s parochial Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood: isn’t it better to be laid in a country graveyard without blood on your hands than with? (Pericles’ on his deathbed declared his proudest boast was that ‘no Athenian ever had to put on mourning because of me’). Maybe it’s not the novel form, or even the larger social ethos, that makes tragedy such an ill fit to Eliot’s art. Maybe it’s that the lines of force of her ethical imagination are always tugging her out of drama as such, away from the conflict, and towards something neither comic nor tragic but rather a sense of the fundamental undisclosure of life as it is lived, and the spiritual benefits of that state. Adam Mars-Jones somewhere says that ‘mourning is a wound that is also somehow an achievement’. He wasn’t talking about tragedy when he said so, but he might as well have been. Tragic drama stages mourning as a mode of ritualised social-religious sublimity, parsing its shattering absences and ruptures into a sort of transcendent achievement. But Eliot, however hard she tried to capture a Sophoclean grandeur and depth in The Mill on the Floss, was working against the grain of her genius. At her best she understands not that grief is not an achievement, but rather than achievement itself is a kind of chimera, that the best things we can do as human beings, things to do with kindness and connection and unobtrusiveness, are actually pointed, forceful, marvellous unachievements. When she writes novels — even when, as in this case, she writes a tragic novel — her aim is to capture the wisdom of the sort of being-in-the-world that evades the drama of tragedy and the melodramatic eventfulness of fiction.

At the end it’s the river that is the uncertain quantity, flowing through a pastoral landscape for most of this novel only to rise up, a deus ex machina (or deus ex fluvio) to wrap-up the plot with preternatural abruptness. By the time she came to writing her greatest novel, Middlemarch, she knew better, and specified breaking the power of the river as a precondition for her heroine’s happy blankness: Dorothea’s energy ‘like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’

Tragic Floss was originally published in Adam’s Notebook on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The buzz on del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022) was very promising (Mark Kermode thought it a near flawless five-star masterpiece) so I sat down to watch with high hopes. Those hopes, however, were not fulfilled. Disappointment!

Hi diddle dee-dee, this movie’s not for me. I thought it dreary, plodding, ponderous, draggingly slow. The animation is painstaking and very detailed but lacks sprightliness or pep. The characters move and interact as if pushing through transparent treacle, every last gesture and twist and flick over-telegraphed. The design has moments of striking Del-Toroesque Goth-appeal, but a movie cannot exist purely on its design. What about everything else? The voice acting is underpar: David Bradley plays Geppetto with an unlikeable querulousness; Christoph Waltz delivers a haphazard, overwrought performance as the villainous Volpe; and whenever Ewan McGregor’s Sebastian J. Cricket was on screen I found myself thinking back to Toast of London, in the recording booth, with Clem Fandango on the other side of the glass: ‘that’s great Ewan, really great: could you do it again, make it a little more likeable? Great — and again please? One more time please. OK we’ll go again.’ Fire the nuculire weapons!

The attempts at humour, without exception, misfire: a problem both with the conception of the comic moments themselves (the cricket is squashed! again! and again!) and with the timing of them. The timing is out for most of the story beats, actually. Also the plot makes little sense. Do I apply a hobgoblin-of-little-minds criterion of pedantic consistency to a fairy tale, though? Is that really what I’m doing? Say it’s not so! But a story needs to have a degree of coherence, a logic, even if it’s not the logic of verisimilitude. My sense with this film is that the story is never quite sure how Pinoccho is supposed to figure.

So: at first the pious Catholic 1930s Italian villagers are convinced that Pinocchio is possessed by the devil. Then, in a trice, he is integrated into the local school system, so much that the local fascist podestà comes round to Gepetto’s house in person to rebuke him for the lad’s truancy — after missing just one day of school! So why didn’t Pinocchio get to school? It was because, on his way there, he was tempted away by evil circus-svengali Count Volpe — it seems Pinocchio is at one and the same time both an unremarkable ligneous boy in his hometown and a startling freak-show marvel whom people will pay top dollar just to watch. Odd, that. When Gepetto and the podestà both try to retrieve the boy from this new life of circus performing Volpe shows-off the signed contract. Except that Pinocchio (who hasn’t ever been to school, remember) can’t write, so has instead drawn a smiley face at the bottom of the document. This is treated as legally binding, with Volpe angrily threatening to bring his lawyers down on everyone, although one wonders under what provision of contract law such a document, doodled upon by an illiterate minor, would be binding. It hardly matters, anyway, because the plot then guilliotines this entire narrative development by having Pinocchio abruptly run over and killed by a lorry. He spends a little time in an archly-conceived, plum-coloured afterlife, all dark purple sand, coffin-clad cliff-faces and skeletal rabbits playing cards, ruled over by a mauve sphinx (this character is another iteration of the blue fairy: the movie’s one and only female character). It turns out that Pinny is immortal and so back to Italy he goes.

Discovering that the boy cannot die, the podestà gets very excited: put him in the army, he cries, to fight for the patria fascista! Does he go to Gepetto and say: “old man, make me an army of such unkillable soldati”? He does not! Instead he recruits Pinocchio into youth camp, alongside his own son, trains him for a bit and then, randomly, instructs his son (who has befriended the puppet) to shoot him with a pistol and kill him. Seems a waste. I suppose his idea is to, I don’t know, toughen-up his boy. But the lad refuses, the podestà is killed by an allied bomb whistling down directly onto his head and the movie lurches into its final act.

Gepetto and Sebastian Cricket have gone in search of Pinocchio and on the way been swallowed by a giant dogfish — a whale in Disney’s version of course, though it’s a huge dogfish in Collodi’s original 1883 novel. In the novel, though, Pinocchio and Geppetto easily escape; this film’s denouement, in which Sebastian hatches an elaborate plan to climb out through the fish’s ‘blowhole’ (a stoma that squalus acanthias, being a species of fish rather than mammals, does not possess) draws on Disney rather than Collodi.

Pinocchio blows-up the dogfish and dies, which is no biggie since he is immortal; but — oh no! — back in the mortal world Geppetto is drowning. P is told that if he wants to go straight back to life, instead of waiting the arbitrarily imposed ten minutes (or whatever) lag-time, then he must sacrifice his immortality. He gladly does this, goes back, saves his father and dies in the process. Except that then he’s brought back to life anyway. It’s a confusing zig-zag that is trying to tug your heartstrings, but which just leaves you baffled.

Then there are the songs. The songs are awful. Utterly unmemorable. Impossible to imagine any one of these smeary dollops being remembered 80 days from now, never mind 80 years — the way ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’, ‘Give A Little Whistle’, ‘Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee’ and ‘I’ve Got No Strings’ are still universally recognised and loved.

Bringing in Disney, of course, tips my hand. It is unfair, and arguably point-missing, to compare this movie to to the peerless Disney Pinocchio (1940) — Del Toro is clearly, indeed rather clangingly, not trying to remake the beloved Disney original (unlike the dire Roger Zemeckis retread). That’s fair enough. My problem is not that Del Toro’s approach is stylistically and tonally unlike Disney’s (although the animation certainly misses the sprightliness and life Disney’s team achieved), or that he has moved the story from a nonspecific 19th-C milieu to a specific, fascist-Italian 1930s/40s one. It is that his film creaks, lumbers, misses, bores, outstays its welcome. That it doesn’t work.

‘But,’ you will say, ‘how can you nitpick and picknit at the plot logic of Del Torro’s movie and overlook the daftness of the original plot?’ I agree, the plot of the 1940 movie is just as illogical in its way as this 2022 one. But I would argue that the aporiae in the 1940 movie’s plotting are, actually, expressive of the movie’s key concerns, in a way that isn’t true of the 2022 film.

For example: in the 1940 movie, naughty boys, including P., are inveigled by a mysterious ‘Coachman’ to voyage to Pleasure Island. Here they are indulged with champagne, cigars, all the food they can eat, gaming tables, and an island-ful of fine things for them to vandalise — to smash, wreck and ruin. The Mona Lisa is there! And those naughty boys have defaced it!

But it’s all a ruse: there is some magic on the island that means, the more the boys misbehave, the quicker they turn into jackasses: literal donkeys, which the Coachman then ships off and sells, to hard labour in salt mines and suchlike.

But think about this for a moment, under rubric of a business proposition. How much does it cost the Coachman to fit-out Pleasure Island? Never mind the endless booze and cigars, food, sundry costs of portage, the labour required to herd and ship-out the finished-product donkeys. What about the paintings? In 1962, the Louvre insured the Mona Lisa for $100 million (about a billion dollars in 2022 cash). Long story short: there really has to be a cheaper way to produce jackasses, so as to sell them on at profit.

And of course there is! It’s called ‘sex’. You get a mummy donkey and a daddy donkey together and, via a special kind of donkey cuddle, a baby donkey gets born. Certainly cheaper, and therefore more profitable, than the Coachman’s method.

Of course I’m being deliberately obtuse. We are not expected to read this sequence literally. It’s a piece of fabulation, talking metaphorically rather than mimetically: it’s saying ‘allow a boy to behave badly and follow his bestial instincts and he will turn into a jackass’. That’s a way of telling a moral story, in a dramatic and visually arresting way. You could make the same argument about the oddities of plotting in the Del Toro movie.

But I’d argue the 1940 Pinocchio is doing something else with the Pleasure Island sequence. It hinges on the question above. Isn’t there a cheaper, more efficient way of ‘making’ donkeys? Obviously there is. Sex. But in the world of Pinocchio sex is precisely what is missing, what is taboo or interdicted — because it’s a children’s film, because it’s a war film and the men are all away in the army separated from their wives, or for deeper reasons. Something is broken in the logic of fertility in this colourful animated land. A cool blue-coloured fairy gifts life to a puppet (because that’s what women can do) and it comes alive, sort-of. We could say: Geppetto has made a son the hard way, constructing it like Frankenstein did his monster, rather than the easy way (I say easy: when the two of us made our children, it was my wife who did all the heavy lifting of course). But Geppetto doesn’t circumvent ‘nature’ out of hubristic arrogance, the way Frankenstein does. He does it because … well, why does he do it? Because he lives in a land without women and has no alternative, perhaps? This, it seems to me, is part of the pointedness of the movie: it is, in its brilliant, colourful, vividly-sung, often hilarious way, a kind of “Waste Land”, a film about a kind of desolation: the old world having died — to quote another famous Italian — and the new world yet to be born, we find ourselves in an interregnum in which a great variety of grotesque and wonderful symptoms appear.

What’s the equivalent for the Del Torro Pinocchio? Why the clonking relocation to Fascist Italy, turning the movie into an epigone Pan’s Labyrinth? Del Toro is, in part, saying: fascism is bad. Which, I have to agree, is true, for fascism is indeed bad; although it’s a truth not very eloquently or resonantly expressed by this movie. What else? Is the point that fascism treats human beings like puppets, disposable, controllable, mere things? Is that it? Or that fascism is a kind of malign circus act, a puppet show, all outward display and inward emptiness?

I daresay I’m both overreading and under-praising this film. Lots of people I know, whose opinions I respect, really love it. Still: it’s a Pinocchi-no from me.

‘Pinocchio’ (2022: directed by Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson) was originally published in Adam’s Notebook on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Since faster-than-light travel is impossible, and the stars are so very, very far away, any craft making interstellar journeys will take many centuries to get where it is going. If they are crewed, then generations of people will be born aboard these ships, live and die and be in turn superseded by younger generations. This standard trope of SF is predicated upon the unbending realities of physics.

But who was the first to hypothesise a ‘generation starship’? Wikipedia says this:

Rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard was the first to write about long-duration interstellar journeys in his The Ultimate Migration (1918). In this he described the death of the Sun and the necessity of an ‘interstellar ark’. The crew would travel for centuries in suspended animation and be awakened when they reached another star system. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, considered a father of astronautic theory, first described the need for multiple generations of passengers in his essay, ‘The Future of Earth and Mankind’ (1928), a space colony equipped with engines that travels thousands of years which he called ‘Noah’s Ark’.

Clute, Nicholls and Langford go further back:

Tsiolkovsky’s ideas … were anticipated as a passing fancy, though with a more realistic timescale, in John Munro’s A Trip to Venus (1897): “… with a vessel large enough to contain the necessaries of life, a select party of ladies and gentlemen might start for the Milky Way, and if all went right, their descendants would arrive there in the course of a few million years.”

But 1897 doesn’t take us far enough back into the early history of this idea, I think. Here’s James E Lake’s Bishop Foster’s Heresy (1889), imagining a future-fleet voyaging out into the interstellar spaces for ‘millions of years’:

Look out from our flying ship as we sail out upon the universal sea of space. We turn our faces toward the sun, whose bright beams shed such a wonderful sea of material glory over us, that all nature is hid save this effulgence and our own ship … we begin to look out through the evening twilight upon the vast ocean of trackless ether, upon which we are sailing, and now thousands, yea, millions of ships like our own heave in sight … Come with me as this fleet of ships sails on its great voyage for a million years, and ask what mighty fleets are these that accompany us over this infinite sea! Hail, thou voyagers over this unsounded sea! Hail Arcturus! Hail Polaris! [154–55]

The scale of the cosmos had been understood for a while by this point, and it is a natural extrapolation from that knowledge to speculate how long it would take for a craft to traverse such distances, and what that would imply for the crew. H F Warren’s Recreations in Astronomy (1879) included this intriguing Space 1999-avant la lettre conception:

If our earth were suddenly to dissolve its allegiance to the king of day, and attempt a flight to the North Star (the centre of the Circumpolar Constellation), and should maintain its flight of one thousand miles a minute, it would fly away toward Polaris for thousands of thousands of years, till a million years had passed away before it reached that northern dome of the distant sky and gave its new allegiance to another sun. The sun it had left behind it would gradually diminish till it was small as Arcturus, thus small as could be discerned by the naked eye, until at last it would finally fade out in utter darkness long before the new sun was reached. [72]

There are many late 19th-c speculation about the distances of such voyages, actually.

The First Generation Starship was originally published in Adam’s Notebook on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status — all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing)” [J G Ballard, interview in Penthouse, September 1970]

Here’s my theory of Ballard’s Crash (1973): the true inheritor of Ballard’s perverse autovision is George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977)

No?

Writing this novel exhausted Ballard. In 1974 he described Crash as a ‘deranging book to write … I sort of hated myself as I wrote the book because I felt I was dealing in … deadly things, like a sort of arms salesman. Much of the book was morally highly objectionable, there’s n doubt about that.’ It is certainly a book structured around a particular repetitive monotony, in which great scads of descriptive prose not only itemise components of the interiors of cars and human sexual organs in various juxtapositions but itemise the same interiors of cars and human sexual organs over and over. It really is remarkable, re-reading Crash, how colourlessly repetitive it is, as text. The narrator, ‘James Ballard’, tells a story about bent desire: alienated from his beautiful wife Catherine, Ballard is involved in an automobile crash on the Westway, injuring himself and accidentally killing the driver of the other car. This event propels him, and the novel, through a sequence of Sadean sexual permutations: sex in cars with the widow of the man he killed, with his own wife and with the obsessed Dr. Robert Vaughan (‘former TV-scientist, turned nightmare angel of the expressways’) who drives around photographing car-crashes, crashing his own car, shagging prostitutes in cars and car-wrecks and generally pursuing his erotic life-goal, which is to die in a sexualised head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor. (Sidebar: I wonder, given that Ballard was happy to include his own name, his girlfriend’s name, and to namecheck Elizabeth Taylor, why he decided to add the extra ‘A’ to the ‘Robert Vaughn’ name: a designedly Scarlet Letter perhaps?)

Anyway: the novel starts with Vaughan’s death, crashing off an overpass into the roof of an airport bus passing below, killing many of the passengers. Then it rewinds the story to trace Ballard’s own crash, the way it reignites his sex-life with his wife Catherine, his erotic adventures with the crippled Helen (widow of the man his crash killed) and various prostitutes, and with Vaughan, and finally back to the starting point with Vaughan’s death. Mostly the novel is great chunks of prose like this:

I looked at the cabin around me. This small space was crowded with angular control surfaces and rounded section of human bodies interacting in unfamiliar junctions, like the first act of homosexual intercourse inside an Apollo capsule. The volumes of Helen’s thighs, pressing against my hips, her left fist buried in my shoulder, her mouth grasping at my own, the shape and moisture of her anus as I stroked it with my ring fingers, were each overlaid by the inventories of a benevolent technology — the moulded binnacle of the instrument dials, the jutting carapace of the steering column shroud, the extravagent pistol grip of the handbrake. I felt the warm vinyl of the seat beside me, and then stroked the damp aisle of Helen’s perineum. Her hand pressed against my right testicle. The plastic laminates around me, the colour of washed anthracite, were the same tones as her pubic hairs parted at the vestibule of her vulva. The passenger compartment enclosed us like a machine generating from our sexual act an homunculus of blood, sealant and engine coolant. [Crash, 62–3]

Lots and lots of stuff like this, in fact: on and on it goes, capturing the fundamentally machinic monotony of porn without generating any erotic affect in the reader (I mean, your mileage may vary I suppose: but … really?) The exigencies of this sexual fetish naturally result in injuries for the participants and the novel lingers as fascinatedly on these wounds as on the dissociated sexualised human and car components. Everyone is scarred, some more seriously crippled, and Ballard treats their wounds as signifying marks, a kind of erotic heiroglyphics:

The whiteness of [Vaughan’s] arms and chest, and the scars that marked his skin like my own, gave his body an unhealthy and metallic sheen, like the worn vinyl of the car interior. These apparently meaningless notches on his skin, like the gouges of a chisel, marked the sharp embrace of a collapsing passenger compartment, a cuneiform of the flesh formed by shattering instrument dials, fractured gear levers and parking light switches. Together they described an exact language of pain and sensation, eroticism and desire. I looked down at his penis, wondering if this too was scarred. The glans carried a sharp notch, like a canal for surplus semen of vaginal mucus. What part of some crashing car had marked this penis, and in what marriage of his orgasm and a chromium instrument head? [Crash, 71]

On and on it goes, repeated tableaux of sex-acts, semen, mucus and blood spattering across instrument panels, leaking across the fluted ribbing of the vinyl upholstery, cars crashing and humans orgasming. Sex and cars, speed and excitement, coming and death.

There are lots of things we could say about this (in its day, and possibly even now) shocking novel. We could talk about its deliberate aesthetic strategies of uglification, its endless parade of increasingly strained similes, its adoption of the strategies of nineteenth-century realism (those Zola-esque blocks of text itemising every little thing in the service of a representational verisimilitude, except in this case the things beind itemised are all the same things: sexualised human body parts and the elements of car interiors). We could address Ballard’s slightly eerie successes as a prophet: how his ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968) anticipated Reagan’s actual rise to the Presidency, how strangely Crash itself anticipates the death of Princess Diana and the bizarre eroticised spasm of national-collective grief that particular car-crash entailed. And this brings me to my main point. Because I think Ballard’s real prescience was in anticipating Star Wars.

This is a nonsense, of course. Crash is a violent and sexually-explicit avant-garde experiment designed to alienate its readers, claustrophobic and disturbing. Star Wars is an expansive and reassuring family-friendly adventure-entertainment about the forces of good defeating the forces of evil. They couldn’t be further apart. Could they?

Well, alright. Whether you agree with my argument will depend, I think, on whether you’re prepared to accept my initial premise: that Star Wars is a movie about cars.

Of course, nor all the space-ships in the Star Wars universe are cars. The imperial dreadnoughts, for instance, are on a much larger scale: battleships and aircraft carriers in space.

But many of the spaceships in Star Wars are, in effect, space cars: sporty-little numbers with seating for you and a friend, able to zip about the cosmos to take you from one adventure to another.

In this I see a palpable continuity between the Lucas of Star Wars (1977) and his previous movie, American Graffiti (1973). That Oscar-nominated film is a hymn, really, to the joys of automated youth, how much fun it is to hang out with your mates, and how much that fun is enhanced if you have cars.

Star Wars is basically the same movie, with Modesto California swapped-out for The Galaxy and an extra layer of cosmic Good/Evil bolted onto the plotting. Otherwise it’s still about how much fun you can have hanging out with your friends, and how much that fun is enhanced if you have space-cars. Or, in the case of the Millennium Falcon, if you have a beat-up old space-campervan.

This doesn’t, in itself, make the connection between Crash and Star Wars I realise. But the thing is: it’s not just 1977’s Star Wars. It’s all of the Star Wars films. The key features of Ballard’s vision is not just that it eroticises the excitement of violent and sometimes deadly car-crashes; it’s that it does so in a perversely repetitive and monotonous manner, driving (as it were) on and on at its simple central conceit, punctuating more-or-less drab accounts of characters driving around West London with the orgasmic intensities of car crashes. The neurotic, lady-macbeth-endlessly-washing-her-hands element of this is not accidental; it’s a large part of what Ballard is getting at. Machines are good at repeating the same motions over and over; and Ballard is fascinated not just by the intensities but by the machinic repetitiveness of sex, the obsessive over-and-over-ness of it.

And Star Wars is not just the one movie. It’s The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) and The Phantom Menace (1999) and Attack of the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005) and ten thousand novelisations and fan fictions, and multiple video games, and The Clone Wars (2008–2014) and The Force Awakens (2015) and Rogue One (2016) and The Last Jedi (2017) and Solo (2018) and Rise of Skywalker (2019). It’s the Disney channel absolutely stuffed to the gunnels with spin-off Star Wars content, extruded in-universe product. It’s the same story, told over and over again with a compulsive urge to return to key fetish objects, light-sabers, droids, spaceships, costumes, and various cathectically-freighted moments and actions. It’s the same pattern endlessly repeated and with only trivial variation, drab exposition and travel interspersed with the death-fixated orgasmic excitement of gigantic explosions, like Ballard driving along the M4 looking for the next explosive, orgasmic crash.

The erotic fixations of the Star Wars story express a notable consistency: the pretty-faced, dark-haired, boyish-looking female lead; the fresh-faced young blonde boy (or his Jungian animus, the intense-faced young dark-haired boy) male lead, the two placed in multiple combinations with one another such that their sexual energy is always mediated by technology — a technology hyperbolically both automatic and mobile and therefore automobilic. We could peg this as a failure in diversity of representation, but it’s not in the nature of erotic fixation to express diversity. It would hardly be a fixation if it did. And there’s no question as to what she looks like, the girl Star Wars wants to fuck:

On and on it goes, detailing fandom’s fetish objects as intently and monotonously as Ballard ever does. More, these movies insist with a perverse intensity that these somatic couplings result in physical injury and mutilation, just like Crash. Really, the longer this series goes on the more struck I am by its apotemnophilic emphasis. So many amputations!

So many prostheses, so many scars worn proudly like Ballard’s erotic cunieform, the marks of the passionate, tech-mediated connection of sexually-attracted individuals:

What’s really remarkable here is the way Ballard’s perverse portrait of repetitive techno-eroticism has been recruited by Lucas and his heirs to power a global franchise worth billions of dollars. Ballard, were he alive, wouldn’t be surprised that there’s such a huge planetwide appetite for all this. From the vanilla perversity of Luke and Leia’s incestuous kiss (presumably to-be-repeated in the next film, as Rey and Kylo Ren are revealed to be sister and brother) to the larger scale psycho-sexual intrafamilial pathologies of this intensely repetitive, techno-somatic visual text, we can look past the surface differences and accept how intensely Ballardian Star Wars really is.

Star Wars: Crash 2 was originally published in Adam’s Notebook on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every review everywhere all-of-them agrees on the excellence of this movie, and I’m certainly not going to disagree. It is (maybe) a tad over-long, and in particular the penultimate staircase-up-to-the-bagel-of-doom sequence is over-extended. But the film’s two hours ten minutes running time is so restless, so crammed with action, ideas, visual wit and panache, and the cast do such a great job delivering the material, that the time fair rushes past. Rushes rather frantically and exhaustingly past. But you certainly won’t be bored. It’s an absolutely spanking movie, sometimes literally so.

Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn Wang, wife, mother and small-businesswoman, is in almost every shot, and the movie really stands or falls (or gongfu-leaps or strikes) on her performance. Fortunately, said performance is amazing — capturing at once Evelyn’s determination, her energy, her querulousness, her exhaustion, her ADHD and her many moods. The movie in effect narrates in exteriorised SFnal mode a woman going through both the breakdown of her marriage and personal psychological collapse, and Yeoh does a compelling job with this story. That said, I thought Stephanie Hsu, playing her daughter Joy, delivered in some ways an even more impressive performance, covering the emotional highs and lows of the role with panache, all the time wearing a series of endearingly bonkers Lady Gaga style costumes, whilst also pulling-off a convincing Gen Z sarcastic-nihilistic mode that speaks effectively to today’s generational divide.

Evelyn runs a coin-op launderette but her tax affairs are in disarray, and the movie opens with her and her wimpy husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) porting a pantechnicon-ful of receipts and loose paper to the IRS office. Here Jamie Lee Curtis’s sinister tax officer is looking to wreck Evelyn’s financial life and repossess her business. But actually unwitting Evelyn is the one hope to defeat a multiverse villain threatening to destroy all realities. In the tax office an alt-reality Waymond from a more macho version of the multiverse does a Morpheus-from-The-Matrix act on her, whereupon the movie explodes into a frantic string of settings and worlds, fists furying and kicks flying, as Evelyn first learns the identity of and then confronts the cosmic menace, the story zipping along on and ornamenting its narrative with a series of brilliant, witty, bizarre and ingenious grace-notes.

The through-line, if we are disposed to stop and isolate it for a moment, is maybe a little pat: the importance of family, respecting your elders, accepting your offspring, all the anti-Seinfeld hugging and learning gubbins. There is perhaps a confusion too, over the movie’s moral: viz., that Evelyn has to ‘let her daughter go’. This is styled both as a (healthy) acceptance of Joy’s independence and individuality — her gayness, for instance, acknowledgement of which Evelyn initially resists — and as a more psychopathological desire on Joy’s part to commit suicide, to give up and die. For Evelyn to ‘let go’ in the latter sense would be an abdication of her love and duty for her daughter, surely; where ‘letting go’ in the first sense is a healthy and needful part of mutual growth. Eliding these, as the story seems to me to do, flirts with wrongness. But the movie as a whole is such a blast that it hardly matters.

Anyway I’m not really here to review this film, concerning which you will already have heard many good things, and which you’ve probably already seen. Instead I’m interested in the word ‘multiverse’. This is what Clute, Nicholls and Langford’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says about it:

Its best known early use was in an 1895 speech by US philosopher-psychologist William James (1842–1910), collected in his Will to Believe (1897): ‘Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference, a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe.’ This was anticipated by the scientist and science writer William Denovan, who in a published letter contributing to debate over planetary motion in our Solar System asserted (of God) that ‘the Great Mechanic presides over a universe, and not merely a cohering multiverse.’ (22 November 1873 Scientific American).

Michael Moorcock reinvented the word for sf in ‘The Blood Red Game’ (May 1963 Science Fiction Adventures), where it stands for the totality of all possible alternate universes or Parallel Worlds. Placing such worlds in the common framework of the multiverse implies the possibility of contact, interaction and travel between alternate realities or Dimensions. This meaning, reinforced by very frequent restatement in Moorcock’s later sf and even more in his Fantasy, is now commonly used in both sf and sf criticism.

This, I suppose, is the consensus. In the words of Michael Wood: ‘the word “multiverse” was coined by William James in 1895, but he was only talking about the one universe that kept failing to get its act together. (The OED says it was first used in its present sense by Michael Moorcock in 1963.)’ Is this right though?

I’d say the original Jamesian sense had already, before Moorcock, come under the pressure of physicists’ and mathmeticians’ speculations to come to mean something more like the modern sense of the word. J A Kennedy’s The Triuneverse: A Scientific Romance (1912) spins a tale of, as its title suggests, three linked cosmoses. Cosmoi. Cosmim. Whatever the correct plural is. Kennedy’s story starts with Earthly astronomers watching as Mars splits in two, afterwards fragmenting into myriad pieces that swarm out and destroy Jupiter and Saturn. Then the sun explodes. Our heroes escape destruction by diverting through an alternate universe, the ‘infratronic’ (that is, smaller than electronic) world, to arrive eventually at Alpha Centauri where life can begin again.

The term Kennedy brackets under his triuneverse concept is “multiverse”. Indeed the book’s opening chapter is called ‘The Multiverse’, and the narrator argues that ‘the Universe displays the organization of the Multiverse, the life of the Organiverse, and the permanance of the Spirituverse’ [204] (hence Triuneverse, you see). A quick Google Books search reveals loads of pre-1963 hits for Multiverse, by no means all Jamesian, as well as plenty of hits for Organiverse and, indeed, Infiniverse.

I’m not trying to rob Moorcock of the credit for reintroducing the term. Kennedy’s is, clearly, an obscure and little-known text, and it’s with Moorcock that the term starts on its jorney to the mainstream, and today’s Star Trek/Spiderman/Doctor Strange ubiquity. But I would insist that pretty much all the story-beats and conventions of ‘The Multiverse’ were in place before Moorcock slapped that moninker on it.

For instance: Sam Merwin’s House of Many Worlds (1951) sends its can-do hero Mack on a rollicking adventure through a sprig of parallel worlds, all accessible via a portal in Florida’s Spindrift Key, for some reason:

Indeed, loads of Pulp SF parallel worlds adventures were published in the 1940s and 1950s.

Raymond Jones’s Renaissance (originally serialized in Astounding, Jul-Oct 1944, later reissued in book form under the title Man of Two Worlds) opens in a utopia called Kronweld. We discover how this Utopia was created: Earth scientists, having discovered time travel, used it to go back and not only kill Hitler, but all the Hitlers: ‘we pointed out what changes there would have been in the world if such as Alexander, Nero, Attila, Hitler, Michoven, Drurila and the hosts like them could have been examined at birth and their criminal tendencies discovered and destroyed without giving them a chance at life.’ [138]. But there’s a hitch. Utopia proves sterile, so the population is maintained by Kronweldians raiding parallel realities and kidnapping their babies. ‘There exist parallel worlds,’ the novel informs us, ‘in which the oscillation rates of the component particles making up their atoms differ’ (the character who tells us this rather dismissively adds: ‘you won’t understand that, neither do I’).

And in Fritz Leiber’s Destiny Times Three (Astounding, March-April 1945: published in book form 1957) our protagonist Thorn rattles quickly through three alternative universes:

In three days he had seen three worlds, and none of them were good. World 3, wrecked by subtronic power, cold battlefield for a hopeless last stand. World 2, warped by paternalistic tyranny, smoldering with hate and boredom. World 1, a utopia in appearance, but lacking real stamina or inward worth, not better than the others — only luckier. [119]

This is merely the tip of the multiverseberg, there being, we are told, an ‘infinitude of infinitude’ of such dimensions. Thorn’s access is provided by a ‘Probability Engine’ super-computer: ‘every point was adjacent to every other point, and so infinity was everywhere, and all paths led everywhere, and only thought could impose order or differentiate’. Leiber’s preferred term for this multiverse is ‘transtime’. It seems to me that might just as easily have caught on as Moorcock’s usage.

So there are multiple multiverses, and vice-versa multi-manyverse transtimes, all before Moorcock dispersed his diverse multiverses in nineteen sixty-three/which is rather late for me.

— — — -

Postscript. A couple of reactions to this post online. Here, my mate Rich Puchalsky thinks I’ve got the focus of the (second part of the) post wrong:

Why did Moorcock create a multiverse? Someone who does actual biographically informed criticism can give a real answer, but he is a prolific writer who had written a large number of fantasy and SF novels that used the same ideas but had different characters.

The concept of a multiverse joins all of these books together into a more or less coherent whole. Instead of being scattered books where Moorcock repeats himself with variations, they are retrospectively about different multiversal versions of the Eternal Champion. The Eternal Champion cycle begins (if that is a meaningful term in a multiverse) in the Moorcock book The Eternal Champion, which itself is a fix-up. Notably, the short references to other Moorcock works which make it multiversal only were added at the fix-up stage. Rather than write about the content of the Moorcock multiverse, I’ll mention that as a publishing device it often took fans who read his Elric books and convinced them that the rest of his sprawling, prolific oeuvre was connected to them and that they should read the whole thing. Therefore, the precursor of Moorcock’s multiverse was in an important sense not the various little-known books that used similar ideas, but James Branch Cabell’s Storisende edition, which has many similar qualities

James Branch Cabell was a prolific and very good fantasy writer (although he did not call himself one: he was influenced by earlier genres), who decided to join up his books into one edition, and in the process put in little rewrites to connect them as the Lives of Manuel. Manuel is, basically, The Eternal Champion. His lives are spread out into pseudo-historical eras rather than a multiverse because Cabell saw himself as writing in the style of Walter Scott rather than as with Moorcock in the style of pulp SF or sword-and-sorcery. But the publishing effect was similar. Cabell gathered up everything he’d ever written, including his poetry, into an 18 book limited edition which he convinced a publisher to put out. He supposedly spent a year personally signing every book. More to the point, he not only modified the works slightly, he wrote new introductions for each of them that framed them as part of this overarching work, which did not exist until after most of them were written. The multiverse, then, is a way of restating one’s artistic tics — ideas that someone keeps coming back to, reused stylistic bits — as not repetitions, but as the bones of a work. As such, it’s perfect for contemporary media franchises. Marvel vaguely understands, as an amoeba does, that all of its products seem rather the same, so in makes a TV series Loki in which all of these repetitions are really part of its universe and therefore intended

This is very interesting to me, although I wonder if James Branch Cabell isn’t rather better known on the other side of the Atlantic than over here. But I don’t doubt I should read more of him. Then my old friend Abraham Kawa makes this suggestion: ‘one influential addition to pre-Moorcock multiverses is Gardner Fox’s The Flash Of Two Worlds from 1961, which not only posits parallel timeline earths with variants of people, but posits the notion that one reality’s people experience the others as dreams.’

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” (dir. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, aka ‘Daniels’ 2022) was originally published in Adam’s Notebook on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s not science fiction, this novel, although it includes some discussion of science fiction, and a few glancing SF-ishnesses. Life in the West is a contemporary-set novel of ideas. The strategy by which Aldiss presents these ideas is: having his various characters lecture at one another, and us, about them, at great length, as well as discussing them, these ideas, earnestly over drinks or meals, walking by the seashore, or in bed. The setting is an academic conference in Sicily: the First International Congress of Intergraphic Criticism at ‘Ermalpa’, a rather awkward almost-anagram of Palermo, I suppose. The guest of honour is Thomas C Squire, founder of the Society for Popular Aesthetics: handsome, middle-aged writer and presenter of Frankenstein Among the Arts, a TV series after the manner of James Burke’s Connections or Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation (‘Mr Squire’ says one character: ‘your television series, and the book, does for the culture of today what Lord Clarke’s Civilisation did for the past!’)

Chapters set at the conference follow Squire’s interactions with the other conference attendees: French academic Jacques d’Exiteuil, an old friend; Italian animal behaviour expert Carlo Morabito (he stalks Squire somewhat, and reveals that he travelled to England the previous year and took long-distance photos of Squire’s Georgian home, his wife and two daughters — photos he is keen to show Squire); two critics from the USSR — as it then was — called Rugorsky and Kchevov; and Selina Ajdini, ‘a small dark Italian lady, the conference secretary.’ Squires spends much of the novel trying to get into bed with the toothsome Ajdini.

Aldiss reproduces the various conference talks verbatim, pretty much; and notes down all the conversations delegates have with one another, about culture, religion, politics, evolution, the Cold War, the future. In this, Aldiss was ahead of David Lodge, whose much lighter and more digestible novel of the academic conference circuit, Small World wasn’t published until 1984.

Interspersed with the 1978-set conference chapters are flashback chapters, set in England and Singapore in 1977, whilst Squire is making his Frankenstein Among the Arts programme, monologues from which are liberally quoted in the text. Squire is having an affair with one of the actresses from the show, considerably younger than he. Squires’ wife Theresa discovers and is not happy, threatening to leave him: there are rows and upbraidings. Squires worries he may lose his fancy East Anglian country house and be denied access to his children. These portions of the novel give us further details of Squire’s backstory: the traumatic death of his father (drunk one night and stumbling about, the old man tripped over his two mastiffs, who then savaged him to death — young Squires discovers the body in the morning); his various affairs with women; his time, post-war as a spy in 1948 Jugoslavia,

Nothing very much happens in the main timeline of the novel, and little is resolved by its end. Squires does manage a quick fumble with Ajdini (‘He began to kiss her, pressing closer … He lay on top of her, eyes closed. She ceased to move …. Gradually, she stirred. “I must go, Tom dear. I won’t stay” [272]) but nothing comes of it: she’s not in the mood, and leaves. Alone again, he contemplates his life, the wife from whom he is now separated, his future. He does a bit of yoga. ‘With placid amusement he detached himself from his body, rising above it to see a man, recently embraced by a woman, standing in still posture, mind clear of logical thought.’

What was he going to do next? How was the rest of his life to be lived? He thought of the sailing ship moored at the harbour. There was no escape, only the appearance of escape. That depended who else was in the boat with him. The opportunity to begin again often presented itself. But the blowfly in the human heart ensured that one went on making the old mistakes. [276]

So no escape for Squires. And in fact we do find out something of what happens to him, in the three lengthy novels Aldiss wrote as follow-ups: Forgotten Life (1988), Remembrance Day (1993) and Somewhere East of Life (1994). More than 1000 pages in all. Squires appears in these as a side-character, and in the last of them the story moves into a near-future SFnal story. Failing marriages, masculine insecurity, sex. The ‘Squires Quartet’.

Anthony Burgess, who picked Life in the West as one of his Ninety-Nine Novels: the Best in English since 1939 (1984), praised it for its ‘vital dialectic’ and ‘rounded characters’. I wasn’t persuaded by the latter, particularly, I must say. Most of the novel’s characters are here, like the various talking heads in Mann’s Magic Mountain, to embody and present different points of view, different philosophical and political perspectives, and are no more characterised as people than that. Squires is a little better drawn, although, as Christopher Priest once said about this novel, he’s really a roman-à-clef Brian Aldiss, and the various to-ings and fro-ings, in amongst the debating and monologuing, are Aldiss writing into fiction his own experiences of writerly conferences and SF conventions.

The translations into fiction — Squires a TV presenter rather than a novelist, a postwar spy rather than, as Aldiss was, a serving soldier in the Far East during the war — enable him to evade direct autobiography, although they introduce distortions as well. The shoot-out in Jugoslavia described in chapter 10 evidently draws on Aldiss’s wartime experiences, and doesn’t entirely fit the Le Carré-esque spy story of which it’s supposed to be part (‘Squire returned to his own country in a curious mental state. What he could confess to no one, and what most deeply disturbed him, was that he had perversely enjoyed killing. It satisfied a black greedy thing in his psyche’ [213]) — Vol 2 of the Squires quartet, Forgotten Life, includes a lot of specifically Burmese wartime recollection, fictionalised into its story.

Reading Life in the West as autobiography locates it in Aldiss’s oeuvre. He often fictionalised his life into novels, as with the Horatio Stubbs Saga [The Hand-Reared Boy (1970), A Soldier Erect (1971), A Rude Awakening (1978)] which novelises his wartime experiences, military and sexual. Aldiss also wrote a great deal of straight autobiography, and it is an interesting exercise to triangulate what he reports of his real life with his fictionalised versions. In terms of straight memoir, there is ‘The Glass Forest’ (1986), a lengthy essay originally produced for Gale Research Press’s Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series and reprinted in …And the Lurid Glare of the Comet (1986). There’s also his entertaining memoir of what it means to be a writer, Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith’s: A Writing Life (1990) and The Twinkling of an Eye (1999), which concentrates with sometimes painful attentiveness on Aldiss’s psychic wounds, his failings as a person, his many affairs, his mental health issues — depression, chronic fatigue, mental breakdown.

Much of this he traces back to his parents. His mother, Dot, Aldiss feels, never loved him. Before he was born she suffered a miscarriage, and in the wake of this she fantasied an angelic afterlife for this ‘perfect’ baby girl that never lived. When Brian came along she would often denigrate and criticise him, comparing him negatively to the perfect, dead child. When pregnant with Brian she had, she insists on telling him, prayed for a baby girl, and now that he is, disappointingly, here and masculine she makes him pray with her for the same thing. When Brian’s little sister is eventually born, his mother becomes convinced that he will infect the baby with whooping cough, and so sends him away, to Peterborough and, when he is old enough, to boarding school, where he is lonely and miserable. Young Aldiss convinces himself that his mother has banished him as unlovable and unwanted, and hardens his heart against her. As an adult he is repeatedly unfaithful to his wife. When his own daughter is born he himself leaves home, replicating the original traumatic separation. The Twinkling of an Eye suggests that he eventually resolved the profound hurt of this in later life, with his second wife (the main character in A Forgottten Life spends most of the novel lamenting that his mother never loved him, but achieves a kind of transcendent revelation in later life that she did — it’s not convincing as fiction, or characterisation, in situ, although the intensity and repetition with which the novel insists upon this redemption clearly cathects something of grave psychological importance to Aldiss himself).

Aldiss’s father, Bill, was careless, unreliable. On one occasion he punished young Brian for some minor infraction by holding him, upside down, out of a second-floor window and threatening to drop him. Afterwards both parents laughingly recall this incident, and young Brian laughs along, nervously and agonised inside. He withdrew into the world of books. Here he recalls a fight with his second wife Margaret, many years later:

Margaret and I had a falling out about something or other. Feeling hopeless, I turned my back and was going to leave. She said … ‘Don’t turn away from me.’ Don’t turn away! I did not recall anyone ever saying that to me before. I turned back to her and took her in my arms. Margaret’s words showed me how I had learnt to behave. Always, the sense of being unwanted…. A harsh word and I was off. What Margaret said showed me how Bill and Dot had never called me back. Bill would have speeded me on my way with a parting jibe. I would have retreated to my room, to solitude and a book. [The Twinkling of an Eye, 352]

The final section of The Twinkling of an Eye records a catastrophic breakdown: Aldiss’s continuing marital infidelities bring on a domestic crisis, and ‘there followed mental breakdown, succeeded by illness’, diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but actually a climacteric depression. With the help of a psychiatrist called Mrs. Green, he works through to ‘a cohesive, sometimes diffuse tale’ about his own life, in which he accepts that he mother did love him, and that his life adds up to a coherent, worthwhile whole.

To read Life in the West alongside this is to be struck by the shifts and psychic relocations the novel undertakes. Squires’s mother hardly figures, and is mentioned as only kindly; but Theresa, his wife, is hostile and angry and rejecting. Squires’s father is mentioned in passing as a suave, gentlemanly, popular figure, prone to alcoholism but otherwise kindly. But his strange, violent death, his throat ripped out by his own dogs, seems to fictionalise a rather different traumatic event from Aldiss’s own youth, to do with his own ‘beloved pet cat, Tiny’:

My arrival startles the cat. It decides to make a run for it. Leaping from the tree, it has gone only a few feet before the dogs are on it, baying with fury. Next moment — in the words of Handel’s Messiah, ‘Behold, I show you a mystery — we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump.’ The cat is changed in the twinkling of an eye. It becomes meat. It becomes an incoherent red mess, stretching, stretching, as the two dogs rush past me, each fastening on to a strand of flesh, running off growling in parallel. [The Twinkling of an Eye, 76]

Horrible! ‘For many months,’ Aldiss says, ‘this terrifying image, and the guilt attendant on it, dominated not only my waking hours.’ It is, he says, ‘the secret sorrow at the heart of things’ in his life. Dogs are everywhere, he says, before connecting the canine and the parental (‘Bill and Dot, in their carefree days before children overtake them, keep Airedales. They breed them and at one time have fourteen … Just beyond my sandpit stands a shed, later to be a tool shed, in which Dot boils up sheep’s heads and oats with which to feed the dogs.’)

In a 1994 article [‘Remembrance of Lives Past’ Science Fiction Studies 21:2 (1994), 129–133] Aldiss says ‘my novels form a parabola above the straight line of my lived life’:

After an early comedy of English society, they take off immediately into space, to planets or futures far away, though their subjects mainly concern evolution and origins, the — as it were — hidden formats of our days. In the seventies, the novels return to Earth briefly to reminisce about a receding past, World War II. Then they are off again, even further, to a planet called Helliconia, a thousand light years away. The dramas enacted on Helliconia reconstruct dramas of power and powerlessness such as we witness every day on Earth, acted out through personae as vivid as I could make them. Whatever Helliconia did for my readers, it did much for me in resolving an inner struggle, in particular my religious concerns; this is accounted for by the metaphysics of the thing. I have always believed that sf was greater than its merely Gernsbackian aspect, though in truth — by which is meant practice — it cannot always live up to its Stapledonian aspirations The parabola of writing then brought me back to Earth: not entirely unexpectedly.

Preceding the Helliconias of the early-to-mid eighties is a somewhat indigestible novel, Life in the West, which considers a global state of play from the viewpoint of a rather obnoxious character, Sir Thomas Squire. Life in the West convinced me I was able to incorporate a novel of ideas (such as British critics, unlike American ones, mainly shun) with a novel of character, and that I should be less timid. With such a conviction in mind, I embarked on the Helliconias; which accounts for the way those three novels designedly differ in construction, one from another.

‘Somewhat obnoxious’ is Aldiss’s unforgiving self-characterisation (and Squire is not ‘Sir Thomas’ until later in the quartet: in Life in the West he is just plain Thomas — although elderly Aldiss was OBE). I agree with him about the superiority of the Stapledonian to the Gernsbackian mode in SF, actually; although I’m not sure he achieves that in this novel.

In some ways, Life in the West has dated markedly. The big climate danger is thought to be global cooling: ‘“The Pope sends a message to the peoples of Poland.” Squires ran a finger further down the page. “Scientists forecast 20,000 cool years ahead. The glaciers retreated to their present positions about 1 1,000 years ago, but now the cooling is beginning again. During the next 20,000 years, we can expect that considerable depths of ice will build up over the Northern Hemisphere. They could reach as far south as Milan. The cause is irregularities in the Earth’s orbit.”’ [12] (‘It means the end of England,’ says D’Exiteuil, and Squires replies, coolly: ‘yes, and France. Not a political collapse but a geophysical one’). Politics is the titular West versus the East, and the novel has much to say about Marxism.

There’s a deal of sexism, and objectification of women, not only from Squires — though lots from him (‘he stood and watched her slender buttocks moving under her dress’ [268]). The sex is rather awkwardly described: ‘He slid into her and they lay side by side, scarcely moving, mouths together, tongues linked’ [71] — tongues linked? Wait: how? ‘He grasped her teasingly by one labium’ [175]. Did he, by George. ‘She opened her mouth, revealing her beautiful lower teeth, her tongue bedded in its clear juices’ [189] Ugh!

One of the book’s ideas is that men engage sexually not with actual human beings but with ‘symbols’: so it is that Laura, who appears in Frankenstein Among the Arts and accompanies Squires around the world filming, and with whom he is having an affair (‘Laura … drape something over this lascivious little body and let’s see how life is progressing down below’) is called ‘the Sex Symbol’. Her role in Frankenstein Among the Arts is to frolic in the surf wearing a tiny bikini, whilst beside her Squires speaks to camera about how sex is the same thing as advertising:

“Advertising in various media frequently makes use of the sea and, of course, of sex symbols such as this young lady by my side. If I mentioned her name, she would become a character, not a symbol; such is the power of names. Her skin is really white, not brown, but she has applied suntan oil to satisfy tradition. The image of brown girl in blue water has proved strongly evocative ever since sea-bathing became fashionable last century. You may believe that such images demean women. I don’t. We are all symbols to each other as well as real people. The experience of the imagination gives life savour.”

Laura knows the affair is going nowhere (“You don’t love me, Tom. You only fancied me because I was billed as the Sex Symbol in your Instant Culture series. You only love me as a symbol — and don’t start telling me that we all respond to each other as symbols, because I hate that line of chat” [177]) and so it proves. Meanwhile, at the Sicilian conference, people lecture, people chat, the significance of digital watches, the semiotics of pinball (‘the pinball table … a cult of functionality. Its object is to transfix with emotion a person who will then surrender money for no reward at all. Thus the pin-table makes an epitome of capitalist economy in its late stage’ [152]) and pop music (‘he recognized the music at once. The Tom Robinson Band playing “Long Hot Summer”’ [87]). D’Exiteuil praises Squires’ young son: ‘“He was with you last time we met in London, if you recall. He impressed me with his knowledge of the music of the Genesis pop group.” “I saw him a few days before Christmas” Squires replies. “This evening, he is seeing the old year out with Fred Cholera and the Pustules. They’re a bit more punk than Genesis.” [254] Fred Cholera and the Pustules. Hmm.

The novel defends science fiction. Squires doesn’t mention Star Wars (1977), but he does speak to the huge popularity of SF that came with that movie.

‘Maybe the secret of all this popularity is that SF puts human character pretty firmly in place. A chap with a name and a lowest common multiple of human characteristics — he may not even have a sex life, poor chap — is set against the cosmos, or against a whole array of inimical technological creations like robots, for example, or against paranoid infrastructures, like multinational companies. Conflict has become more than character — because that’s how many people experience life in these days. I guess the population of the world is about three times what it was when Thomas Mann or Thomas Hardy started writing. There had to be a change and SF expresses the change. SF is the change.’ [202]

On religion and evolution:

“However, the point I was trying to make,” [said Squires] “goes beyond politics, to forces moving through our evolutionary lives, if I may use that phrase. Evolution still shapes us. Compare Islam and Christianity with the conceptually primitive Aztec religion, where mass-salvation could be achieved by mass-sacrifice. Souls were interchangeable. The Old Testament is a drama of man becoming aware that souls are no longer interchangeable.”

[Adjini] smiled. “You speak of the soul, whatever that may be. Yet you are not a religious man?”

“We are all religious. In our day, the Left has all the dialectic, the Right none. Yet lying to hand is the supreme argument that souls are not interchangeable. It is perhaps too universal a truth for the Right to use, too true a truth to fall to the service of any party. Nevertheless it is the vital factor through which the present world struggles towards the future, whether capitalist or communist, Caucasian, Negroid, or Mongoloid. It’s our one hope, because undeniable.” [67]

As per the title, one of the main talking points in the novel is West versus East which, in 1978-terms, means the capitalist west versus the Soviet Union. In one of the funnier chapters, the two Soviet scientists give a lecture on the necessity of a kind of Gurdjieffian optimism blended with dialectical materialism, but the young woman hired to provide simultaneous translation to the audience can’t quite wrangle their Russian, and generates a garbled mess.

“We must look ahead concisely, and without being merciful. It’s enough to know that many things will not be, where for instance people are exploited with bare bread. They stand in rows now. We can’t decide. We have decided … Nor should we be very overturned. If experiments of this kind or type, I should say, confirm to literature, if we will have experiments made purely for the sakes of experiments, then we will have no result. There has to be inspiration to confirm, an example being the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, who has a remarkable development which can be seen. It touches men and women alike, not always from behind. [112]

At dinner that evening, various characters debating the future of West versus East: ‘The possibility of a war with the United States is now really excluded. The West will anyhow fall of itself, as did Byzantium, in effect. China is the great enemy for the Soviets.’ A delegate called Morabito predicts that, under Brezhnev will usher in a new Stalinism, the USSR redefining itself in terms of its radical anti-Semitism: ‘that is the new religion that will fill the empty shell of communism — a new anti-Semitism! Anti-Semitism was official policy under the Czars, and soon the calendar will go back and again … In the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, “AntiZionism” was one excuse. Now more evil propaganda is said in the Soviets against the Jews than ever before. Hitler was only an actor, a — what’s the English word? — a strolling player in hatred against the Jewish people; soon you will see the performance lived.”’ [122]. Aldiss was wrong in terms of the durability of the USSR, and of the reorienting of the geopolitical axis along USSR/China lines , though I wonder about the prescience of this prediction of a resurgence of the anti-Semitic impulse.

You can tell that Aldiss was beginning to plan out the giant Helliconia SF trilogy. The novel keeps coming back to the topic. This is the gist of Herr Professor Fittich, a German delegate:

So Ermalpa is a good place in which to hold this first serious critical enquiry into the aspects of the popular culture of our time. My subject is science fiction literature, or fantascienza, the excellent Italian word, or Utopische Romane, the less effective and in consequence now obsolete German phrase. Science fiction — or SF — is a melting-pot much like Ermalpa. It also contains conflicting cultures. It looks to the future and to the past and, by implication, most searchingly to the present. Many disciplines make their contribution, such as science, of course, notably astronomy and cosmology and the physical sciences, but also any other science you care to name, genetics, biology, down to soft sciences such as sociology and anthropology. Also such more general themes as religion, mythology, apocalypse, catastrophe, Utopia, perfectionism, literature, adventure, and sheer crazy speculation. [193]

Late in the novel Squires sees an actual UFO, flying through the Sicilian skies. There’s some chat about this, and Aldiss annoyingly repeatedly refers to the object as “a You-Foe”, but this story element doesn’t really go anywhere — as if the impulse to transfer the novel Aldiss is writing from mimetic to sciencefictional representation is asserting itself, but not very forcefully. The novel ends with Squires returning to London — he is staying in a flat in Paddington during a trial separation from his wife — and meeting his old TV producer for drinks. This latter, one Grahame Ash, is heading out to Australia. There’s nothing for the UK now, he says:

“After all I’ve done — Frankenstein and all the rest of it! But the oil crisis isn’t going to go away. Inflation isn’t going to go down. I believe, if you ask me, that the Arab world is going to squeeze Europe and the US by the throat. Nothing’s ever going to be the same again. We’re going to go down the drain, till we end up like a lot of little Uruaguays and Paraguays. This country’s had it, that’s my belief, I tell you frankly. We’ll have to team up with the Soviet Bloc in the end, just to keep going. Trading in furs again, before long. Well, I must dash.” He looked at his wristwatch. Summer was closing, and the day; the light thickened in the narrow street. [291

Squires resolves to try and patch things up with his wife. The novel ends in medias res. But then, Aldiss’s life in 1978 was also in medias res. On we go.

Brian Aldiss, ‘Life in the West’ (1980) was originally published in Adam’s Notebook on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I bought Inversions from Methven’s Bookshop (remember them?) in 1998 when it came out; £16.99 which-was-a-lot-of-money-back-then, signed by the author no less. I have no strong memory of reading it; as far as I can recall I was underwhelmed. But re-reading it recently was a much more positive experience. In short: I thoroughly enjoyed this novel: a tight, involving narrative of two intertwined court-intrigues, inventive, menacing and, especially towards the end, genuinely tense.

It’s a Culture novel that’s not about the Culture, a few coyly cryptic references aside, the story makes no explicit reference to the Culture at all. Instead we get two connected narrative strands, both set in a sort-of late-medieval sort-of early Renaissance world. Part of our story takes place in Tassasen, where the old king has been deposed by the ‘Protector’, General UrLeyn, a sort of orientalised Cromwell complete with enormous harem. The main character here is the reserved bodyguard DeWar. DeWar — huh! — what is he good for? Well for a number of things, in fact, including preserving the General’s life from assassination attempts. To protect his master, DeWar sticks close to the General. He is with Urleyn in the evening. He is with Urleyn late in the morning. He is with Urleyn early in the morning. Surely this latter time is the relevant one, in the event is Urleyn attacked by the drunken sailor, what will he do with the drunken sailor, what … look, this isn’t just a cheap gag, you know. There actually is a drunken sailor (well, a drugged-up admiral) who tries to kill Urleyn with a dagger. DeWar foils this dastardly plot. Other assassins come crashing in Tassasen. In diverse fashion. Then the country is drawn into a debilitating border war, the Protector’s son falls ill, things start to fall apart. The Mysterious Figure behind it all is a genuine surprise.

All this is interleaved, chapter by chapter, with a second storyline set in the kingdom of Haspidus: narrated by Oelph, perhaps so named because the vicar at the christening was unfortunately punched in the stomach whilst dipping him in the font. Or, perhaps — since this world is without Christianity, christenings or fonts — not. Oelph is the assistant to a doctor called Vosill, a woman; which fact is remarkable in the institutionally sexist and misogynist society of Haspidus. Vosill is the king’s own physician, possessed of preternatural common sense about infection, hygiene, diet and rest, although not otherwise supplied with advanced pharmaceuticals. The DeWar storyline is good, but this Vosill one is much better, properly suspenseful. Young Oelph himself is more or less in love with the handsome doctor, but also serves a mysterious ‘master’, reporting back to him like Pascali in Unsworth’s fine Pascali’s Island (1980), a novel of which I was several times reminded whilst I read Inversions. King Quience, a sort of young-Henry-VIII, is surrounded by a convincingly drawn set of schemingly unpleasant aristocrats, and Banks also has space to touch on the lives of the peasants outwith the palace. Banks is particularly good on the resentment Vosill inspires in the breasts of the (male) courtiers, precisely because she is so valued by the king. There are various murders. Lords and nobles scheme against Vosill, and the story gets genuinely tense as her inevitable downfall, to be accompanied by torture and rape, comes ever closer.

Of course, what’s hidden in plain view is that DeWar and Vosill are citizens from the Culture sojourning on this world as undercover Special Circumstances operatives. This gives the twin narratives a secondary level of resonance. Indeed, without this second level the novel would feel like an underfilled balloon. DeWar entertains the Protector’s children with stories about a magical utopia called ‘Lavishia’ where everybody has what they want, and which would be rather dull stories if we didn’t know he was actually talking about the (in the logic of the novel) actual realm of the Culture. The Lavishia stories fill several chapters of the less eventful, and less consequent, DeWar narrative; and one — about two cousins, a boy and a girl, who grow up and have various adventures — clearly fill us in at second hand with the backstory of DeWar and Vosill (‘Hiliti’ and ‘Sechroom’ are their Culture names).

They were the best of friends but they disagreed on many things. One of the most important things they disagreed about was what to do when Lavishia chanced upon one of those tribes of poor people. Was it better to leave them alone or was it better to try and make life better for them? Even if you decided it was the right thing to do to make life better for them, which way did you do this? Did you say, Come and join us and be like us? Did you say, give up all your own ways of doing things, the gods that you worship, the beliefs which you hold most dear? [90]

So, yes, Inversions is actually another Banks should-they-shouldn’t-they Culture intervention novel; which is to say, it is another one of his should-we-shouldn’t-we Western Liberal Democracy problem books. And, inevitably, we are interpellated into the story as Culture-y. The Culture shapes our readerly experience. When Vosill shows Oelph a blunt, pitted old metal dagger, we know what it actually is without being told.The medieval world has its appeal, especially since we spend most of the novel amongst the very richest and most powerful; but mostly it’s horrible. We might want to holiday there, especially with protection; but we wouldn’t want to live there.

It reminds me — if you’ll indulge me — of a particular question to do with Romantic Irony. Now, I have a high regard for Irony, aesthetically speaking; and, more, I consider it a crucial artistic feature of modernity. It acquires a significant momentum in Romantic and post-Romantic culture (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and all that), but I’ve often thought I should write a book about a particular two-horned manifestation of it in the Romantic novel. On the one hand: Jane Austen. On the other: Walter Scott. Now, we don’t often think of Scott as a particularly ironic writer — he does foresquare, slightly prosy historical adventure stories, in which a ‘wavering’ character (hence: The Waverley Novels) is positioned at some Big Historical Pivot Time: the Crusades; the English Civil War; the Jacobite Rebellion. There is peril, questing, there are battles and duels, and there is lots and lots of local colour and vividness. And Scott was hugely influential — it is hard, indeed, to overstate just how influential he was in the 19th-Century, worldwide; and therefore how large a part he played in the evolution of the novel. There’s a reason that description — character caught up in big events, questing/fighting/adventure, lots of local colour — describes a hefty proportion of all the Space Opera and Adventure SF written.

Now only a fool would deny that Scott, despite his many excellences, lacks the sophistication and maturity of Austen as a writer. To read his books after reading Austen is to be struck by a kind of coarseness and flatness. Austen writes stories not about improbable adventures but about the probable dilemmas of everyday life, stories all readers can test against their own experience. But that’s not the crucial thing. It’s not that Austen writes about falling in love and marrying with sensitivity and charm — of course, that’s exactly what she does do; but there’s more to it than that. It’s that she is one of the first creative artists in the world to understand characterisation in ironic terms. Emma Woodhouse simultaneously is handsome, clever and rich and a short-sighted, rather spoilt young woman. The glory of Emma as a novel is the way Austen expertly, beautifully traces her growth in self-knowledge and maturity, correlating it to her awareness of whom it is she really loves. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged …’ is a very clever sentence; because it both is and isn’t true — isn’t because not all men see marriage as central to life as Austen’s women, and is because love is much more important and resonant than questing/fighting/adventuring — and in the world of Austen’s novel this truth acquires a universality that derives by definition from the parameters of her art.

Scott has no characters like this. His heroes are heroic all the way through; his villains similarly villainous. They stalk about their stage-sets acting entirely in character from start to finish. The Waverley novels construe a WYSIWYG universe of reassuring moral absolutes. And yet, and yet: there is something in Scott that responded to the change in the times. He lacked the technical skill to portray the ironies of individual subjectivity the way Austen could, in part because his approach to character was wholly externalised. But in some of his novels he found a way of apprehending something that approaches Austenian doubleness of character anyway.

I’ll give you an example of what I mean. In The Talisman (1825) noble characters are constantly gadding about in disguise. King Richard Coeur-de-lion goes disguised as a slave. When King Richard falls sick he is attended, and healed, by an Arab physician called El Hakim. At the end of the novel we discover that this physician was actually Sultan Saladin himself, Richard’s enemy, all along. All this disguise gubbins is Scott’s way of intimating that a character like Saladin might be both the enemy of Christendom and an honourable, gallant individual at the same time. It’s a device that externalises what happens more naturally, and more persuasively, as interiorised characterisation in Austen’s novels.

To come, eventually, back on topic: this Scotty variety is the kind of irony Banks employs in Inversions. We read his account of sort-of late-medieval sort-of early Renaissance people with pleasure, as we might read George R R Martin, for the local colour and the ‘wouldn’t-it-secretly-be-fun-to-escape-civilisation-and-its-restraints’ brutality and sex. Whilst doing this, we also read about Richard Lionheart, and Saladin — or Vosill and DeWar — and clock their secret identities. Austen’s irony is more sophisticated, and has had a greater influence on ‘the literary novel’ (whatever that is). But Scott’s works too, though, in its way; and is more in evidence in popular narrative.

Anyhow, the summary judgment: there’s a focus to this novel, a narrative efficiency, that makes its simple storyline work really well. Banks uses his doubling device as a rudimentary way of adding nuance and complexity; and, again, it works. If anything it could be a little tauter. Several chapters add literally nothing (chapters 14 and 16 struck me as supernumerary); and there’s a slackening of interest roughly around the pages 200-to-250 mark. But this is not a novel that has been bloated, as several 21st-century Culture novels seem to have been, and it feels all the better for it.

Iain M. Banks, “Inversions” (1998) was originally published in Adam’s Notebook on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[The original 2017 publication of this post, in a now defunct blog, carried this headnote: “I’m just back from the Edinburgh Book Festival where I appeared on a panel about science fiction with the great Jo Walton and my friend Farah Mendlesohn: the event organised, and moderated, by the estimable Ken McLeod. The panel was fun — it was lively, which is code for ‘we disagreed’, or more precisely ‘everyone disagreed with me’ — and one of the things it entailed was each of us offering a thumbnail definition of SF. Now: it occurs to me that my definition, such as it is, doesn’t really exist in one single place. So I thought I’d sketch it here. I used to have a dedicated SF blog, which would have been the natural venue for a post like this, but I’ve been trying to rein-in my blogging habit, and my relationship to SF criticism is going a bit Dover Beach at the moment. Here will do. To be clear: neither Jo nor Farah agree with my definition of SF; and you should certainly read their respective writings to see what they have to say about the topic. There’s a good chance their views will persuade you in ways mine doesn’t.”]

On those occasions when people ask me to define science fiction, I generally say it’s this:

Probably the most famous match-cut in cinema. You already know the context, so I don’t need to spell it out for you: millions of years BC, an apeman throws a bone into the sky. It flies upward. The camera pans with it, following it a little shakily into the blue sky. The bone reaches its apogee and, just as it starts to fall back down, Kubrick cuts to a shot of a spaceship in orbit in AD 2001.

Now, this seems to me an extremely beautiful and affecting thing, a moment both powerful and eloquent even though I’m not sure I could lay out, in consecutive and rational prose, precisely why I find it so powerful or precisely what it loquates. It is, I suppose, something ‘about’ technology, about the way humans use tools, our habit of intrusively (indeed, violently) interacting with our environments, about the splendour but also the limitation of such tools, the way even a spaceship is, at its core, a primitive sort of human prosthesis. But when you start explaining the cut in those terms you become conscious that you are losing something, missing some key aspect to what makes it work so well in situ.

It works, in other words, not by a process of rational extrapolation, but rather metaphorically. I mean something particular when I say that, and I explain what I mean in detail below; but for now, and to be clear — I’m suggesting this moment actualises the vertical ‘leap’ from the known to the unexpected that is the structure of metaphor, rather than the horizontal connection from element to logically extrapolated element that is the structure of metonymy. Kubrick’s cut is more like a poetic image than a scientific proposition; — — and there you have it, in a nutshell, my definition of science fiction. This genre I love is more like a poetic image than it is a scientific proposition.

Now, if my interlocutor needs more, and if the picture doesn’t make my point, I might add something Samuel Delany-ish: about how science fiction is a fundamentally metaphorical literature because it sets out to represent the world without reproducing it.

The danger, here, is that people will take what I’m saying as a statement about the content of the genre, rather than what it is, a statement about the form, about the genre’s discursive structure. So, for instance, Darko Suvin’s common-sense definition of SF as determined by one or more novums, things that exist in the SF text but not in the real world (and therefore not in texts mimetic of that real world) is too often, I think, treated only on the level of the content of the text. If a given novel or film contains a time machine or a faster-than-light spaceship or radically new concept of gender, then it is science fiction: end of. But what interests me about novums is the way the novum itself is so often a kind of reified or externalised embodiment of the formal logic of the metaphor, rather than just an, as it were, brute marker of difference as such.

Now, I need to acknowledge that most of the fans and critics of SF I know are not likely to be persuaded by what I say. More people, I think, would argue that a science fiction text extrapolates (more, or less, rigorously and quasi-scientifically) from knowns in our world into possibles in its imagined world. This is, on its face, perfectly sensible, and has the advantage of distinguishing ‘science fiction’, where the extrapolation needs to stay within broader guidelines of possibility, from ‘fantasy’ where magic, surrealism and so on may enter in to the equation. If you’re writing about a colony on Mars, then you need to stick more-or-less within the bounds of what we know about Mars, and space travel, and humans-living-in-close-proximity and so on. Small deviations from probability may be permissible, depending on what they are and how cleverly the writer handles them; but large deviations are liable to ‘bounce’ the reader out of her reading experience. Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief is harder to sustain (the argument goes) in a story where the protagonist is a captain in the Proxima-Centuraian Space Navy than one in which they work in a shoe-shop in Colchester, so writers need to tread carefully not to tip-over their readers’ delicately balanced sensibilities.

I don’t think that’s true, actually; but plenty of clever and knowledgeable people do.

This approach to SF tends to lead to prioritising things like: consistency and scope of worldbuilding, plausibility, rationality, the scientific accuracy of the way novums are extrapolated from present-day knowledge and so on. But once we get in the habit of judging SF by these criteria, I would say we are moving away from what makes SF so cool and wonderful in the first place. Put worldbuilding in the driving seat, as writer or reader, and Mike Harrison’s clomping foot of nerdism comes stamping down on our human faces, forever.

Don’t get me wrong: worldbuilding, the correlative of ‘extrapolation’, certainly has its place in SF. Not in my definition of SF, though, and that’s what concerns this blogpost. It seems to me that worldbuilding is ancillary to the crucial thing that makes SF (and Fantasy for that matter), vital, crucial and wonderful. I’m enough of a Tolkien fanboy to enjoy reading the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, but I’m not enough of a fool to believe the appendices to The Lord of the Rings are the point of that novel.

Put it this way: worldbuilding is part of the system of a science fiction text; but the point of SF is not its system. The point is that it transports us — that it takes us somewhere new, that it brings us into contact with something wonderful, that it blindsides us, makes us gasp, unnerves or re-nerves us, makes us think of the world in a different way. I might differentiate a mediocre novum from a great one by saying that the former is embedded in a carefully worked-through and consistent web of worldbuilding, where the latter achieves escape velocity.

Now, if I say the point of SF is transport and you immediately think of a well-integrated network of trains and buses, then it may be you’re more persuaded by that view of SF as coherent rationally-extrapolated worldbuilding. But if I say the point of SF is transport and you think rapture, well, conceivably you’re closer to seeing the genre the way I do. Sometimes this transport is the full on mindblowing ‘Sense of Wonder’, a phrase I tend to take as a modern-day version of the venerable aesthetic category of the Sublime (to adapt Edmund Burke, we could say: mimetic fiction can be beautiful, but only SF can be sublime). Sometimes it is something smaller-scale, a woh! or cool!, a tingling in the scalp or the gut when we encounter something wonderful, or radically new, or strangely beautiful, or beautifully dislocating: something closer to Wordsworth’s spots-of-time maybe. It needs to be at least flavoured with Strange (‘Weird’ as the kids used to say) to be properly SF. Great SF can never situate itself inside its readers’ comfort zones, though commercially popular SF can and often does.

Fantasy has a related aesthetic uplift, which we might call ‘enchantment’, which can manifest in several ways, but which absolutely needs to be there, somewhere, in amongst your welter of maps and family-trees and invented languages and costumery and battles and elves and soap-opera-y comings and goings, if your Fantasy novel is going properly to come alive.

Now, I cannot deny that there is an ideological element to my definition here (there’s an ideological element to every definition, whether we acknowledge it or not). It’s hardly news that the genre I love exists over a particular political fault line. There are many right-wing SF fans, who, speaking socially, prize proper authority, tradition, following the rules and a congeries of what are essentially military values, and who prefer SF that embodies all that. Which is fine; there’s plenty of that kind of SF out there. For myself I have little time for the whole ‘the rules of physics prove my ideology is correct!’ crowd: the there’s-no-such-thing-as-a-free-lunch crew, the ‘the pilot in The Cold Equations was right to throw that girl into space!’ cadre (together with their more deplorable ‘I cheered when the pilot in The Cold Equations threw that girl into space, serves the bitch right’ fringe). But there are many dedicated SF fans who find truth in some or all or those slogans. I can only speak for myself when I say I see SF as more fundamentally about the encounter with otherness, about hospitality to the alien, to the new and the strange and therefore with the marginal and the oppressed. This means it needs to embrace conventional and unconventional things, to be as much about gay as straight, trans as cis, colour as whiteness and so on. In all this I see SF as an art of disclosure, not enclosure. That’s my ideological bias, and I’m content to own it.

I’ll say two more things about my definition of SF as a fundamentally metaphorical literature. The first is to stress I’m not saying that (for example) SF’s novums are symbols that can be decoded. I don’t think so at all — that, as it were, the rocket ships are all symbolic penises, Hydra is a straightforward translation of Hitler’s Nazi party and so on. This strikes me as a reductive and foolish way of reading texts. To repeat myself: it is not the content of any specific metaphor that defines SF for me; it is the structure of the metaphor as such. Mine is a formal, not a content-driven, definition. In order to explain what I mean by that, I’m going to bring in a little theory. Bear with me.

So here goes.

Roman Jakobson, one of the most influential linguistic theorists of the last century, makes what seems to me a really interesting and important distinction between metaphor and metonomy. Indeed, I hang my definition of science fiction upon that dyad. Metaphor is that trope that refers something to something it is not, invoking an implicit rather than explicit similarity between the word or phrase used and the thing described (a related but different trope is that of the simile, where words such as like or as are deployed): Achilles is a lion, all the world’s a stage, chaos is a ladder and so on. Metonymy, on the other hand, is the rhetorical device by which a part of something is used to refer to the whole of something: a parish of a thousand souls, a hundred head of horse, calling the monarch ‘the crown’ and so on.

On a simple level, we recognise these rhetorical devices, and they take their place amongst the scores of other rhetorical devices that constitute our discourse. Jakobson, though, makes much more of them than this: although speech-acts and stories and novels only occasionally contain metaphors or metonomies, language as communication (he argues) is structured on a larger scale by the interplay between metaphor and metonomy. This is what he argues:

The message construction is based on two simultaneous operations (the terms metonomy and metaphor are not used as figures of speech but rather as pervasive forces organizing language):

Combination (horizontal) — — constructing syntactic links; contexture.
Relation through contiguity, juxtaposition.
METONYMY: implying time, cause and effect, a chain of successive events

Selection (vertical) — — choosing among equivalent options.
Relation on basis of similarity, substitution, equivalence or contrast; synonym/antonym.
METAPHOR: implying space, a-temporal connection, simultaneity.

In poetry the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection (metaphor) is used as the major means of constructing a sequence (combination; metonym). This projection is the defining characteristic of poetry, and it expresses itself in rhyme, meter, symmetries, repetitions, motifs.

The dominant mode in the poetic is therefore that of metaphor. Whereas in Prose the metonym prevails, the chain of events, the plot, successive actions, a sequence of occurrences. (The opposition is not an absolute one, but rather a mark of a tendency).

In fact, Jakobson developed his thought when he was working with autistic and asperger’s-syndrome children. What he discovered was that these kids tended to understand metonymy, but tended to be baffled by metaphor. So, as it were, you could show them a headline that says the White House today issued a statement on immigration, and they would understand that ‘the White House’ was a metonym for the US Government. They wouldn’t assume the actual building was talking (they’re autistic, they’re not stupid) but would, on the contrary, grasp the connection between the US Government and the White House, since the head of the US Government lives in the White House. In this case there’s a logical connection, a conceptual copula, between A and B. But Jakobson discovered that if you said to them Achilles is a lion, they were liable to reply: no he’s not, he’s a man; and if you said Chaos is a ladder they’d stare at you like you were bonkers. Not, of course, that Jakobson’s actual research involved him quoting Game of Thrones to autistic children. But you take my point.

I don’t have hard data, and stand ready to be proved wrong by people who do, but I suspect that SF fandom contains a higher proportion of asperger’s people than society as a whole. To be clear: such a statement is not a judgement. I have several friends on the spectrum, asperger’s-wise, and they’re clever, sensitive and wonderful people, precisely as worthwhile and valuable as people not on the spectrum. I make this observation to ask whether this might have something to do with why my way of defining SF is so marginal to how most of the fans and critics I know see the genre. Mine is an eccentric position, in the strict sense, and I know it: most fans who are happier with a metonymic model of the genre (extrapolation — which is to say, cause and effect, a chain of successive events — and worldbuilding: coherence, links, contexture). It may be they’re right,of course. But that’s not how I define science fiction.

The structure of metaphor as such is the knight’s-move, my favourite manoeuvre in chess. It leads you in a certain metonymic direction, and indeed sometimes leads you quite a long way down that consecutive path, in order to leap suddenly, not arbitrarily, but poetically, expressively, marvellously, in its unexpected direction. It’s the way the carefully worldbuilt society of Asimov’s ‘Nightfall’ falls apart under stellar Sublimity, or the way the intricate anthropological detail of Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness is leavened by actual supernatural foretelling — a.k.a. magic — as a correlative to love, which is that novel’s wondrous theme, wondrously handled. It’s the way the scrupulously rational computational logic of Clarke’s ‘Nine Billion Names of God’ steps, in its last sentence, into amazing impossibilities. It can be the beautifully unexpected outgoing, as when Ellie Arroway enters the alien world-construct at the end of Contact, or it can be the beautifully unexpected homecoming, as at the end of Kij Johnson’s superb ’26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss’. It doesn’t need to happen at the end of a text: it might occur at the beginning (as when Timur’s scouts ride through a wholly deserted Europe in Stan Robinson’s Years of Rice and Salt) or anywhere in the text, actually. It is more affective than rational, more lyric than narrative (though the narrative is usually needful to generate its lyrical affect, I think). It is the hurled bone that turns, unexpectedly, impossibly yet somehow rightly, into a spaceship.

I’ll finish on a personal note. I write, as well as write about, science fiction, and have been doing it for long enough to know that the kind of science fiction I write does not find favour with the majority of SF fans. How I define ‘Science Fiction’ may well have something to do with this: although it’s just as likely that my relative lack of genre success is (Okham’s razor and so on) because what I do just isn’t very good. But this structure I’m describing here as formally constitutive of science fiction is also formally constitutive of the joke, and jokes are very, possibly unhealthily, important to me. The structure of a joke is a knight’s move: it leads you along a particular narrative trajectory only to finish with a conjurer’s flourish of the unexpected. The joke can’t be capped with a merely random or left-field unexpectedness, or it won’t be funny: but the flourish at the end (the, to deploy a term invented by a giant of genre, prestige) must work. Here’s a joke:

A man walks into a library, goes up to the counter and says brightly: ‘I’d like fish and chips, please!’

And the woman behind the counter replies: ‘but … but this is a library.’

The man’s eyes go wide. ‘Oh, I’m sorry!’ he says. Then he leans forward and whispers: ‘I’d like fish and chips please.’

Here’s another: my 9-year old son’s favourite joke, as it happens.

There was once an inflatable boy. He lived in an inflatable house with his inflatable parents. He went to an inflatable school with all his inflatable friends. But one day he took a pin to school.

The headmaster summoned the boy to his office. Shaking his head sorrowfully he said: ‘you’ve let me down, you’ve let the school down, but most of all you’ve let yourself down.’

I’m absolutely not saying that SF needs to be full of jokes. Indeed, on the contrary, successful comedy-SF is very rare indeed (The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide is really the only undisputed classic in this narrow field). I am not talking content, I am talking form; and the point of this form is that the unexpected twist releases a quantum of joy. That’s why jokes are great, and that, although its content is very different, is why SF is great.

So when I call SF a metaphorical mode of art I mean it in that Jakobsonian sense: as a structural or formal constitution rather than anything content-level. And, in the unlikely situation that such a thing should be of interest to you, it provides the key to my own creative and intellectual exercises. Structuralism, metonymic and procrustean, interests me less than various poststructuralist freaks and shakes; irony (though it’s currently rather out of fashion) interests me more than earnestness, play more than preachiness, epiphanies more than consistencies. I think our genre needs more Keatsian negative capability and fewer grids, hierarchies and certainties. SF is in the prestige, not in the setup and the performance, although the setup and the performance are needful for the prestige to come off. SF should transport us or what’s the point of it. At any rate, that’s how I define ‘Science Fiction’.

How I Define “Science Fiction” was originally published in Adam’s Notebook on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I re-read some Dante, in part because I was kicking around the idea that Tennyson wrote his Maud on Dantean lines (you can read the post that resulted from that kickage here). Since my Italian is molto molto rudimentale, that meant pulling up the online Divina Commedia, opening my English translations, and picking my way awkwardly through. Those translations happen (through no very carefully planned-out strategy) to be: the Dorothy L Sayers version of the whole poem, Robin Kirkpatrick’s more recent and not-at-all-bad Penguin Inferno, and Clive James’s 2014 rendering.

Pausing only to note what a great title “Penguin Inferno” would be for a major motion picture, I’ll go on to:

Dates me, that reference.

I’ve always liked reading Clive James’s prose. His writing provokes in me a mixture of delight and professional envy at his technical chops — writing good comic prose is really hard to do, and James writes truly excellent comic prose. His poetry has always seemed to me a lesser achievement, although writing poetry is clearly something that mattered to him immensely. Still, I’ve read a lot of it (the poetry I mean), and acknowledging that comedy isn’t the function of most of his verse, I have found some things to admire in some of it. So when his Dante translation came out in paperback, I treated myself and bought the book.

I can’t say I was able to read the whole thing, straight through, which, I think, is what the book would like me to do. Not for want of trying, either. But I’ve had some long stretches with it. Doing so I’m struck mostly by a kind of mismatch between the stated aims, in the nifty preface, and the actual verse. I feel boorish saying so, actually, since the preface makes very plain that the whole, huge enterprise of Englishing, or Australianing, the Divine Comedy is all bound up with James’s wife, an academic Dante specialist, and a woman James was very open about having repeatedly wronged. The two were separated now, and James was dying (and is now dead), which makes him offering-up this undertaking to her rather moving. And what he says about the difficulty of rendering the original is persuasive. He recalls his wife, from their courtship days, taking through some of the many patterns in Dante’s writing:

One of the first moments she picked out of the text to show me what the master versifier could do was when Francesca tells Dante what drove her and Paolo over the brink and into the pit of sin. In English it would go something like:

We read that day for delight
About Lancelot, how love bound him.

She read it in Italian.

Noi leggevam quel giorno per delitto
Di Lancelotto, come l’amor lo strinse.

After the sound “-letto” end the first line, the placing of “-lotto” at the start of the second line gives it the power of a rhyme, only more so. How does that happen? You have to look within.

This is a simple but wonderfully telling point. James goes on to note how often English translations, by straining for the rhymes at the end of their lines (rhyme being so much harder in English than in Italian) butcher the echt Dantean tone. ‘Dante isn’t thinking of rhyme,’ James says, ‘which is too easy in Italian to be thought a technical challenge: in fact for an Italian poet it’s not rhyming that’s hard.’ He adds:

Dante’s overt rhyme scheme is only the initial framework by which the verse structure moves forward. Within the terzina, there is all this other intense interaction going on. Dante is the greatest exemplar in literary history of the principle advanced by Vernon Watkins, and much approved by Philip Larkin, that good poetry doesn’t just rhyme at the end of the lines, it rhymes all along the line.

I like the thought of this last sentiment very much; and it sets us up to look for this internalised dynamic in James’s actual verse. But to turn to the actual poetry is … look, see, here’re the opening lines of the Inferno:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinova la paura!

Tant’ è amara che poco è più morte;
ma per trattar del ben ch’i’ vi trovai,
dirò de l’altre cose ch’i’ v’ho scorte.

And here’s Clive:

At the mid-point of the path through life, I found
Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way
Ahead was blotted out. The keening sound
I still make shows how hard it is to say
How harsh and bitter that place felt to me — 
Merely to think of it renews the fear — 
So bad that death by only a degree
Could possibly be worse. As you shall hear,
It lead to good things too, eventually.

Those first three lines, including that choppy, wholly monosyllablic opening line ‘at the mid point of the path through life I found’ (that’s an almost robotic stretch of English) read like somebody stumbling instead of somebody getting into their stride. I query the merit in starting a broadly iambic verse epic with two trochees (AT the MID point) followed by a hurrying-to-catch-up anapest (ofthe PATH), starting to settle with two iambs before interrupting the patter with another trochee (LOST in). By the time the reader gets into the swing of things by lines 4, 5 and 6 she can hardly look back on the opening without feeling its awkwardness. Add to that the inversion in lines 7–8, a tic that jars in what is otherwise a confident contemporaneity of vocabulary and syntax: what’s wrong with ‘so bad, that death would be worse by only a degree’? Apart from the rhyme, of course. And the rhyme is not very deftly handled here. I don’t mean the replacement of the terza rima with quatrains: that’s a legitimate tactical decision made by the poet. I’m talking about the greetings-card tweeness of rhyming ‘degree’ with ‘eventualee’. Fiddlededee.

I would also say that going back to the Dorothy L Sayers version has re-impressed me with how solid an achievement that old warhorse is. I note this in the understanding that Sayer’s Dante is not very highly regarded. The worst one can say of it is that it is unashamed of archaism: ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ are awkwardly sore-thumb English renderings of the perfectly ordinary Italian tu, and sometimes Sayers indulges in old-school idioms and inversions of idiomatic syntax in ways that must have been distracting even in the 1950s and which are actively wincing nowadays.

Breathe in me [Apollo], breathe, and from my bosom drive
Music like thine, when thou didst long ago
The limbs of Marsyas from their scabbard rive. [Sayers, Divine Comedy 3: Paradise, 1:19–21]

That aside, her verse is mostly very effective. Here’s the famous opening of Paradiso 2:

O voi che siete in piccioletta barca,
desiderosi d’ascoltar, seguiti
dietro al mio legno che cantando varca,

tornate a riveder li vostri liti:
non vi mettete in pelago, ché forse,
perdendo me, rimarreste smarriti.

L’acqua ch’io prendo già mai non si corse;
Minerva spira, e conducemi Appollo,
e nove Muse mi dimostran l’Orse.

And here’s what Sayers makes of it (her Paradise was completed and edited by Barbara Reynolds after her death, but the impression given in the preface is that the lion’s share of the finished work is still Sayers’s):

O you that follow in light cockle shells,
For the song’s sake, as my ship sails before,
Carving her course and singing as she sails

Turn back and seek the safety of the shore;
Tempt not the deep, lest, losing unawares
Me and yourselves, you come to port no more.

Oceans as yet undared my vessel dares;
Apollo steers, Minerva lends the breeze,
And the nine Muses point me to the Bears.

The only wrong-step here (and, really, I’m being supercritical in saying so) is that ‘light’ as a modifier of ‘cockle-shells’ is a touch ambiguous between flimsiness and illumination — are these sailors following in frail cockle-shells or sailing their cockle shells to follow the light? — a consideration that has more weight than it might otherwise given how important actual and spiritual light is for Dante’s paradise. Otherwise it’s perfectly decent verse; even somewhat better that decent. The way she plays with the internal near-rhyme of ‘shells’ and ‘sails’ in that first terzo (not to mention the ‘cockle’/’carving’/’course’ alliteration) reproduces some of the musical inscape James notes in the introduction to his edition I quote above. And here’s James’s version of those lines, from that very edition:

You sailors in your little boats that trail
My singing ship because so keen to hear,
By now it might be time for you to sail
Back till you see your shoreline reappear,
For here the sea is deep, and if you lose
My leading light just once, then steering clear
Might bring bewilderment. So you must choose — 
Be warned, this sea was never sailed before.
Minerva breathes, Apollo steers, the nine
Muses will navigate me by the store
Of stars.

That’s just … off, I think. Prolix (ten and a half lines to do nine lines’ work), with wrongfooting enjambments and odd phrasing. There’s the weirdness of a sailor navigating by a ‘store’ of stars. Who talks like that? Apart, that is, from poets desperate for a rhyme with ‘before’? And why lose the specific detail of Dante’s named constellations Ursa Major and Minor? Beyond that: ‘you are trailing my singing ship because so keen to hear’ is really not very idiomatic English (to hear what?), ‘By now it might be time for you to sail/Back’ is slack and chatty, and crunches pointlessly over its enjambment; ‘steering clear’ is inappropriately ambiguous between ‘setting a clear path into ocean open’ and ‘avoiding something’, and ‘Minerva breathes’, whilst sticking close to Minerva spira, doesn’t convey that what Minerva is breathing is the breeze that fills the sail, and leaves us with the shadowy sense of Minerva sitting belowdecks somewhere, wheezing. Plus ‘the nine/Muses’ throws out the prosody so sharply it’s almost like the verse twists its ankle at that point.

Another example, again from the Paradiso, since that’s the part I’ve been reading the most, lately. In Canto 14, Dante rises above the sphere of the sun into the sphere of Mars. The canto’s opening simile, quite famous, is also quite tricky to put clearly into English:

Dal centro al cerchio, e sì dal cerchio al centro
movesi l’acqua in un ritondo vaso,
secondo ch’è percosso fuori o dentro:

ne la mia mente fé sùbito caso
questo ch’io dico, sì come si tacque
la glorïosa vita di Tommaso,

per la similitudine che nacque
del suo parlare e di quel di Beatrice,
a cui sì cominciar, dopo lui, piacque: [Paradiso, 14:1–9]

Sayers/Reynolds go with:

Water in a round bowl makes ripples glide
Centre to rim, or back from rim to centre,
As from within ’tis jarred, or from outside.

This image dropped into my mind instanter
When Thomas’ glorious life had said his say;
Like an apt simile it seemed to enter

In likeness of the verbal interplay
‘Twixt Beatrice and him; for she, as suited,
Her pleasure, thus took up her cue straightway:

A bit clumsy, that ‘instanter’ (for the rhyme), and rather creaky with the ‘tis’ and ‘twixt’ and the wrenching of what would work much more effectively as ‘it seemed to enter like an apt simile’. But it gets the image across. James:

The water moves from rim to centre when
A round container is struck from without.
The water moves, when it is struck again — 
But from within — the other way about,
Centre to rim. This proof from science fell
Into my mind the instant that the soul,
So glorious, of Thomas, ceased to tell
His story, because Beatrice took the role
Of speaker, and was pleased to follow thus:

That’s just a muddle. ‘But from within — the other way about’ is worthy of The Stuffed Owl, and its just hard to get a sense from this of who’s banging which bowl and why. I don’t want to give the impression I’m doing whatever the opposite of cherry-picking is, so one last instance. On to Mars:

Ben m’accors’ io ch’io era più levato,
per l’affocato riso de la stella,
che mi parea più roggio che l’usato.

Con tutto ’l core e con quella favella
ch’è una in tutti, a Dio feci olocausto,
qual conveniesi a la grazia novella.

E non er’ anco del mio petto essausto
l’ardor del sacrificio, ch’io conobbi
esso litare stato accetto e fausto;

ché con tanto lucore e tanto robbi
m’apparvero splendor dentro a due raggi,
ch’io dissi: «O Elïòs che sì li addobbi!». [Paradiso 14, 85–96]

Sayers/Reynolds:

That I’d been lifted up I saw by this:
The warm smile of the star, whose burning ball
Seemed ruddier to me than his custom is.

With my whole heart, and in that tongue which all
Men share, I made burnt-offering to the Lord,
Such as to this new grace was suitable,

And ere the sacrificial fire had soared
Forth of my breast, I knew my prayer had sped
Accepted and found favourable accord;

For such bright splendours, and so ruby-red
Within two rays appeared, “O Eloi,”
I cried, “that giv’st them thus the accolade!”

So that last word is not much of a rhyme, and there’s a stiffness here and there in this version. James: ‘I saw myself moved’

Up to a plane exalted even more,
Of whose high ranking I was given proof
By Mars. More rose-coloured than before
It now seemed. With my heart not held aloof,
But fully yielded, I employed the tongue — 
Befitting all the loving care and grace
That lit the favours I was now among — 
Of one and all when making, in that place,
The burning sacrifice to God, and still
It burned my breast though I knew it was
Accepted, and propitious. For the spill
Of splendour was so shimmering because
Of two beams, and so roseate, I said,
“Divine Sun, that so glorifies this!” As …

I’ll stop there. Fourteen lines for twelve lines’ work; some padding (‘not held aloof/But fully yielded’ doubles up its point not because Dante does, but because James needs an -oof rhyme). Rose-coloured works in Italian (and French) for pinky-red, but not in English, where roses (as Lewis Carroll knew) might just as easily be white; and ‘more rose-coloured than before/It now seemed’ is a pointless and therefore distracting inversion of the natural word order. ‘The spill/Of splendour was so shimmering because/Of two beams …’ starts well, but pisses it all away in its last four words: that clunking ‘because’! That what-are-we-doing-woodwork-now? double beam!

The most damning thing about this Jamesian Dante is that, unlike his smooth onflowing prose, it really doesn’t lend itself to long bouts of reading. It clogs and turns about and stalls, or at least that’s how I have found it.

Dante and Clive (Live) was originally published in Adam’s Notebook on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.