Fantastic Metropolis

“I’m interested in history’s sub-texts. The genesis of a fiction might, for me, lie in the question: what were the real causes of the Second World War—the political rationalisation of Lebensraum, or a hidden psychological agenda (hidden even to the Nazis themselves) to literalise certain dark, repressed, libidinous energies? Similarly: what are the sub-texts of many contemporary moral panics—do they suggest that an ancient, murky, a-historical and ‘mythic’ impulse is likewise struggling to realise itself, and that the ‘panicked’ general public are merely its unconscious vectors? I’m fascinated by the idea that we all live secret histories, secret lives, and that history, and contemporary reality, is actually something other—something darker, but more meaningful, more mythic—than it appears.”

Having meandered onto the subject of moral panics, I ask Calder about an issue that resurfaces in several of his stories, the fear of violence towards and by children. What provoked his imagining of the boys’ towns in Cythera: was it a satirical representation of a deep-rooted fear of the threat children pose to social stability and the dangers they face from potential abusers?

“More than anything, Cythera is about hysteria. I wrote it in Thailand in 1995-6, when I’d lie in bed late at night and listen to the BBC World Service, and in particular, to reports concerning London and England. For a while, they were dominated by stories that focused both on child criminality and the threat to children from abusers. A nation that, on the one hand, seemed to be increasingly worried about a supposed outbreak of viciousness amongst children was also becoming increasingly protective of childhood innocence—the hysteria surrounding the Bulger case was, of course, the sine qua non. The two attitudes seemed to converge into an overriding concern about control: control of children’s minds, their movements and ultimately, of course, their bodies. This in turn seemed to reflect the mindset of a nation that felt it had lost control, was drifting in a godless, capricious universe, and felt that discipline needed to be re-established in order to recapture some lost notion of security and concomitant ‘innocence.’

“I immediately re-read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible—perhaps the greatest play ever written about hysteria and the role that society sometimes affords children in justifying its paranoia. Then, as now, it often seemed to me that the world would be destroyed, not in some nuclear winter, or by overpopulation or something more exotic, like an asteroid strike, but by fantasy: a pandemic of mass hysteria. Freud was perhaps the definitive writer of the last century, and perhaps our own century, too, in recognizing that the central element to modern man and society is fantasy. And this surely makes the role of the fantasist an important one. I’m talking about fantasy here as a serious exploration of society’s shadow-side, of course, the dark terrain of its psychological underworld, and not as simple escapism.”

These excursions into the interior of that dark terrain have earned comparisons with the past masters of symbolist fiction, and led to the construction of the term ‘cyber-decadence.’ Decadence is a dangerous path for any artist to tread, whatever their accomplishments. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray was received with incontinent enthusiasm in America, while a notorious review in the London Daily Chronicle in 1890 described it as “a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.” Words that came to haunt Wilde when repeated at the 1895 trial that led to his imprisonment.

More than a century after Wilde’s death, decadent art may have lost its overt ability to shock, but it still elicits a strong response from critics and readers. So while Calder’s devotees see the books as witty, transgressive examinations of the human condition, his detractors tend to be appalled by the same ‘mephitic odours’ that offended the olfactory sensibilities of the Daily Chronicle critic.

Our discussion of the continuing allure of the themes, tropes and symbols of decadence provokes a reflection on the history of Calder’s attraction to the movement.

“I read a lot of Decadent writing, and books about the Decadents, when I was a teenager: Baudelaire, the French Symbolists, Huysmans, Wilde, and art books like Philippe Jullian’s ‘Dreamers of Decadence.’ It wasn’t merely the literature, or the art, that I enjoyed so much, but the pose, too, I suppose. And when you’re in your teens a pose is, after all, so important! When I was sixteen I spent a few weeks in Paris with a friend: it was an incredibly hot summer, and we’d saunter around in our seventies’ velvet suits, floppy black hats and walking canes. At that age, you’re supposed to look a bit of a prat, so I mention all this without too much embarrassment. But there is something of a painful awareness that the attention we received was likely from the ghost of Baron Charlus rather than the cute little French girls we desperately hoped to take back to our flea-bitten hotel. Over the years, however, the furniture and poses of Decadence have given way to a concern with the meat of Decadence—that is, its transgressive agenda, an aesthetic pose that is all about a critical opposition to what society deems ‘normal’ but which, under a David Lynch-like microscope, is revealed to be a ‘normality’ writhing with corruption.”