Fantastic Metropolis

I have a distinct image of myself at age eight, occupying a large upholstered green chair of nubbly early fifties vintage, “lost” in a book. Sometimes my memory has me sprawling in that chair with my scrawny stick-figure legs dangling over one of the arms. Or it has me lying on the floor with those same legs propped above me on the cushion, my toes curling or my legs scissoring in the air, soles clapping smartly together. Or even sitting up properly with my infant brother warm and heavy in my lap sucking up a bottle of formula. But in every memory I have of that chair, I am reading. I remember reading, in that chair, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for the first time. And Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons. And Little Women. And countless Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Bobbsey Twins mysteries. And biographies of famous women, which because they often tended to conclude with the subject’s death, sometimes made me cry.

I also read at night under the covers with a flashlight. Scratching up the money to buy batteries posed a constant challenge to my deviousness and ingenuity. So many people I know cop to having read under the covers with a flashlight as a child that I now imagine children all over the world, hunched over in the dead of night, unwilling to exchange the magic to be found in a book for the mundane oblivion of sleep. When my mother rearranged my bedroom furniture with the bed next to the closet door, I had the luxury of reading for hours every night by the light of the closet. The instant I’d hear a parental hand on the doorknob to my room, I’d close the closet door (with the light still on), shove my book under my pillow, and play possum. I knew that once the secret of my middle-of-the-night reading were exposed, my parents would likely figure out a way to keep me from ever experiencing that particular illicit pleasure again. And I couldn’t have that.

I recall vividly the occasion on which my first-grade teacher took the entire class to the library and I not only acquired my first library card, but beheld, for the first time, the glory of shelves holding more books than I could (at that time, anyway) ever imagine reading. Recently, Zoran Živković’s “The Night Library” evoked the recollection of a book I had read when aged seven or eight about a “bookworm” who, “lost” in the book she is reading, fails to notice that the library is closing for the night. The very idea enchanted me: to spend the night alone with all those books! The protagonist didn’t have to go hungry from missing supper because on raiding the librarians’ drawers she found chocolate, the perfect food for any adventure. And when her adventure was over, her parents took an indulgent if nominally scolding attitude. The only obstacle to this bookworm’s pleasure, in fact, proved to be herself. If I’m correctly recalling the story so many years later, as the evening wore on she became scared and miserable long before she figured out how to get herself rescued.

In spite of the girl’s wimping out on me, the prospect the story opened before me itself inspired many hours of pleasurable daydreaming. I knew that under similar circumstances my parents would not be so understanding at my “pulling such a stunt.” And I also knew that were I to be locked in the library, I would simply call my parents and ask them to get me out. The story’s scenario lay far beyond the reach of ordinary reality, for it violated my sense of what is profoundly.

Which is why, of course, I loved it.

I must have been in about the sixth grade when my mother asked the librarians to give me access to the adults-only section of the library, a tantalizing set of shelves that filled the mezzanine level directly behind the librarians’ main desk. Once I gained access to the adult section, my mother took to borrowing my library books, which felt odd and almost perverse to me. Throughout childhood I experienced reading as a private pleasure evoking every manner of imaginative thought and fantasy. The very idea that my mother might have been experiencing the same private pleasure as I did unnerved me. I did not understand then that because we brought such utterly different experiences and imaginative tendencies to the texts we shared, our readings probably bore only a slight resemblance to one another.

It is probably because I experienced reading as a strictly private activity that it never occurred to me that my grandmother, who was on a long visit to us at the time I first read Jane Eyre, might actually have an acquaintance with that book. I had never in my life actually seen her reading anything other than a newspaper or magazine. Whenever she visited us, my grandmother, a 4’ 8” woman of some three-hundred odd pounds, shared my small double bed. The day being a Saturday, I had awakened early for the express purpose of reading while everyone else in the house was still sleeping. When I came to the scene in which Mrs. Reed locked Jane in the Red Room, I began sobbing. My grandmother woke, took one look at the title of the book I was reading, and said “My land! That a girl your age should be reading a book like that!” Played up by a guilty conscience, I had no doubt that she meant that the spectacle of Jane’s rebelliousness was wicked and likely to make me even more rebellious than I already was. But how, I wondered, did she know what kind of book it was and that its heroine was rebellious? Because I had until then experienced reading as a strictly private pleasure, I had no idea that literature constituted a cultural heritage and tradition in the same way that music did. This I discovered only later, when we began reading the canon in high school because it was “good” for us (rather than fun). And why should it have occurred to me? Having discovered that sentencing me to grounding in my room simply gave me more time and privacy to devote to the pleasure of reading, my mother always made a point of confiscating my library books and card when punishing me.

When I did finally come to understand that the official canon was intended for a public rather than a private reading experience, I realized that those classmates in my high school English classes who professed to hate reading fiction of any sort had no idea of a difference between public and private reading. Public readings were intended to produce a fairly uniform, shared text. Students might come up with their own quirky ideas about these texts, but certain interpretations were more correct than others, and many interpretations were just plain wrong. Shakespeare meant this, here, and that, there. And to master the public reading, you had to learn what those authorized meanings were. Private imagination and emotion were beside the point. People who had never known the pleasure of private reading thought reading was only about authorized meanings set in stone that had to be learned as though they were state capitals or multiplication tables.

My experience of music had taught me that knowledge of music theory and history greatly enhanced the pleasures of performing, composing, and listening to music rather than diminished them; I only discovered that this could be true for literature when feminists began moving into literary criticism and narrative theory. The exclusion of private meaning from canonical texts likely helped me to persist in the notion that reading outside of the canon was an intrinsically rebellious activity, even as I was being taught that fiction in the canon was another species entirely from all other sorts of fiction. It certainly was responsible for my later coming to view the act of reading canonical texts with the same private passion I brought to noncanonical fiction as rebellious, also.

But where, exactly, is the rebellion in reading that is both private and pleasurable?

I would argue that its roots can be glimpsed in some of the earliest experiences of childhood. Consider what happens when a small child reads Dr. Seuss books. First, the child’s imagination is engaged in defying the what is that we call reality. Green eggs? There is no such thing! But what child doesn’t love to play with the idea of green eggs and ham and with Dr. Seuss’s many silly permutations of words and phrases that slip off the tongue with joyful ease and delight? One of the lessons Dr. Seuss offers is that pronouncing an unusual grouping of words together can be not only fun (which is something most toddlers discover for themselves), but can also send one’s mind to strange and wild places, creating absurd and colorful places that can be shared with anyone else playing Dr. Seuss’s game.

Such child’s play is simply child’s play, of course, and not rebellion. But the child a little older, reading the adventures of characters who are in many ways like the reader but who live in worlds unlike the one and only world the reader knows personally–whether it is the life of Alice, or Harry Potter (or even Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey children, whose model middle-class American lives were as exotic and strange to me as Alice’s)—is drawn into vivid, psychodramatic worlds, often featuring unfamiliar rules and situations that engage the young reader in a kind of world-building likely to generate a voracious appetite for imagining other ways the world can, could, or might be. Suspension of disbelief, for such children, becomes as easy as breathing, while the status quo becomes what-is-but-need-not-necessarily-be.

For adults—particularly those who do not care to read fantastic literature—suspension of disbelief is harder to come by; these days the status quo has become carved in stone. What is, most people tend to think, is what must be. Our mainstream media constantly scrawl across every available inch of the sky Surrender, Dorothy!, while the message This is as good as it gets, baby! is dinned into our heads constantly, telling us we are fools to want anything other than what is apparently available.

Fantastic fiction allows readers to flout the superior status of what is over what might be. It teaches us not only to long for different worlds, but to play with them and think within their special frames of reference and rules. It allows us, in short, to rebel against the status quo—to permit ourselves to feel deeply and engage imaginatively with what not only does not exist, but also does not purport to represent with precision and authority what does exist. Granted, much fiction is merely escapist and makes us comfortable with rather than rebellious against the status quo. When we read escapist fiction we take a break, a time-out, and can either pretend for a time that the status quo is a good place to be or avoid thinking about it for as long as we’re immersed in the escape. But afterwards we do not feel especially refreshed, invigorated, or even satisfied, and those of us who are rebellious readers always return to the reading that fuels our resistance.

In a recent Fantastic Metropolis editorial, Jeff VanderMeer offered readers a “Shadow Cabinet” of titles that are not kept permanently in print, titles the passionate private reader is typically willing to go to some trouble to locate. I’d like to add several more titles of fantastic fiction to the Shadow Cabinet:

• Brigid Brophy, Palace without Chairs
• Rebecca Brown, The Evolution of Darkness
• Lenore Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet
• Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales
• Cecilia Holland, Floating Worlds
• Bev Jafek, “The Man Who Took a Bite out of His Wife”
• Anna Kavan, Ice
• Natalie Petesch, “The Leprosarium”
• Lynda Sexson, “Margaret of the Imperfections” and “The Incarnation of God into the Body of Florence”
• Mary Staton, From the Legend of Beal
• Wendy Walker, The Secret Service