Pardon This Intrusion

by John Clute

Genres: Literary Fiction; Magical Realism; Science Fiction

Synopsis

Pardon This Intrusion gathers together 47 pieces by John Clute, some written as long ago as 1985, though most are recent. The addresses and essays in Part One, "Fantastika in the World Storm", all written in the twenty-first century, reflect upon the dynamic relationship between fantastika - an umbrella term Clute uses to describe science fiction, horror and fantasy - and the world we live in now. Of these pieces, "Next", a contemporary response to 9/11, has not been revised; everything else in Part One has been reworked, sometimes extensively. Parts Two, Three and Four include essays and author studies and introductions to particular works; as they are mostly recent, Clute has felt free to rework them where necessary. The few early pieces - including "Lunch with AJ and the WOMBATS", a response to the Scientology scandal at the Brighton WorldCon in 1987 - are unchanged.

Release date: November 24, 2016

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

There are forty-seven addresses and essays in this medium-sized book with a very long title. Forty-one of them were first published between 1985 and 2011, though most are recent; six are published for the first time. Published or unpublished, they are included here because they continue to ring a bell with me: this is not a Collected Essays. A large number of pieces, extending from the mid-1960s until very recently, did not get past the door: some said things I no longer think are worth thinking; some were crap; some were so ancient they’d need walkers to get across the big sidewalk into the Here; some were commissioned articles written so impersonally I couldn’t remember doing so; some I lost.

The rest is a mixed bag that means a lot to me.

Out of all the pieces that were ultimately matriculated into Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm, only a few – the seven making up the “World Storm” section of the book – directly argue the premise implied by the title: that fantastika is planetary fiction; that the planetary crisis we now face is fantastika’s home territory; that from the get-go fantastika has been structured to transgress against the amnesia that our owners call honey. Of these seven pieces, “Next” was written in 2001, just after 9/11 and has not been revised from its prior appearances in print; the others were mostly given as addresses to symposia or conferences, and have been reworked on publication and here. On pages 13-14 within, “Pardon This Intrusion” (oral version 2004) suggests some cues with which to judge the significance of the Frankenstein Monster’s first utterance – see also the frontispiece to this book, which reproduces page 113 of volume two of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818). “Fantastika in the World Storm” (oral version 2007) gives some background context for its title. “Truth Is Consequence” (oral version 2010) treats all fungibles like utopia as death on wheels. “And Then I Woke Up” is previously unpublished.

So it goes.

Part Two is called “General Pieces” and they are. Most of them rest within the saddle of the arguments suggested in the first part, but do not pretend to advance them directly. But the world storm blows through everything in the book – even, tentatively, through an early piece like “Lunch With AJ and the WOMBATS” (1987), unretouched here – which should come as no surprise, for we are all in the storm together, and everything we write is shaped by the storm. Everything else in Part Two that was previously published has been revised; some pieces have been revised more than once. Part Three contains some essays on writers I felt strongly about (Joan Aiken, William Mayne and Howard Waldrop) or was intrigued by despite myself (Thomas Burnett Swann). Part Four is full of introductions. The first five of these, written for Interzone anthologies between 1985 and 1991, have again, like other early stuff, been left untouched. Everything else in Parts Three and Four has been through the mill. And that’s the lot of them. I wrote most of them hard, and have tried here to fix bits that were never hard enough, or now seem to have softened out of shape.

Nothing collected here was knowingly written to industrial standards, though I think some earlier essays were peer-reviewed. I’ve excised a lot of repetitions throughout, and hope I got rid of enough of them. Two pieces – “Next” and “What I Did on my Summer Vacation” – were first reprinted in an earlier book of mine, Scores: Reviews 1996-2003 (2003). Everything else has been collected for the first time. As the current volume contains no reviews, revisions have generally been made without signalling them. Nevertheless, when I wanted to insert [CLEARLY ANACHRONISTIC COMMENTS] into passages they would otherwise covertly disrupt, I placed them in loud italic caps between square brackets and [NOW YOU CAN’T MISS THEM]. I know a little of this sort of intervention can go a long way, and hope I’ve not been too generous to my daimon, who is something of a badger.

Roger Robinson saved me from forgetting how to make this book, and he made this book. Judith Clute designed the cover and read the book backwards and forwards, and then did so again, and saved it. Liz Hand applied delicate jiu jitsu nudges of approval, or not, and saved it. Andrew Robinson did production and design, and made it scan. Leigh Kennedy did the index, again superbly, and now it’s sorted. Pardon This Intrusion is a paper boat in a real storm, I feel it scudding out of reach, like any book. May it find pardon. May we all. Vale.

John Clute,London, April 2011

in Nebula Awards Showcase (2002)

Writing at the end of September 2001 is writing afterwards. The nature of sf – like all our ways of making art – must necessarily change along with the world, in order to address a terrible new intimacy between works of imagination and the reality of things. This intimacy does surely exist, an intimacy that is somehow shaming; for an anxiety of shame (a phrase I’ll return to) grips our imaginations when we sense reality aping our words. There is, perhaps, nothing new in this. Long before 11 September 2001, sf had already begun to make the new century, had already begun to cavitate the real into its own image. The disappearance into thin air 900 feet above the ground of 6000 human beings, this brightness falling from the air of America – with all the unendurable turns of horror that succeeded – had already been grasped in the claws of our minds. Our minds at “play”. [THE FIGURE OF 6,000 DEATHS GIVEN HERE, CURRENT WHEN I WROTE THIS PIECE, WAS EVENTUALLY REDUCED TO 2,752, A CHANGE WHICH AFFECTS NOTHING SAID BELOW.]

This needs some unpacking.

I think we need a couple of centuries of running start. Here is the argument, in rough. I’ve offered it before elsewhere, and it takes off in any case from books like José B Monleón’s A Specter is Haunting Europe: A Sociological Approach to the Fantastic (1990); so a fast run-through should be enough. The argument begins with the premise that the birth of the genres of the fantastic – they include Gothic, horror, sf, fantasy, supernatural fiction – is intimately connected with the becoming visible of the engine of history, round about 1800, when the future began. Genres began when the creation of geological time and evolutionary change began to carve holes in reality, which became suddenly malleable; when, for the first time, the human imagination (as in the French Revolution) could conceive of altering, by fiat, both human nature and the world we inhabited. The future could now be almost literally perceived, though not understood. We felt this in our bellies. From this point, from about 1800 on, a new kind of anxiety began to haunt the Western World: a fear that the engines that we made to turn the world might shake us off, that we were both responsible for that engine, and usurped by it, that Progress was not only a process we might predict, but a Dark Twin grinning at us out of tomorrow. That the world, which had been a palm of God, had become a raft adrift.

The works which began to create the dominant genres of entertainment in the twentieth century – by writers like Horace Walpole and Mary Shelley; E T A Hoffmann and Heinrich von Kleist and Ludwig Tieck; Victor Hugo; Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Plan Poe; Nikolai Gogol and Charles Nodier; etc – were deeply stress-ridden assays of the new world. Hauntings, doubles, dark twins, revenants, untermenschen doppelgangers who digest the siblings who live in the light, Frankensteins who bring Promethean fire to the masses who then rise, clockwork men who shadow real folk: all these revealing stigmata of a profoundly anxious literature did not only express the obvious: they allayed the fears they dramatized, the deep consolations of Story displaced out of our bellies the hysterias endemic to a world changing, as it seemed, ungovernably.

This task of prophylaxis has continued until now, each of the genres of the fantastic handling the Anxieties of the Engine in varying manners. Horror treats the future as something which is already behind us, so that its Dark Twin dramas of digestion and desecration can be understood as already lived through by its readers; Fantasy treats the present world as a mistake created by the engine of history, a mistake which must be refused through the creation of counterworlds and secret gardens as respite from the harrowing of the Shire; sf – which comes to maturity only in the twentieth century – treats the changing world as something which may be made to work, a brief we advocate, an egg we hope to instruct how to hatch.

We come to the century we now inhabit.

And here’s the rub. Horror and Fantasy fade into VR, which makes them sf. But sf remains a genre designed to allay anxieties about a world we could not control. Its visions of making the world work are still grounded in fears, two centuries old by now, that the world had become an engine we could not drive. But in 2001, these visions no longer simply compensate us for our mortal helplessness; they turn the world. Sf’s unique capacity to advocate is now an engine capable (for we have become creatures of nearly infinite power) of shaping, in the mind’s eye, which is all that counts, the planet itself. Sf writers have now the capacity to marry the Word to the World, to transform the planet by giving the planet its marching orders.

So sf contains in itself the portents of terrible change. In September 2001, it seems very terrible to think that the sentences we write – the mission statements we issue – shape the world we write about, that what we write seems to be something like that which terrorists do, for sf novelists and terrorists have always treated the world as a story to be told. In 2001, that story is a story which is not only told but is the case. It is as simple and awful as that. We are the world. We would never literally create an act of terrorism, but The World Trade Center is the kind of sentence we write. This shames the imagination.

This shame – this anxiety of shame – is cognate with that felt by survivors in 1918, and in 1945. It is a shame which may suggest silence. But the difference between then and now is that we human beings, who lack the wisdom of gods, now have the strength of gods. We are the Word. We cannot afford to fall silent, not sf writers, not makers, not givers, not anyone. Everything depends on us, from now on. We are the Word. We are all going to die if we do not say something good.

Canary in the Coalmine

Keynote address for Graduate seminar, New Paltz, New York, 29 April 2004. Revised for publication. Here further revised.

1.

This evening the subject on hand, which is the literature of the fantastic, will be approached through the description of a moment of joy which came to me recently as I was reading In the Forests of Serre (2003), one of a series of brilliant fantasy novels that Patricia A McKillip has been writing for the past thirty years. After leading up to that moment of joy, whose implications for an understanding of the literatures of the fantastic (or fantastika) I hope to make clear, I’ll try to give some sense of the region and remit of those literatures, which are, I strongly believe, the salient literatures of our new century. And then I will stop, until the next day.

McKillip’s novel is a tale of fantasy, narrated in an impersonal dark serene voice that is both chilling and reassuring, a voice typically heard in stories where the tale itself, as in most fantasy, is central, and – though it may initially be difficult to decipher – is ultimately intended to be believed. It is the tone of voice of a servant of the truth. In the Forests of Serre, like much fantasy, is told as though the narrative will continue until the truth is found. Serre, we learn, is a land riddled by interacting tales and conflicting magics, where nothing, it seems, can be taken for granted. A young woman is sent into the woods and through the forest to honour her arranged marriage with a prince heartbroken by the loss of his first wife and child; she is accompanied by a wizard whose own torn heart has an unravelling effect on reality. The heart of the land itself breaks, and the hearts of witches and wizards and ogres and queens and princes and firebirds all break. All break, and then mend. And gradually the reader, sitting at the feet of the wise teller of the tale, begins to learn that the only way to understand that tale is to understand that everything told in it turns out, in the end, to be literally the case. Every time a heart breaks, something does break, and there is a literal breaking of the world. Every mending is a mending of the world. Like all great fairy tales, like the literatures of fantastika in general, McKillip’s novel is, in the end, about what it says it is about. In the end, the fantastic is very simple: what we see is what we get.

We just have to concentrate upon the world in order to see it.

After the accidents of image are swept away, the residue of Serre is substance: and as with all great fantasies that substance lies, finally, naked before us. Words mean what they say here, as Samuel R Delany argued years ago, distinguishing between the fantastic and what he called the mundane literatures. In fantastika a cigar is what the story says it is. Sometimes it is only a cigar. But if something that resembles a cigar opens its mouth for us, we have entered a Portal, not a dream which suggests psychotherapy; if we drown in contaminants, as the Congo nearly drowns Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, we have been swallowed by Cloaca, not by the spent cigars of imperialism. The Congo is the thing itself. It is not primarily an extractable image for darkness – it is the darkness. In fantastika, when we say X is really Y, we do not mean X is really like Y. When a heart breaks in Serre, we see the abyss and the severed heart. That, it may be, is also the secret of Charles Dickens.

So all we have to do in order to read In the Forests of Serre, and any other great fantasy, is to try to see what we are given, and to pray that what lies broken before our eyes – and so much does lie broken before the eyes of any reader of fantastika in 2004 – can be healed. What we also have to do – because In the Forests of Serre is an example of that genre of fantastika we call fantasy – is to obey the tale: which means that, in the end, we do not ironize our reading, we do not condescend, we do not doublethink the telling. When we accomplish this simplicity, we may find that story itself supplies all the doubleness we could dream of.

Which brings me to the moment of experienced joy: because it was a moment when the tale was obeyed, both by the characters within the book, and (if I am correct about the reading protocols necessary for the proper comprehension of fantasy) by the reader as well. The wizard who attends the princess to Serre, whose name is Gyre, and who is accompanied therefore by spiraling winds, has been momentarily enchanted by a singing firebird, which is also a woman. He follows it/her into the house constructed by the great witch Brume out of bone, where he regains his senses just as she is about to make him into soup.

I quote:

He said to her, “Let me go. I don’t want to fight you”.

“Then don’t”, she suggested unhelpfully, unhooking the steaming cauldron to replace it with another, larger and empty … “Just get in here for a moment and let me see how you fit”.

“I’ve never climbed into a cauldron”, he answered, remembering some tale of the queen’s. “Show me how”.

She gave him a long opaque look out of her lenses. Then she loosed a burble of exasperation and bundled her skirt around her knees. Her broad feet, splayed like bird claws, seemed almost too big to clear the rim, [but] somehow … she got both feet into the cauldron.

“There”, she said, squatting on the rim. “Now you do it”.

“You don’t fit all the way in. How could I?”

“I fit”.

“You don’t fit”.

Her tongue smacked off the roof of her mouth; spittle flew. Muttering about wizards from foreign realms who couldn’t find their brains with a map, she hunkered herself down into the cauldron, then crowed at him, “I fit!”

Most of us who have read a fairy tale of two – that is, one hopes, all of us – will know what happens next: the wizard will trap Brume in the cauldron, and make his escape. This indeed happens. Whirling like the wind (as his name predicates) through various metamorphoses in order to do so, the wizard Gyre does make his escape. The passage, as a whole, gives pleasure; but I selected for the sake of one single sentence, the sentence which brought me joy, which made my hair feel as though it were standing on end. This is the sentence:

She gave him a long, opaque look out of her lenses.

That gaze of the witch, face to face with her fate, lies I think at the very heart of fantasy. It would be precious of me to suggest that the whole of fantastika, over the two hundred years of its increasingly conscious existence, could be unpacked from that one sentence, but I think I might suggest that the gaze of Brume is of a kind only freely found in that literature.

There are two general reasons for arguing this.

In the first place, it seems clear that Brume recognizes herself in a fashion inherent to fantasy, as a figure transparent to a tale which is telling her: because she witnesses herself as being dictated, as having become an Utterand, a Dictate of the Cauldron of Story, which we might also call the Theatre of Memory. The opacity of her gaze of realization is, I think, a kind of tact – both on her part, within the story, and on the part of the teller, or implied narrator: both, at this instant, seem, to my reader’s eye, to have become magically merged: who can tell the dancer. Her tact – the tact of the Utterand – is to play the game of story, for to challenge the wizard’s invocation of an old tale at this point would have been to break up her lines to weep. As Yeats goes on to say later, in “Lapis Lazuli”, sages do not do that. They play the game of art, of story. They confess nothing. “Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay”. Brume’s “long, opaque look” is the look of a sage refusing to break up her lines to modernize – or to post-modernize – herself. This is the tact of fantasy. It is the tact of fantastika as a whole. It is a gift of the storied to be told.

So we are free to think of her gaze as pure obedience. We are also free, I think, to understand it as manifesting the kind of literal deadpan transparency to story that marks all world literatures – except perhaps the tradition of the mimetic novel in the Western World, a tradition which managed to retain, here and there, though mostly in restricted circles, but well into the last century, some vestiges of its argumentative prestige, now lost for good. It is a literal transparency which the novelists of this new century, who must negotiate constant transformations in their subject matter, have taken to like fish finally allowed back into the pond.

Which leads us to the second reason for concentrating on this gaze: Recognition itself. The gaze of the witch Brume is a gaze of Recognition and witness of a sort which I have argued in the past is central to much “full fantasy”, In the model I constructed for The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), in an attempt to give some sense of the typical narrative course of full fantasies, a model which was somewhat sophisticated in a piece called “Beyond the Pale” in 2002 [IT IS PRINTED BELOW, P. 127], I suggested a four-part sequence, to which – not very seriously perhaps, but the joke was feeling – I attached, in something like the manner of Northrop Frye, seasonal analogues. The four parts or moves are Wrongness/autumn, Thinning/winter, Recognition/spring, and Return/summer. Of these, the move of Recognition is central. It is the moment at which Thinning and amnesia begin to lift from the tale, when the protagonist discovers what story is Dictating her (only characters like Brume already know), when the Land itself remembers its true name, and thunder causes gentle rain to fall and the world to green. Brume’s moment of Recognition is of this sort, I think.

But let us stretch Recognition a little. Let us call Brume’s version Recognition One. And let me suggest here that the whole of fantastika is bound to a larger (and vaguer) pattern, which we will call, for the moment, Recognition Two. This form of Recognition depends on the argument that fantastika is uniquely bound to the passage of Time, bound to the huge, and hugely perilous, transformations of the world since 1765 or so, when History as we now live it began. According to this argument, the genres of fantastika take their sometimes ludicrous shape from exposure to that changing world; the anxieties fantastika awakens and (occasionally) allays in readers are anxieties natural to a species whose habitat has become problematical. The melodramatic gaze of the fantastic, into horrors or futurity or otherworlds that are healable, is, in the end, a gaze at the world itself, as it desiccates beneath us. Fantastika is anxiety as true sight: not the sleep of Reason but the dawning. It is the gaze of Recognition of the canary in the coal mine when the air changes. What we see is what we get.

(It is also the gaze of those who watched on television the fall of the Twin Towers on the eleventh of September 2001. For that is also a gaze of recognition and witness [SEE “AND THEN I AWOKE” BELOW, P.32].)

The literatures of fantastika are not metaphors.

They are the tale itself.

Pardon This Intrusion

Keynote address for Interstitiality Conference, New Paltz, New York, 1 May 2004. Revised for publication. Here further revised.

1.

The day before yesterday, I delivered a talk to the seminar Bob Waugh and Ernelle Fife had organized for the SUNY graduate program here in New Paltz. Heaven forfend repeating at length what I said then: but I do want to say a bit more about the implications of a term I used in my description of certain effects Patricia A McKillip achieved in her recent fantasy novel, In the Forests of Serre (2003). That term – Recognition – I’ve been using for about a decade now to describe a significant moment in full fantasy texts – like Tolkien’s Ring or Peter S Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (1968) – when the characters in the drama abandon denial, when they begin to shed the amnesia that had been cloaking them, begin to understand that their sight had literally been occluded from the Real (the term occluded is, I know, cod gnosticism; but it’s as close as I’m likely to get). Slowly or suddenly – sometimes so very swiftly that the transformation can seem to be a kind of trompel’oeil – they remember who they are, who they always were; they remember the story that tells them; they see the Land whole, which itself begins to Return to them. Everything is washed in the light of Recognition.

They remember the War. They remember they are alive.

From McKillip’s fine novel, I selected a moment of Recognition, when a terrifying witch named Brume hears and obeys the words of an old fairy tale – the familiar moment when a witch is tricked into climbing into a cauldron to demonstrate to her potential victim that he is small enough to fit inside (and thence be cooked) but as soon as she’s inside the pot her victim slams the lid on her. What was significant here was not so much our (lower case) recognizing of the old tale, but an instant of held breath in its telling, just before Brume looses “a burble of exasperation” and knuckles down to her fate (though she does escape being cooked). She is attempting to get the wizard Gyre into her cook pot, and he has just asked her to show him how to fit inside. In the pause she clambers into the pot in obedience to the law of the story that is telling her, Brume gives “him a long, opaque look out of her lenses”. And it seems the world holds its breath, only seemingly opaqued in silence: for the heart of fantastika is glowing through her gaze like Galadriel.

That “opaque look”, I suggested the day before yesterday, was a gaze of Recognition. Here I would emphasize again that Brume’s Recognition of who she is and how she must act is what one might call naked: fantastika naked: there is no irony here, no excuse, no agenbite of inwit, no scumble of metaphor. Story, at this level, is literal. The Stories of fantastika do not shift from world to the proscenium arch of metaphor, but the other way round. At their deepest, magically and perhaps mysteriously liberated by the formularies they adhere to, they are capable of achieving something like a literal gaze at the given.

To repeat, Brume’s gaze upon the cold grammar of the real story in which she lives is a gaze permitted through the formulary of genre – the example just quoted being a segment of story that of course far precedes the slow surfacing of fantastika toward the end of the eighteenth century. It is a gaze that could not have been found in its original iteration as a fairy tale, any more than it could be found in George Eliot. It is a gaze (I think) similar to the gaze of Wozzek, in Alban Berg’s opera, for the naked intensities released in this opera are precisely made possible through the intricate arcs of formula which structure the actual music. [IT IS THE GAZE OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN AS THE ARCHIPELAGO THAT GIVES HIM AMERICA BEGINS TO BETRAY HIM IN THE PERSON OF TOM SAWYER; THE GAZE OF THE EPONYMOUS PROTAGONIST OF JAMES PURDY’S MALCOLM (1959).]. True freedom, as Igor Stravinsky once said, more or less, comes when you obey the rules.

The rule of fantasy is: what you see is what you get.

This release of vision is, I think, easily demonstrable. Here are a few sentences from some recent reading. The first is from Gob’s Grief (2000), an admirable novel by Chris Adrian that hovers at the edge of the fantastic, but remains, I think, mundane; the second is from In the Forests of Serre.

Adrian first. Walt Whitman (here fictionalized) is speaking :

His heart tore [he says, referring to the death of his mad brother], and I wonder if it was not the accumulated burden of madness and woe that tore his heart apart as hands might tear a paper bag.

Now McKillip: The wizard Gyre has found an ancient book, which may open his eyes to power.

All [Serre’s] beauty would be his”, [says the implied narrator,] its mystery, its treasures and secrets. He [Gyre] felt his own heart try to change shape again, grow to encompass such marvels.

Adrian’s language is vivid, but the image of the paper bag is what I just described as a proscenium arch: something draped over the real: a frame of reference: an eloquence. In the end, the paper bag is, as it were, ontological froth, exudating nought. It cannot become real. McKillip’s two sentences are not, in fact, markedly eloquent at all. But they are, in fact, literal. They constitute a literal description of a recognizeable world. The wizard’s heart does in fact change shape, as does the world he commands. And wisdom will not come to him until he literally returns to himself.

And one final example of the word made flesh, from the final pages of Elizabeth Hand’s [THEN FORTHCOMING] novel, Mortal Love. We are at a point when the earth has, in two or three senses, moved. Nothing will be the same again. One of the protagonists looks up and sees

a flare of blinding emerald-white in the center of the eastern horizon like a tear in the world.

The first thing to notice here is that the simile, “like a tear in the world”, does not in the end work as a simile at all, but as an utterance of literal reality; as a movement of language from image to world: because the earth has moved, and there really is a tear in the world this point in Hand’s complex tale: a Portal through which a character will move, departing from us.

The second thing to notice is that the buried pun – for we can also read or say “like a ‘teer’ in the world – turns out to be a form of language designed to reveal two realities in the same Recognition, each of these realities being as real as the other, and similarly dangerous, because, at this point in Mortal Love, the world does “really” weep for a loss it is about to incur. Severance is a – a teer – in the fabric of reality. They are literally the one thing.

It is a moment of understanding not available in any non-fantastic text.

2.

And now to speak, very briefly, about danger. The kind of Recognition I’ve been talking about is, of course, dangerous for those who experience it: it can rip the face off. But there is another kind of Recognition, which the final pages of Mortal Love come close to expressing directly. It is something I’ve been trying to fix into words for some time, though I’m not sure I really know how to describe what I want to mean here, but maybe even a cartoon try at saying what I’m trying to get at will spur someone else into song.

Let us begin at the beginning of things:

A sweet elderly man is sitting in a remote cottage in the middle of a mountain meadow, in the middle of what passed for a state of Nature in the heart of Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This “natural” world “boasts” moments of sublimity – great heights, picturesque abysses, sunsets – but always under the ultimate control of a rational husbandry. Shepherds throng paved prominences. Meadows self-mow. The man – though he is clearly of noble birth, a m