Fantastic Metropolis

Reflecting on my year’s reading, I’ve realized that whenever I’m forced to curtail the time I allocate to reading, the first items to be sacrificed tend to be those most recently published, which then get added to my to-be-read pile. I’m not yet ready to advance a reason for this prioritization, although I expect it has something to do with my sense that what I need at any given moment may not necessarily be the work that is hottest off the presses. Still, I regret this, since the lag puts me out of step with the au courant. And yet, being out of step produces a distinct effect: by the time I get around to reading work that’s a year or three old, such hype as may have attended its first appearance has faded (since the flow of hype shifts focuses swiftly), leaving me with a less-mediated read. And also when I read older work, I often find myself considering whether it has become dated, in the sense of being past its sell-by date: something that can happen with astonishing rapidity to not only blockbuster fiction and trendy nonfiction but also to academic work. Is this a result of the publishing industry’s fostering a built-in obsolescence of its products and of a publish-or-perish oversupply of scholarly work? Or does it have to do with the constant shortening of our cultural memories and attention spans, an epiphenomenon, perhaps, of an accelerating rate of change? Whatever the case, the very idea of textual obsolescence is a sobering thought for any writer. This essay aims to celebrate the work I’ve read with appreciation this year, though, so I see no need to dwell on it

My pulse always quickens when I come upon articles that help me think about difficult, seemingly intractable problems that interest me. Two such pieces stood out this year. Rachel Hall’s “’It Can Happen to You’: Rape Prevention in the Age of Risk Management” (Hypatia 19,3; Summer 2004) delivers a knockout blow to the notion that making women fearful and timid is the best means of rape-prevention, as well as to the conceptualization of rape as inevitable (and even natural), and argues that “the performative recurrence of horror in public representations of sexual violence naturalizes rape in a manner that denies men’s ability to stop raping women.” Besides offering fresh ways of thinking about this problem, Hall’s article reminded me that something like a quarter of a century ago more than one (male) graduate student insisted to me that rape was hard-wired into men and that therefore we should accept it as inevitable. I didn’t understand the argument then; but Hall’s article makes me wonder, now, if such an naturalization of violence isn’t the reason that after thirty years of concerted feminist effort most people still seem to think that teaching women to be fearful is the only possible strategy for preventing rape.

In a special issue of differences (14, 3; Fall 2003) honoring the late Naomi Schor, Monique Roelofs examines gendered valuations in Hume’s aesthetic theory and Barthes’ degendering of the detail by way of two details in a Vermeer painting. I find aesthetics difficult to think about, though as a writer and a feminist I’ve long been concerned with the problem of why women’s creative productions are all but ignored by critics and historians. “A Pearl’s Pleasure and Perils: The Detail at the Foundation of Taste” opens new space for feminist thinking on the subject.

I’ve long been fascinated by the process known as reading and so continually gorge myself on work that explores that process. This year I especially enjoyed three articles that focus on the changing history of how Jane Austen’s novels have been read and how that history helped shape and develop particular audiences for the novels: “The Divine Miss Jane: Jane Austen, Janeites, and the Discipline of Novel Studies”; “Austen’s Earliest Readers and the Rise of the Janeites” by William Galperin; and Mary A. Favret’s “Free and Happy: Jane Austen in America,” all of which appear in Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees, ed. Deidre Lynch (Princeton University Press, 2000). The Janeites were fans of Austen, comparable, as Johnson notes, to late twentieth-century trekkies, constituting a “reading community whose practices violate a range of protocols later instituted by professional academics when novel studies emerged—dogmas holding, for example, that you cannot talk about characters as if they were real people” (30). One particular community, “principally….an elite corps of publishers, professors, and literati,” exercised considerably more influence on the judgment and interpretation of Austen’s novels than the “middlebrow” communities of Janeism managed to do, though as fan communities tend to do, every Janeite, regardless of the nature of their fandom, seems to have adopted a fiercely proprietarial attitude toward her work. The intensity of passionate conflict described in these articles suggests that ways of reading widely beloved texts will always engender quarrels (if not outright interpretive war) among reading communities that value very different qualities in the texts they adore.

Two additional pieces of literary history, addressing the subject of the writer’s position rather than reading communities, especially struck me. Elizabeth W. Harries’ “’Out in Left Field’: Charlotte Smith’s Prefaces, Bourdieu’s Categories, and the Public Sphere” (Modern Language Quarterly 58:4; December 1997) begins by examining how the cultural field of eighteenth-century fiction had “its own rules for the woman who writes for publication, rules that differ sharply from those that govern male writers” and the “propitiatory dance that publication required of” (471) novelist Charlotte Smith (because she was female), and then observes how Smith transformed private experiences and opinions into a public form. Harries quotes Sartre to describe the result: “Words wreak havoc when they find a name for what had up to then been lived namelessly.” (472) Marilyn Butler’s “The Purple Turban and the Flowering Aloe Tree: Signs of Distinction in the Early-Nineteenth-Century Novel” (Modern Language Quarterly 58:4; December 1997) delivers a decisive reminder that definitions of literature that insist that it is “centrally about character” necessarily exclude most literature written before the nineteenth century. Butler notes that the novel as it was emerging around 1800 was extremely close to the travel narrative. (Often the same people wrote in both genres.) What the two, overlapping genres shared in common was “the attentive documented study of human beings within their social and physical environment or their habitus.” One of the century’s most celebrated writers, Daniel Defoe, for instance, wrote works now classified as novels—including Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders—as a paid spy, “not merely to simulate factual truth (verisimilitude) but to reproduce it.” (480) Butler’s article is full of fascinating surprises; I recommend it as a fun read to anyone interested in the development of the Anglophone novel.

The fragmentation and breakdown of political discourse in the United States continued apace in 2004; living in that country as I do, I could not help but be drawn into somber reflection and concern about the relationship between political discourse on the one hand and civil liberties and democratic processes on the other. Gore Vidal’s mannered essay on the framing of the US Constitution, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson (Yale University Press, 2003), gave me some help in my thinking. Vidal treats George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton critically but respectfully. His skill is such that he renders them not as icons, nor as caricatures, but as three-dimensional persons—even as he focuses primarily on their political moves and how and why the Constitution came to be designed at all. (Vidal bluntly reminds us that the Constitutional Convention was convened following Shay’s Rebellion because men of property decided they needed an instrument of law to protect their interests from those who owned no property.)

Another book-length essay, Steven Shaviro’s Connected: or What It Means to Live in the Network Society (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), also gave me a lot to think about. Shaviro meditates paragraph by paragraph, with impressive specificity, on both science fiction and current social and technological realities to their mutual illumination. In addition to his insightful discussions of numerous sf texts, plain-language explication of theory, and riffs on copyright law, privacy, flexible accumulation, the fall of the rate of profit (and much, much more), Shaviro spices his prose with gossipy tidbits. He cites an April 2000 New York Times Magazine piece by Andrew Sullivan, for instance, in which Sullivan “rhapsodizes” about the wonderful effects of shooting up biweekly with testosterone but admits that he missed the deadline for his article because it fell three days after one such injection, such that he “couldn’t bring [him]self to sit still long enough” to work on it. Shaviro reports that Sullivan apparently finds this a negligible price to pay, holding as he does that “the Big T” brings out his true manhood, making him able “to feel things no woman will ever feel to the degree that I feel them, to experience the world in a way no woman ever has.” (200). When at the end of Connections Shaviro takes the stance that “science fiction does not claim to be reportage,” he proposes that “science fiction is about the shadow that the future casts upon the present. It shows us how profoundly we are haunted by the ghosts of what has not yet happened.” (250)

In Anecdotal Theory (Duke University Press, 2002), Jane Gallop, a literary theorist, brings explicit personal experience, often emotionally fraught, into her painstaking examinations of how narratives (particularly anecdotes, which are rooted in reality) not only provide examples for illustrating theoretical arguments, but also “knot theory to the here and now.” (5) Gallop hopes, she says, to “find the seductive fissures in theory,” to “make theorizing more aware of is moment, more responsible to its erotics, and at the same time, if paradoxically, both more literary and more real.” (11) Although in the front and back matter she places emphasis on how the anecdotal serves theory, I found her essays interesting for their insights into how narrative structures shape even the most abstract discourse.

For those with an interest in the history of sexuality who are able to bracket gynephobia in the same vein as that found in Boccaccio’s Il Corbaccio, I recommend the newly translated La Cazzaria: The Book of the Prick by Antonio Vignali (Routledge, 2003). This edition comes with an excellent scholarly essay by Ian Frederick Moulton. This sixteenth-century dialogue, was written in Siena around 1525, circulated in manuscript among a small group of humanist aristocrats until someone published it without the permission of its author. The author was then forced into permanent exile. La Cazzaria is unusual in celebrating anal sex; and it is unique in exploiting the metaphor of the sovereign body to satirize the dire political situation then prevailing in Siena through tales in which personified “Cocks,” “Cunts,” “Asses” and “Balls” are at war with one another (each representing a major faction in Siena’s civil strife). The text explicitly mocks medieval scholasticism by dividing the dialogue into a series of questiones, which are noted prominently in the margins. A few examples will suffice to give a sense of the text’s flavor: “Why, as Soon as Man Has Shit, He Looks at the Turd”; “Why People Who Can’t Take It Up the Ass Are Called Uptight”; “Why Jerking Off Was Invented.” As Moulton points out in his introduction, thanks to the Counter-Reformation, such a work would have been unthinkable only fifty years later.

Every now and then I have the pleasure of reading an argument I find admirable or even fascinating but implausible. This might happen with a creative, well-constructed conspiracy theory, a piece of imaginative political analysis, a psychobiography, or literary criticism where a fundamental premise or assumption is in error but the thinking otherwise brilliant. And so I found with Gilles Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty, which Zone Books has published with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs in a single volume titled Masochism (1999). After reading Venus in Furs and other novels by Sacher-Masoch, Delueze observed a set of points marking significant differences between the eroticism in the novels of Sade and those of Sacher-Masoch. The most important of these differences is that the desires that each oeuvre expresses are not complementary. Sade’s sadists and Sacher-Masoch’s masochists, in other words, would never find sex with one another in the least bit satisfying. Deleuze does not explain why he takes Sacher-Masoch’s novels as depicting the definitive, Platonic form of erotic masochism and Sade’s novels as depicting the definitive, Platonic form of erotic sadism. He reads the novels of both men not as works of fantastic literature but anthropological studies of existing sexual practices—and also as accurately portraying psychological formations that can be scientifically explained by psychoanalytic theory. What Deleuze has to say about the works of Sade and Sacher-Masoch is both fascinating and insightful. But since very few novels of either masochistic or sadistic eroticism by other authors—and, perhaps more importantly, very few reports of actual practices of sadomasochism—conform to Deleuze’s schematic deductions, I must conclude that Sacher-Masoch and Sade’s fantasies can be taken as templates only with a great deal of qualification and careful consideration of the difference between fantasies written to get their authors and readers off and actual erotic practice. Perhaps the most interesting point Deleuze makes is that both Sade and Sacher-Masoch are essentially masturbators assisted in their fantasies by a partner who takes no pleasure from the congress. For all those whom Deleuze considers true sadists and masochists, then, sexual partners must be paid or involuntary participants with no erotic interest in the encounter; given that few women ever purchase sexual services, one would almost have to conclude, then, that few women ever experience either sadistic or masochistic eroticism: a conclusion I just can’t wrap my head around. Anyone interested in pornography in general or deviant sexuality in particular will find Coldness and Cruelty thought-provoking. After reading it I furiously jotted notes for exploring the many ideas it stimulated and wished I had the time to pursue some of the questions it raised—for instance, whether all erotic fictions involving elements of either sadism or masochism are (unconsciously, perhaps) read from either a sadistic or a masochistic perspective, rather than for the sadomasochistic perspective characterized by the “a child is being beaten” fantasy Freud elaborated. Would one characterize The Story of O, for example, as serving (or even exemplifying) a masochistic eroticism, or a sadistic eroticism? And what, exactly, do fantasies written in established narrative forms have to do with real-life sexual practices? The questions Deleuze’s book raises are more likely to be found in a consideration of the relation between fiction and reality than in essentialist delineations of particular sexual formations.

Deleuze’s book of interviews, Negotiations (Columbia University Press, 1995), which I also read this year, complements Shaviro’s Connections. The interviews here cover some (but by no means all) of the areas of Deleuze’s work. In admiring Foucault, Deleuze says “Foucault, unlike the linguists, thought that even language was a highly unstable system. A thought’s logic is like a wind blowing us on, a series of gusts and jolts. You think you’ve got to port, but then find yourself thrown back out onto the open sea, as Leibniz put it. That’s particularly true in Foucault’s case. His thought’s constantly developing new dimensions that are never contained in what came before. So what is it that drives him to launch off in some direction, to trace out some—always unexpected—path? Any great thinker goes through crises; they set the rhythm of his thought.” (94)

In “Family, Sexuality, Gender, Art” (Genders 39; 204) Jo-Anne Berelowitz interviews Vivien Green-Fryd about her new book, Art and the Crisis of Marriage. Fryd comments that artists are generally taken to “exemplify non-traditional and experimental lives that defy the norm,” seeming to “exist outside the realm of the ordinary.” After having asked herself what is at stake “in considering artists within the context of marriage,” Fryd says that she came to recognize “that the older notions of marriage, which entailed the imposition of patriarchal authority, the repression of female sexuality, the control of male sexuality, and the occurrence of unplanned pregnancy, and the newer ones, which were yet to be fully forumulated but which included affection, comradeship, and mutual sexual gratification, affected the art and lives of both artists and their spouses.” Later in the interview Fryd discusses the vexed issue of Georgia O’Keeffe and Jo Hopper’s acting both “as the passive model for the active patriarchal male artist and as an active agent in her own subjectivity” as an artist. The interview made me want to read Fryd’s book.

Moving on to fiction: I especially enjoyed three anthologies this year: So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy ed. Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004); Polyphony 3, ed. Deborah Layne and Jay Lake (Wheatland, 2003); and The James Tiptree Award Anthology 1, ed. Fowler, Murphy, Notkin, and Smith (Tachyon, 2004). About the latter I want to emphasize to everyone who has read Flying Cups and Saucers, the first Tiptree award anthology, that despite the title, this book does not duplicate the contents of the first anthology, as I assumed it did until I actually looked inside the book. Nor does this anthology pick up where the first anthology left off, but reprints mostly recent stories (with the exception of Kelly Link’s “Travels with the Snow Queen”). Despite the confusion (which the editors compound by pointedly avoiding all mention of the original volume), this book is rich with essays by several stars of feminist sf as well as fine fiction, including the first print version of Karen Joy Fowler’s controversial, Nebula-winning story, “What I Didn’t See.” I recommend also both issues of Steve Pasechnick’s new fantasy magazine, Alchemy: the first two issues are beautifully produced and feature beautifully written fantastic tales.

My recommendation for specific stories include Lisa Goldstein’s “Finding Beauty” (F&SF Oct-Nov 2004); Andrea Hairston’s “Griots of the Galaxy” (So Long Been Dreaming); Lois Tilton’s “The Gladiator’s War: A Dialogue” (Asimov’s June 2004); Claire Light’s “Pigs in Space” (McSweeney’s No. 14)—hard sf that revisions Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations”; Alex Irvine’s “The Fall at Shanghai” (Alchemy 1); Amber Van Dyk’s “Sour Metal” (Alchemy 2); and Ellen Klages “Basement Magic” (F&SF May 2003).

This year saw the publication of an unusually large number of collections by excellent short-fiction authors. As a result, I have a huge, tottering stack of them I will happily but slowly work my way through in the months (and maybe even years) to come. So far I have read only two, Ian R. MacLeod’s Breathmoss and Other Exhalations (Golden Gryphon, 2004) and Victoria Garcia’s Unspeakable Vitrine (Claw Foot Bath Dog, 2004), both absorbing, intelligent reads. I also took immense pleasure in Carter Scholz’s The Amount to Carry (Picador, 2003)—encountering there stories I read for the first time as well as several I’d read three or four times before. This is fiction that wears very well indeed. The cleverest, most entertaining collection I read this year was Jane Stevenson’s Several Deceptions: Four Novellas (Houghton Mifflin, 1999). The delicious opening story, “The Island of the Day Before Yesterday,” begins with the sentence “In retrospect, I am strongly inclined to blame the whole thing on Umberto Eco.” A vain, social-climbing academic, the narrator has visions of pulling off a postmodernist coup through his dastardly machinations but instead renders himself a laughing-stock. The stories in Leslie What’s The Sweet and Sour Tongue (Wildside Press, 2000), which explore areas of family relations and religion that f/sf seldom takes heed of, deeply moved me. What’s narrative perspective is infused with sensitivity as well as a sense of humor, and her images are simultaneously quotidian and startling.

What’s novel, Olympic Games (Tachyon, 2004—excerpt) ventures into the territory of satirical religious sf—rubbing shoulders with the likes of James Morrow and Stanley Elkin—using postmodern manifestations of the ancient Greek gods, Zeus and Hera, to do so. Since it has been centuries since anyone has worshiped Zeus and Hera, What is able to avoid asking critical questions about any particular extant religion and can make her gods as absurd or obnoxious as she chooses without offending anyone. As with The Sweet and Sour Tongue, What uses humor here to serve serious and emotionally tender purposes. The reader may howl with laughter at the thought of the vapid, self-centered Hera being impregnated by a cockroach and giving birth to a cockroach-human hybrid named Igor, but the implied reference to the famous cockroach named Gregor is poignant rather than hilarious, particularly since Igor is sweet, doomed, and lovable.

I doubt I need to draw attention to these since they’ve received considerable attention from reviewers, but Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (Bloomsbury, 2004), Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004), and Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw (Tor, 2003) (which has just won the World Fantasy Award) were all fine reads. Earlier in the year, when I still had time for reading, Eileen Gunn’s description of Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles beguiled me into trying The Game of Kings, which in turn seduced me into reading the remaining five volumes. About this I will say only that although I was intensely aware of how manipulative Dunnett’s narration is, I lost more than one night’s sleep to the addiction. (Gunn, that wretch, likens the experience of reading this series to a love affair: and so it was—one that was short, violent, and intense.) A couple of months later, I dipped into a second historical series, Mary Gentle’s four-volume The Book of Ash. I found this an interesting but frustrating read. Gentle records nearly every breath her hero takes, an impressive feat of narrative that occasionally becomes a little like watching paint dry. Since one can’t help but be aware that the author is playing the reader, if one wants to have one’s guesses about what kind of fiction the novels are confirmed or denied, one must read every sentence lest important details appear for only a fleeting moment as the paint continues to dry… On the other hand, I absolutely loved Vonda N. McIntyre’s Nebula-winning sf novel The Moon and the Sun (Pocket Books, 1997), which many reviewers have mistakenly labeled fantasy. McIntyre does a beautiful job getting the setting—the Court of Louis XIV —right and depicting the powerful tensions between science and religion in seventeenth-century Europe. (Admittedly, her protagonist’s experience as a young woman composer resonated powerfully with my own experience more than three decades ago.) A bona fide fantasy, Nina K. Hoffman’s A Fistful of Sky charmed me, first for the imaginativeness and psychological sophistication of her treatment of magic, second because she did not give in to the genre-pressure to transform her heroine (through magic or dieting) into a sleek, sexy fox, and finally because the novel did not throw itself away on an easy ending.

I’d like to conclude by praising the three most impressive novels I read this year. The first of these, Shirley Jackson’s The Bird’s Nest, first appeared in 1954. Jackson ’s protagonist suffers from multiple personality disorder; interestingly, Jackson shows the protagonist’s aunt and doctor as developing not only relationships with her various personalities but also echoes of such splits within themselves The novel is just brilliant.

William Gaddis’s last novel, Agapē Agape (Viking, 2002) is a haunting tour de force offering a glimpse for a brief passage of time inside the mind of a seriously ill intellectual. The narrator searches helplessly through his papers (haplessly knocking stacks of them over and spilling water over piles of unopened mail) as his mind (perhaps affected by the prednisone oxycodone he habitually takes) makes connections, sifting continually through a vast accumulation of ideas, facts, and insights, virtually unable to synthesize them into a coherent, consistent whole. At the end, it all comes down to “Age withering arrogant youth and worse, the works of arrogant youth and the book I wrote then, my first book, it’s become my enemy, o Dio, odium, the rage and energy and boundless excitement the only reality where the work that’s become my enemy got done and the only refuge from the hallucination that’s everything out there is the greater one that transforms you…” (95-96) Gaddis’s last work is sublime.

Samuel R. Delany’s new novel, Phallos (Bamberger Books, 2004), is a graceful jeu d’esprit exuberant with gorgeous, scintillating prose. The title takes its name from the putative text of a novel that one Randy Pedarson of Moscow, Idaho claims to have synopsized. (Pedarson’s synopsis is virtually the text of Delany’s novel.) The synopsis quotes liberally from the putative novel and is buttressed by extensive speculation on its origins and a series of entertaining footnotes, but the synopsis focuses primarily on the plot of the putative (apparently pornographic) novel, which is set in the second century of the Christian Era and involves an endless search for the jeweled phallos of the statue of a nameless god believed to hold the secrets to acquiring vast knowledge and wealth. The plot, rich in symbolic significance, is pure Delany. To keep from spoiling the story, I’ll say only that Delany’s Phallos is a joy.

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L. Timmel Duchamp’s most recent publications are Love’s Body, Dancing in Time (sample story), a collection of short fiction, and The Grand Conversation: Four Essays. An ample selection of her essays and a few of her stories can be found at her website.