Fantastic Metropolis

This fascination with the ‘meat’ of decadence has led to the creation of a dazzling array of flawed characters, people with self-destructive tendencies, people at odds with the worlds they inhabit. Then there are the surreal aberrations of accepted notions of technology, gender, sexuality, social organisation… I ask Calder what draws him to these ‘damaged’ characters and what attracts him to the notion of the perverse?

“Another interviewer said he couldn’t take to Frenzetta because he found its central characters so unlikeable. I don’t actually think Duane and Frenzy are particularly unlikeable—I’m biased of course—but it’s not necessary for fictional characters to be likeable. That is a kind of backdoor way of introducing a moral argument for art. It’s only necessary that they be interesting. At best, they should cast a spell on the reader and draw him or her into their world. We don’t generally care to read about happiness. The Devil really does have all the best tunes. We want drama. Conflict. Blood and sweat. Art is Dionysian, and if my heroines, or muses, are rather maenad-like, then my heroes are their votaries, and so am I.

“Perverted is from the Latin pervertire, meaning ‘to turn’ or ‘to turn upside down.’ To turn the world upside down—that certainly fascinates me, in terms of overthrowing the established order of things, or indeed, paramount reality. Freud argued that the perversions are monstrous and terrifying ‘as if they exerted a seductive influence; as if at bottom a secret envy of those who enjoy them had to be strangled.’ The perverse—that is, going against the grain, taking the left-hand path, choosing fantasy over reality, play over what is socially useful, pleasure over work—seems key to all artistic endeavour. The realm of the erotic is the foundation of the world. The ‘perverse’ characters in my books, the champions of the perverse, if you like, are opposed to, or at war with, those whose dark, psychic necessities have become oppressive, destructive and cruel because repressed and literalised instead of turned into play, art, or finally, love. The psychotherapist Thomas Moore has pointed to ‘a kind of love not rooted in relationship. It is unstable and unreliable and yet love all the same.’ I’d like to think that some of my protagonists explore, and discover, different kinds of love, and that, though strange, and sometimes violent, it is a love more intense, and in a sense truer, than conventional modes of affection.”

So is Calder suggesting a moral foundation to his baroque, grotesque and erotically charged narratives?

“My moral stance is to oppose the ‘moral’ stance. I’d characterise myself as a libertine writer. I believe fiction, the whole imaginative process, should be free from societal constraints—both external constraints and the internalised, self-censorship mechanisms that society often relies on to control its dissidents. We happen to live in a Sadeian society, but one that doesn’t know, or understand, its own nature. Repressed, fearful, it literalises and externalises its dark side through laws, wars, prisons and panics. Literalism is poverty of the imagination, the inability to live through chthonic myth, art and dream. I think it’s ethical to oppose this literalism, this savage, false innocence, through fantasy. And since part of my fictional project is to unveil unconscious motivations, that is, the secret life that goes on in society’s deep cellars, my narratives often have a tendency towards the dreamlike and surreal.”

Possession, Transformation, Strangeness

This rejection of social and cultural coercion, together with Calder’s searingly satirical vision of authoritarian capitalism in Cythera, leads me to speculate that his fiction may be informed by an anarcho-syndicalist critique of contemporary modes of social and political organisation. But, it turns out, I’m way off beam, and the craziness of trying to cram a writer so fascinated by notions of flux and flexibility into a political category soon becomes apparent. A literary libertine Calder may be, but a political libertarian?

“I’ve never been called an anarcho-syndicalist before! I think what would make me an unlikely candidate for election to their exalted ranks is the fact that I don’t believe that human beings are fundamentally good—I believe them, instead, to be both fundamentally good and fundamentally evil. I do oppose all forms of exploitation and control. But I also recognise that the human psyche is hardwired in such a way that it yearns for domination and submission, and there’s not much we can do about it except come to understand ourselves.