Fantastic Metropolis

The politics of narrative, the narratives of politics, and the intelligibility of texts preoccupied me this year, and since reading tends to be serendipitous, I seemed constantly to be bumping into essays that helped me to think about these subjects. These included Ann Kibbey, “Gender and the American Ideology of War,” (Genders 37), Joan Wallach Scott, “Reverberations” (differences 13,3 Fall, 2002), Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel H. Nexon, “Representation is Futile? American Anti-Collectivism” (in Jutta Weldes, ed., To Seek Out New Worlds: Exploring Links between Science Fiction and World Politics, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and Iris Marion Young, “Feminist Reactions to the Contemporary Security Regime” (Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 18, 1 Winter, 2003). Some of my thoughts about these can be found on my Night Shade Books message board (particularly my “politics of narrative forms” thread). Peter Yoonsuk Paik’s “Smart Bombs, Serial Killing, and the Rapture: The Vanishing Bodies of Imperial Apocalypticism” (Postmodern Culture 14,1) looks at “post-ironic” narratives of imperial apocalypticism popular among far-right wing fundamentalist Christians in the US since 9/11; although I had some quibbles with it, I found it thought-provoking. But of all the political essays I read this year, Edward W. Said’s brilliant “Dignity, Solidarity, and the Penal Colony”, written with such stern ardor and blazing passion that I found myself imagining it causing my printer to burst into flames, most moved me. Lest anyone wonder whether I’ve abandoned my usual feminist interests, let me recommend, also, Celia S. Stahr, “Elaine de Kooning, Portraiture, and the Politics of Sexuality” (Genders 38) and an astutely Bourdieuan consideration of underwear by Wendy A. Burns-Ardolino, “Reading Woman: Displacing the Foundations of Femininity” (Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 18,3 Fall 2003).

Thoughtful interviews have always engaged my attention, but I’ve lately been struck by the rapid development of the print interview genre, encouraged presumably by the proliferation of Internet venues. Most interviewees offer interesting replies only the first few times they are interviewed; thereafter, they tend to repeat the same words and phrases in interview after interview, never straying beyond a small selection of ideas they are prepared to elaborate, such that collections of interviews of a single person tend to be disappointing, excepting those rare instances when the interviewer is well-prepared, imaginative, and skillful. Fortunately, there are exceptions. The best known of these, of course, is Samuel R. Delany, who has made an art of using stupid questions as a springboard for serious discussion. Edward W. Said, I discovered this year, must be counted another such artist of the interview. The 450 pages of interviews found in Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (Vintage, 2001) span a quarter of a century and not only address the scholarly, academic, and political issues of passionate interest to Said, but also afford Said’s readers an opportunity to trace the shifts and developments in his thinking. Josh Lukin’s expert, informed interview of mathematician and science-fiction writer Chandler Davis (Fifties Fiction: Paradoxa, No.18) gave me another kind of pleasure, that of glimpsing the long view of a seasoned political exile of keen eye and generous spirit as he reflects on his experience as a leftist sf writer in the US during the McCarthy era. For those interested in the production of scientific knowledge, I recommend Hélène Mialet’s “Reading Hawking’s Presence: An Interview with a Self-Effacing Man” (Critical Inquiry 29, Summer 2003). Mialet’s “reading” of her interview of Hawking offers fascinating insight into the generalization that “all scientists are in some sense handicapped insofar as they are unable to think without being attached to a set of instruments, machines, and laboratories through which their intelligence is distributed. This is why Hawking, contrary to the image generally presented of him, does not have a mind free from all worldly constraints; it is precisely because he suffers from a real handicap that I have discovered that he is more incorporated than any other theoretician.” Mialet observes that “in a certain sense, Hawking’s handicap becomes a window both on the representation of how science and scientists work and on the actual presence of science.” Hawking’s physical difference, then, rather than making him an exception, provides the means for understanding how all scientists work. And finally, of the many literary interviews I’ve read this year, I found the wide-ranging “Birnbaum v. Charles Baxter” especially well worth my while, not least because of his explication of what he calls “hypothetical masculinity.”

I enjoyed a number of collections and anthologies of essays this year. William Gaddis’s The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings (ed. Joseph Tabbi, Penguin, 2002) suited my taste for tart, pointed wit. “We who struggle to create fictions of various sorts,” he writes in “How Does the State Imagine? The Wiling Suspension of Disbelief,” “must regard the state with awe, for the state itself may be the grandest fiction to be concocted by man, barring only one.” (123) Two collections by feminist cultural theorists gave me particular pleasure: Janet Wolff’s Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism (Yale University Press, 1995) and Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York University Press, 2000). I especially appreciated Wolff’s “Death and the Maiden: Does Semiotics Justify Murder?” as it grapples with our culture’s circulation of woman/death tropes, examining narrative and ideological strategies of gender at work in musical, literary, visual, and filmic texts to do so. Felski’s essays historicize modernist and postmodernist culture and insist that the cultural theorist attend to the particularities of the heterogeneous public spheres rather than reading every artistic and cultural production as aimed at a mass, homogeneous audience. Kate Bernheimer’s Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales (Anchor Books, 2002) offers a feast of essays by twenty-eight writers reflecting on how fairy tales have impacted their “feminine selves”; many of these essays resonated with my year’s preoccupations.

Christine Brooke-Rose’s Invisible Author: Last Essays (Ohio State University Press, 2002), despite its disconcerting title (Brooke-Rose is, after all, still alive and writing) is both painful and exhilarating. In these essays, Brooke-Rose reveals the “keys” to the lipograms underlying each of her experimental novels. She does so ruefully, since such “keys” tend to be welcome from innovative men writers only. “A man experimenter,” she explains, “once he does attract attention, is innovative, bold, original, and so on, in articles that show a knowledge of development from precedents; a woman experimenter is just, well, an experimenter, the term often slightly pejorative, without further exploration. Indeed, any noticed or imagined development from precedents is mentioned only for dismissal as imitation. Sacred cows are mysteriously needed but must be male. Any female who left ‘keys’ would be laughed out of court or ignored, as I shall be, no doubt.” (4) Ignored, is my guess. The Dalkey Archive Press has been publishing Brooke-Rose’s fantastic and science fiction novels for years, but in the circles I move in, she’s sadly invisible. I end with recommending to all Jane Austen aficionados the book-length essay that felt almost illicitly pleasurable to read: D.A. Miller’s Jane Austen: The Secret of Style. This slim volume takes up the related questions of voice and style in fiction by way of considering Austen as the epitome of Style. Its insight into the gendered politics of reading Austen issues from an underrepresented angle of vision in Austenophilia: that of the gay man. Early in his essay, Miller distinguishes two possible positions for the male reader–”a foolish and a clever. The foolish one has evidently fantasized ‘being’ Jane Austen–being the woman she was–but ends up only being the object of ridicule in a quasi-Austenian comedy; while the clever one, more intelligently bent on ‘performing’ Austen–on writing that comedy–mocks, scorns, disowns the very name of Jane Austen, and so contrives, anonymously and in secret, to carry on her work.” (6) Austen’s work, he asserts, “most fundamentally consists in dematerializing the voice that speaks it.” (7) Austen, Miller tells us, is the only Anglophone author who has ever succeeded in doing so.

An unusually large portion of the short fiction that came my way this year could be characterized as politically inspired. WisCon’s Guests of Honor, China Miéville and Carol Emswhiller, both chose to read intense, moving stories inspired by the US’s twelve-year war against Iraq. “The General,” the story Emswhiller chose to read, I later read for myself in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, and I could almost hear her voice inside my head as I did so. Another strong Emswhiller story, “Boys,” appeared in SciFiction. (January, 2003); it shares Deena Metzger’s quest for “taking the war out of men”–but comes to different conclusions than Metzger’s novel does. The anthology, Politically Inspired: Fiction for Our Time, edited by Stephen Elliott (San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2003), has several good pieces (and a few lame ones). My favorites include the good-natured “The President’s New Clothes” by Anne Ursu, in which we see that Dubya would make an extremely successful eleven-year-old were he to happen to exchange consciousness with a little boy; Jim Shepard’s “Dade County, November 2000,” a story I would not have read politically absent its title; Elizabeth Tallent’s “Eight Hundred Pages,” a story about desire, ghosts, and trying to make one’s body remember; and the elegantly illustrated tale in verse, “The Vampires of Draconian Hill” by Brian Gage and Von Do:

The sun could destroy vampires roaming the night—
A sun that is hidden from toddlers’ sight.
Instead they stare blankly at glowing blue globes—
A gift from the dead that is placed in their homes.
Its beauty transfixed upon all those who stare—
It lulls them with hypnotic somnolent fare.
When they look to it, they see not the dead,
But charming old statesmen—no fangs in their head. (193)

Every year I seem to find a Kelly Link story that I absolutely adore; this year I found “The Canon” in Say… #2, a tale in which men and women are fired out of cannons but “don’t travel to the same place.” I’m grateful to editor Ellen Datlow for reprinting Chan Davis’s “It Walks in Beauty” (SciFiction, Sept 2003). This story first appeared in 1958, sadly adulterated by its editor, as Davis reveals in his interview with Josh Lukin. The anthology Fantasmas: Supernatural Stories by Mexican American Writers is in the “Borderlands” tradition first made prominent by Gloria Anzaldua. Its stories, by Kathleen Alcalá, Daniel A. Olivas, and others, forge the conventions of traditional Mexican American storytelling, folk religions, and pulp fiction into ghost stories “with irony, affection, and an eye toward their aesthetic value.”

I read Argentine Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial, tr. Ursula K. LeGuin (Small Beer Press, 2003), as a collection, only to be informed when I tried to recommend the story titled “Concerning the Unchecked Growth of Cities” for the Nebula that the book is in fact a novel. I am convinced that given the will, one can read almost anything as a novel and therefore suspect I could assemble these stories into the shape of a novel in a second reading; however one reads this book, it teems with fascinating stories and beautiful images. Rebecca Brown’s The End of Youth (City Lights, 2003) voyages into a territory of memory and perceptions that comes into existence only after the deaths of both one’s parents. Sheila Heti’s The Middle Stories (McSweeney’s Books, 2002) variously startled, unsettled, and delighted me. Home, in these stories, is often a place that is not; I can only describe them as Raymond Carver meets Franz Kafka meets Muriel Spark. On the last day of 2003 I purchased Michael Swanwick’s Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures (Tachyon Publications, 2003), carried it a half-block to the Café Allegro, and devoured almost all of it with my first caffe latte. I loved every word of it, as I imagine most habitués of Fantastic Metropolis would, too.

I read (or reread) a number of good novels this year. Nalo Hopkinson’s magnificent The Salt Roads (Warner, 2003) towers above all of the rest.

Blues sister
                 soul
Throwing W
                 O
                    R
                        D
                            S
Sharp
         As vinegar to the tongue (305)

Honest and vivid, joyous and grieving, formally innovative and erotic, Hopkinson’s prose bursts upon the senses in full four dimensions; as all great novels do, this one shows us something profound about the human spirit. The novels I reread this year include Deena Metzger’s The Woman Who Slept with Men to Take the War Out of Them (1981) (my essay on it can be found here) and Anna Kavan’s brilliant work of surrealism, Ice (1967). I loved Shirley Jackson’s haunting Hangsaman (1951), which I refused to read as a story about a young woman’s descent into schizophrenia (as most critics insist on doing). I enjoyed David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), though afterwards I found myself grumbling a bit about some of the narrative choices Markson made. Christine Brooke-Rose’s Textermination (1991) is the voracious reader’s dream (or perhaps nightmare)–a delicious, frequently hilarious romp in which thousands of fictional characters from works by Homer through Brooke-Rose (imagine Emma Woodhouse and Emma Bovary as seatmates on a plane) flood into San Francisco for an event resembling the MLA intended to bolster the existence of literary characters in a world infatuated with television.

William Gaddis’s Carpenter’s Gothic (1985) impressed me tremendously. Just about any writer who tried to put so much ideological speech in their characters’ mouths would almost certainly face accusations of being a polemical ideologue using literature for didactic ends. Gaddis, though, pulls it off beautifully. Rikki Ducornet’s The Jade Cabinet (Dalkey Archive Press, 1993) is as mysterious and conspiracy-ridden as Carpenter’s Gothic, but its style is rich enough to not only accommodate the crazed sensibility that must necessarily imbue a bitterly personal enemy of Charles Dodgson but also support the recognition that “memory is a cabinet of chameleons and the mind as unstable as the moon.” Both Kathryn Davis’s The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf (Knopf, 1993), the tale of a cross-dressing Danish composer and the woman she chooses to complete her last opera posthumously, and Zoe Landale’s The Rain Is Full of Ghosts (Tesseract Books, 2000), a ghost story involving another Danish expatriate, perform the arduous work of mourning in precise, textured prose. Jeff VanderMeer’s Veniss Underground (Prime, 2003) retells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice with an energy and brio of imagery that catapulted me breathlessly through the novel: I had no choice but to read the entire work in one sitting. I also read Patricia Duncker’s The Deadly Space Between (Ecco, 2003) in one sitting, because its habit of constantly offering new tropes for reading its story teased me deliciously. Is this a story about a vampire? A werewolf? A Dr. Moreau? Or an alien disguised as a human. Could it be a new telling of Frankenstein? A pact-with-the-devil story? Or a ghost story? It amused me to discover that it is possible to read a story without knowing which tropes are appropriate (and thus without every clearly deciding its meaning). Needless to say, that discovery only further complicated my thinking about narrative forms, intelligibility, and politics.

So much for 2003.

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L. Timmel Duchamp’s first collection, Love’s Body, Dancing in Time, can be ordered directly from Aqueduct Press.