Amid among betwixt between

I’m currently reading the latest interstitial anthology, Interfictions 2 edited by Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak. It’s not a bad anthology. If no stories stand out as brilliant, there are no obvious clunkers either. Though for all the claims of innovation, most of the stories are fairly straightforward fantasy or (less commonly) science fiction. It’s quite remarkable how many of the contributions use the standard postmodern trick of foregrounding the fact that it is a story, making the characters aware they are within a fiction or directly addressing the reader. I keep seeing things I’ve seen rather too often elsewhere; in fact, reading it has made me realise why I feel so ambivalent about the whole interstitial enterprise.

The High Cs

We like our alphabet in sf: ABC (Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke), the three B’s (Bear, Benford, Brin), etc. All of these, of course, are still in print, still read. But what about that cluster of British writers of the 70s, Compton, Coney, Cooper, Cowper? Mostly out of print and forgotten now, it would seem. Which is a shame.

Simenon and evil

Off to the London Review Bookshop yet again, (by way of a Starbucks where the bacon and egg panini seemed to consist mostly of mushrooms) to see John Banville in action once more. This could get to feel like stalking. This time he and John Gray are talking about Georges Simenon, whose books I’ve found unreadable though I’ve enjoyed the Maigret dramatisations on the radio.

SF Addict

Intriguing, though when you think about it not totally surprising, to discover that William Golding was what he describes as a ‘science fiction addict’. At Christmas 1954, the year that The Lord of the Flies was published, Charles Mentieth sent him some sf novels (John Carey, in his biography of Golding, does not mention which). In an enthusiastic response, Golding wrote how keen he was on sf, listing as favourites Ray Bradbury, C.S. Lewis, and ‘A Case of Conscience’ by James Blish. As Carey notes, he must have read this as a novella in If since the novel wasn’t published until 1958.

Flaws in the Matrix

Anyone who has driven along the dispiriting stretch of holiday homes overshadowed by the grim sea wall at Dymchurch will understand well enough why the fairies chose to flit from there. But as Rudyard Kipling wrote it, the fairies left because Britain changed from being Catholic believers to Protestant sceptics.

Three Paragraphs

I’ve been following the Short Story Club over at Torque Control, if not always taking part, and I’ve realised that one of the things that has bothered me is that three of the four stories so far have not been what I would call a well-made story. Let me try and explain by picking up just three paragraphs from the latest story, ‘The Rising Waters’ by Benjamin Crowell, published in two parts, here and here. This is not meant as an analysis of the story as a whole, just a reading of what he says in these paragraphs.

I’m only omniscient some of the time

A photograph never quite tells the whole story. I recognised John Banville the moment he walked into the London Review Bookshop, he was exactly like his photographs. Yet there was still something different: he was shorter and heavier than I had anticipated. His face seemed the result of high gravity, the flesh had descended loosely around cheek and jaw but was tight across the brow. He had that mournful, Clement Freud look, offset by an attractively self-deprecating sense of humour.

Expression, religion, want and fear

I returned from Montreal with three books, two pairs of earrings and a totem pole for MKS, but only one book for myself. However, that one book was what I had hoped to find, and proved to be every bit as good as I expected, Four Freedoms by John Crowley:

More thoughts on Dhalgren

1) Admiral John A. Dahlgren was the Union navy’s head of ordnance during the civil war and inventor of the smoothbore Dahlgren Gun. His son, Colonel Ulric Dahlgren was at the heart of the notorious Dahlgren Affair of 1864, an apparent attempt to assassinate Jefferson Davis. Other Dahlgren’s have included a singer, a botanist and an athlete or two. The name is always spelled ‘ah’.

2) The word ‘Dhalgren’ occurs only four times in Delany’s novel. ‘William Dhalgren’ is in a list of names in Kid’s notebook. The list is quoted in full twice during the novel and a brief extract from it a third time. [EDIT: near the end of the book Kid recalls the name 'William Dhalgren' from the list immediately after his session with Madame Brown. Though later still it is strongly implied that William Dhalgren is the name of the reporter on the newspaper.] But the most significant use comes when Kid takes part in the gang bang and finds the word ‘Grendal’ running repeatedly through his mind. Grendal Grendal Grendal gradually deconstructs itself into Dhalgren. When I first read this I took this as evidence that Dhalgren was the Kid’s real name; now I don’t think this matters. More importantly I think we should reverse the deconstruction process, and take the title as pointing us towards Grendel. But whether this means the Kid is Beowulf or the monster I don’t know, I can read him either way.

3) We should not forget that Bellona comes out to meet the Kid. The novel opens with him having sex with a strange naked women he encounters in a wood; she leads him to a cave where he climbs a cliff face to claim the first of the chains with which he adorns himself. This whole encounter is redolent of myth, and of course sets the tone for the novel. Everyone else who wears the chains seems to have acquired them in the city itself, but they come to Kid a full day and one truck ride before he reaches the city. [EDIT: during his talk with Madame Brown the Kid suggests that this pre-Bellona experience was a dream, which of course further undermines our trust in anything that goes on in the novel.]

4) Where is Bellona? We know it is in the mid-West, we are told that right at the start. We know it is one of the six largest cities in the US, Captain Kamp tells us that late in the book. We know it has a waterfront, presumably on a river. But the river disappears from the geography of the city, except briefly when Kid is on the bridge as Newboy leaves.

5) The novel opens part way through a sentence. But this is a trick Delany uses repeatedly throughout the final section of the novel. What is more interesting is that none of these passages from the notebook end part way through a sentence, except for the very last. [EDIT: some passages towards the end of the notebook end structurally in mid-sentence, but we don't feel as if we are losing any of the sense of the passage.]

6) The first part of the novel, told in the third person, is presumably some sort of external account of events. The final part of the novel, the passages from the notebook in first person, are clearly unmediated and direct experiences of the events. Yet the uncompleted last sentence of the notebook loops us back round to the first sentence of the novel. The novel thus becomes like an Escher drawing, feeding into itself: the novel contains the notebook that becomes the novel that contains the notebook.

First published at LiveJournal, 21 July 2009.

Stepping twice into the same stream

I first read Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany more than 30 years ago. It became a personal icon for me. I reviewed it for a fanzine, simultaneously the first review and the first piece of fanwriting I ever did. More than that, it became in my memory a measure for what science fiction literature was capable of achieving.