”The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.”

Doris Lessing

What is ‘genre’? Today, a new collection, or mosaic novel, along with the nature of  ‘real’ versus ‘imaginary’ writing. We welcome back one of our occasional guests, Paul StJohn Mackintosh, who brings praise for Jeffrey Thomas’s The Unnamed Country, and then segues into M John Harrison and the question of writing as art.

We are always delighted to have Paul here. This is mainly because he has a habit of raising combative points, but also because it allows us to make fun statements about how our guest posts do not necessarily represent greydogtales’ views, cite our lack of legal representation and so on. Then we can sit back and see what happens – and nothing is our fault! Huzzah!

More seriously, this sort of thing reminds us that, on genre, we ourselves were probably most influenced by Doris Lessing’s views, after we read her Canopus in Argos series. Many ‘literary’ critics were dumbfounded by, or dismissive of her move into social commentary through science fiction. How could a proper, respected literary writer do this? She herself called the five books ‘space fiction’ without shame.

“I would so like it if reviewers and readers could see this series, Canopus in Argos: Archive, as a framework that enables me to tell (I hope) a beguiling tale or two; to put questions, both to myself and to others; to explore ideas and sociological possibilities.”

It is perhaps most telling that whilst science fiction readers are not averse to reading more widely, the literary cognoscenti found it far harder to embrace anything with a whiff of science fiction. Lessing said, in a 1982 interview for the New York Times:

”The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.”

Of course, Doris Lessing had the added complexities that she had previously been hailed (at various stages of her career) as an African writer, a Communist writer, a feminist writer, and a psychological writer; even better, she was now drawing on Sufi thought and writing SF, which made her a sort of mystic heretic as far as certain posh critics (and some readers) were concerned.

To this day, some Big Name Writers still go to ludicrous lengths to deny they write fantasy, science fiction or horror, fearful perhaps that only by calling it ‘magical realism’ can they get away with a Booker – or any other prize that will be reported in the quality newspapers. As we recently said elsewhere:

“All fiction is ‘Speculative’ if it speculates how imaginary people and circumstances interact (and all people in fiction are imaginary); all fiction is ‘Fantasy’ if it didn’t actually happen (which is itself the definition of fiction). All fiction is ‘Literary’ if it demonstrates a reasonable command of the language it’s written in. All fiction except the most absurdly fantastical contains Horror, for that last is the part of the nature of Being – at one point or another.”

(And at the end of today’s post, we provide a caustic view of pompous writers from Mr Bubbles, that well-known, slightly psychotic pony who doesn’t really suffer anyone gladly.)

But here is Paul StJohn Mackintosh, with a rather more detailed piece…

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The Unnamed Country

by Jeffrey Thomas

“This is a modern classic of writing about another country or culture on the level of Lafcadio Hearn or ltalo Calvino.”

I apologize first off for using Jeffrey Thomas’s superb latest collection with which to flog my favourite dead hobby horse. This doesn’t reflect for one moment on the quality of the stories in The Unnamed Country. It does reflect on a relevant issue that Jeffrey has brought up more than once online: the nature of genre, the proliferation of genres, and the character of the weird.

To get the most important part of the review done first, I’m going to start by focusing on The Unnamed Country’s outstanding merits and very few flaws, while skirting the genre question. This is a modern classic of writing about another country or culture on the level of Lafcadio Hearn or ltalo Calvino. It belongs on the shelf of any, and every, bookstore in any airport with a flight to Southeast Asia. Its stories are disturbing, insightful, macabre, vivid, grotesque, propulsive, engaging and endlessly inventive. It shuffles the genre deck to come up with winning hand after winning hand drawn from different suits.

If it has any stylistic faults I can identify, it has two – and I admit that these are my personal taste as much as anything. The diction in the dialogue and the choice of words quite often comes across as stilted, formal, even prim – quite a contrast with the subject matter. You get “bottom” for arse, “testicles” for balls, “member” or “penis” for dick. Perhaps this is a reflection of some level of formality in the Vietnamese language that I’m not aware of, but it does sound odd to a modern Anglo-American ear. Also, Jeffrey Thomas’s effort to make this “an imagined country” sometimes stretches too far into a realm of social and cultural aphasia. This is Vietnam, for fuck’s sake. Without the particulars of real place, real local specifics, real proper names, you risk missing the grit-beneath-your-fingernails immediacy of actual, tactile engagement with the locus that a writer like Malcolm Lowry achieves, and left floating in something far more abstract. That also relates to one of the characteristics of genre that we’ll get on to in a bit.

Maybe I’d be better to shut up at this point. But I was really surprised to read a Facebook post by one of Jeffrey Thomas’s readers saying that they didn’t realize that the unnamed country was Vietnam until they reached his afterword. I’d have thought that any reader who knows the slightest bit about Jeffrey Thomas, or Vietnam, would get that from the first page. I also read other posts by the author himself, saying he’d seen great puzzlement among retailers and readers about which slot to put the book in: horror, weird fiction, fantasy, science fiction, travel writing, etc. So perhaps there are basic practical reasons for digging into this whole question of the real versus the imagined.

The Foreign Travel of the Imagination

“Partly, I decided to set these stories in a fictitious, and nameless, Southeast Asian country out of respect, out of concern for seeming arrogant for writing too far outside my personal background,” Thomas writes in the book’s Afterword. “Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I simply thought it would be fun to translate many of the things I’d encountered in Viet Nam into the stuff of fiction. Worldbuilding could well be my favorite part of fiction writing.”

That statement implies a bunch of assumptions about fiction, and worldbuilding, that I want to tackle for a start. For one thing, I think Thomas is proposing, or more likely, is affected by, a false dichotomy. IMHO, if they’re different, they’re not different in the way this dichotomy implies, with one being real and the other one fictitious. Their unifying quality as literature transcends that distinction.

In his much-reddited fragmentary essay on writing and worldbuilding, M. John Harrison says: “I see no technical distinction between the worldbuilding of the representational writer – the travel writer or memoirist – and the worldbuilding of the fantasist.” He then cites Aldous Huxley to the effect that fantasy is the “foreign travel of the imagination.” According to this argument, there isn’t any substantive writerly difference between Jeffrey Thomas’s representation of a Southeast Asian country, and his representation of aliens grown out of mole hairs or imaginary unicorn/antelopes – it’s all fictive. The imaginative act of writing itself, and the act of reading to perform or recreate that act in the reader’s imagination, is more fundamental than any distinction between real and imaginary in what is represented. It’s art. It’s not the bogus self-flattering self-deluding pseudoscience advocated by Zola in The Experimental Novel: “the whole operation consists in taking facts in nature, then in studying the mechanism of these facts, acting upon them, by the modification of circumstances and surroundings, without deviating from the laws of nature.” It’s not scientific or geographical writing, it’s not sociology, it’s not even journalism. It’s art. It’s the transformation of material by aesthetic means that may be all about representation, or about something totally different.

Readers of travel writing or intellectual literature who flatter themselves that they don’t do escapist nerdy fantasy don’t get a cultural get-out-of-jail-free card for not indulging the “imaginary,” because there’s no meaningful distinction. And the same applies to any writer of weird fiction who thinks they’ve dodged the nerd bullet simply by not using too many capitalized imaginary places, people or things in their writing. Whether your reader slips away to Middle-Earth or the Towers of Trebizond, King’s Landing or Italo Calvino’s Venice, it’s all escapism.

Don’t be too quick to ditch those imaginary place-names and other worldbuilding gewgaws, though. If you bait your genre story with enough genre hooks, it will catch the reader’s imagination and drag them into total immersion. For Tom Clancy style technothrillers, it’s military technobabble; for Lovecraftian pastiche, it’s Capitalized Big Bads; for fantasy, it’s imaginary places and races; for science fiction, it’s plain old techno-technobabble; for chick-lit, perhaps it’s fashion and makeup brands and Devils wearing Prada. For a certain type of intellectual novel, it’s ideas or concepts, or even aesthetics and the intricacies of an art form, manipulated in the same way – not as premises in an argument or a critical analysis, but as imaginative triggers to induce immersion, for flavour, not fact. For travel writing, it’s place names, foods, the other specifics of time and place. It makes absolutely no difference that those hooks are “fact” or “fantasy” – they work exactly the same way, they have exactly the same effect on the imagination. Rebecca West’s idolatory of heroic Slavs is written in exactly the same way, and triggers exactly the same type of responses, as Tolkien’s eulogies of pure and angelic elves.

I’m not snarking on genrebabble in an attempt to belittle Jeffrey Thomas on his book. I am trying to undercut the pretensions that lead some genres to pretend they’re not using such techniques, and to dignify themselves as a result, when the only difference is the bait tied on the hook. For all I know, namedropping Karl Kraus or other pseudo-intellectual triggers is the reason why Jonathan Franzen attracts the readers he does. As M. John Harrison remarks, these techniques “don’t, recently, have much dignity even in their proper place” – whether in a genre potboiler or a fawned-over middle-class chamber piece.

Likewise, I don’t want to suggest that some writing can’t be absolutely focused on the actual fact, like a physics textbook or a research paper. But when you’re writing literature, you’re already well beyond that distinction, into the realm of the imagination, of art. All this talk of imagination and fiction and fantasy is a way of disguising that what you’re doing is art – for a culture that has become unaware of and uncomfortable with what literary art actually is.

Literature is art before it’s imaginative, or realist, because art is the ultimate actualization and playground of the imagination, it’s the use of all kinds of sensory, mimetic, auditory or linguistic techniques to go beyond the common run of experience and representation, and layer on all kinds of added intellectual, imaginative, aesthetic shading. It’s the inductive equivalent of the deductive processes enshrined in scientific writing. Whether the subject was originally there, or just dreamt up, is literally immaterial. I want to help writers be better artists. One very good way to start doing that is to jettison preconceptions about real versus imaginary that may cramp your style. It’s all art. You’re an artist. Get over it.

Art and Representation

Once you’re over the artistic distinction between real versus imagined, all kinds of genre distinctions that depend on it are in deep trouble. The hiving off of the non-literalist “imagined” has a very 19th-century, Victorian, materialist, objectivist air to it. It has that same air of discomfort as you see in the photorealistic work of John Wharlton Bunney, assiduously and diligently labouring for Ruskin’s Guild of St George, practising the Ruskinian dictum that all art should be hard work to represent truth – until Whistler sneaks up behind him and sticks a label on his back saying “I am totally blind.”

That’s the same Whistler who becomes an exemplar of the art that M. John Harrison praises for not describing and itemizing everything, for giving just enough visual hints to impel the viewer to project their imagination into the pictorial space, for engaging the audience as active participants and co-creators, for making space for “the uncontrolled, the intuitive & the authentically imaginative.”

If our science, our technology, our everyday assumptions about how reality works, are based on the mathematically proven premises that relative points of view, and the quanta of acts of perception, are absolutely primary, beyond any Victorian objective, materialist Big Machine, then why are our literature and our arts still hostage to some 19th-century assumptions that here is “real” and there is “created” – and that this bunch of genres over here deal with the “real,” and that lesser other bunch over there deal with the “imagined”? Do we really have to delve deep into the exact sciences to prove to ourselves that you can’t even perceive a thing without recreating it, let alone represent it? Physicists have no trouble believing that; why should writers and readers? You’d think writers would be rushing to grab the new scientific endorsement of inalienable subjectivity, the act of perception as that which literally recreates the actual world, which restore the arts to an equal footing with the sciences, instead of remaining caught within that Victorian circle.

An artist’s perception, and more to the point, their assessment of what they do and how their discipline operates, strikes me as far closer to modern cosmological principles than the Victorian assumptions of realism. Why trip over yourself trying to remove too many references to the real, specific and actual, just to point up the fact that you’re writing “fiction”? That’s as 19th-century as the underlying assumption that only by including those concrete details can your work aspire to be “real” – i.e. not a piece of imaginative fiction. In the end, it’s all the damn same. Is The Anatomy of Melancholy more “real” or “true” than The Unfortunate Traveller? Is The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman more “real” than The Turn of the Screw? Would Jeffrey Thomas’s stories be any less imaginary if he minutely traced every step his characters took over a Google Maps view of Saigon? I don’t think so. Would they be any more true if he left out any allusion to ghosts in jars or mythic monkeys? Nope. As M. John Harrison said, too much exhaustive self-consistent worldbuilding is “an excuse or alibi for the act of making things up, as if to legitimise an otherwise questionable activity,” a pre-emptive cringe and admission that the realist critics of fantasy have the upper hand. These days, though, Victorian assumptions about “the real” are far more questionable than the merits of good fiction.

Jeffrey Thomas shouldn’t be put under any obligation, or feel any obligation, to excuse himself for writing imaginative fiction. He’s already described the most fully realized destination we could all imagine visiting or living in: Punktown. All these genre considerations have only produced one persistent but minor structural fault in The Unnamed Country; the rest is, superbly, as it is. Fiction comes first. Literature lasts. The rest is footnotes.

Paul StJohn Mackintosh December 2019

You can catch more of Paul’s guest posts below:

http://greydogtales.com/blog/words-on-the-weird-from-paul-stjohn-mackintosh/

http://greydogtales.com/blog/paul-stjohn-mackintosh-on-lovecrafts-legacy/

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“Other countries have conquered us over our long history, and sometimes they changed our name. Hundreds of years ago, our Emperor Tho tried to think of ways to protect his country from being attacked again, after he managed to drive out the last invaders. And he knew he had to change the name his enemies had given to his country. Then Tho had an idea… a way to keep other people from wanting to come here and steal his empire. He would hide it from their eyes, and their minds, and the eyes and minds of any demon lords who might try to bring more bad luck to his empire. So he gave our land the name it has to this day.”

“And what name is that?”

“The Unnamed Country.”

Jeffrey Thomas’s The Unnamed Country (Word Horde, 2019) is available now:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07ZPDWL28/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_hbR7Db8YTMNP2

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07ZPDWL28/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_jcR7DbZMFHK16

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And as a coda, sometimes we find the ‘literary’ scene so tiresome that we simply hand the microphone to Mr Bubbles.

MR BUBBLES AND THE WRITER

A sober reflection on equine standards, by J Linseed Grant

The writer strolling across Buttersmite Fell was small and undistinguished in appearance, but had the sort of neck that became bulbous with self-importance, as if there was a balloon living in their oesophagus, inflating and deflating according to mood.

“Oh, I’ve had this published, and that published, and I often meet up with so-and-so to have a chat, and I’m such close friends with some of the more notable editors, and so on. It’s nothing, of course, because it’s my ability that shines through. Why, only the other day I was saying this to dear Neil Gaiman, and he suggested it was because–”

“You’re a wanker?” offered Mr Bubbles.

The writer sighed. “You clearly don’t understand the creative arts, or literary merit.”

The slight psychotic night-black pony flicked his ears. “I ate some China Mieville once. It was full of pleonastic grandiloquence and fustian complexity. I got the runs.”

“An author is a special person!” protested the writer. “A gift to society, beyond the mere rules of mundane work, the sordid day-to-day concerns that absorb the shop-girl and the factory worker–”

The people who found the body couldn’t understand why it had been trampled on so many times by what seemed to be massive, iron-shod hooves – but one of them did go and write a story about it later…