• About
  • Index
  • The Lost Domain

Through the dark labyrinth

Through the dark labyrinth

Tag Archives: Andrei Tarkovsky

Boundaries

07 Wednesday Oct 2020

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Andrei Tarkovsky, Christopher Priest, M. John Harrison, Maureen Kincaid Speller, nina allan, Robert Holdstock, Steve Erickson

[This is, I suppose, a place holder for something I may want to explore at greater length elsewhere. But for now …]

I don’t normally listen to podcasts, I suppose I tend to be visually rather than aurally directed. But Maureen insisted that I should listen to an episode of Weird Studies, to be precise, Episode 81: Gnostic Lit: On M. John Harrison’s ‘The Course of the Heart’. She said I would enjoy it; she was absolutely right. In a sense it amplifies and runs variations on some of the things I was talking about when I discussed The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again a little while ago.

One of the things that caught my attention was an opening discussion about zones, specifically referring to Tarkovsky’s Stalker. (The two people hosting the podcast don’t seem to be overly familiar with Harrison’s other work, so they completely miss how closely this relates to the middle volume in his Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, Nova Swing. A pity, that could have opened up a much wider and even more complex discussion.) But I found myself thinking less of the zones, however we might choose to characterise them, than of the boundaries between zones. And I realised how much of my favourite literature, the literature that for me best exemplifies the fantastic, is specifically concerned with the identification and the examination of such boundaries.

Harrison is, of course, the prime example here. The Course of the Heart concerns the relationship between mundane reality and the pleroma, here identified as the vanished land of the Coeur. Typically, the pleroma is not real and its achievement is more associated with loss than with achievement, so in Nova Swing the story moves between everyday disappointment and the unfulfilled promise of the pleroma-like zone. Exactly the same dynamic is there in The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, as it is in stories like “A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium” or, more recently, “In Autotelia”.

But it is not just Harrison who explores this boundary between the worlds. Think, for instance, of Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock. The edge of Ryhope Wood is exactly the sort of border between Saubade and the zone that we encounter in Nova Swing. Crossing that border, entering the wood, is less a journey into a land of myth than it is into a land of promise.

Or there is the boundary between England and the Dream Archipelago in Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation. It is not just that these are two sides of a shattered mind, it is that each is a realm of promise. To Peter Sinclair in Britain, the Dream Archipelago is the longed-for but ultimately unsatisfying pleroma; to Peter Sinclair in the Dream Archipelago, it is the other way round. As the boundaries between the two worlds become ever more porous, so the other land becomes more expressly the dream that is unfulfilled, the desire that is unsatisfied.

And there are others. The sister who disappears and then, perhaps, reappears, crosses one way and then the other across this very boundary in Nina Allan’s The Rift. The multiple Americas of Steve Erickson’s Rubicon Beach are separated one from the other by just such a boundary.

Of course, and it is probably rather bathetic to point this out, identifying and crossing such a boundary is commonly figured as an act of creativity. The two Peter Sinclairs are both writers, the secret of Ryhope Wood is first revealed in the pages of a diary, the story of the Coeur is imagined into life in the stories that one character tells to another. But still I can’t help thinking there is something here, something that might repay further consideration. Something to ponder upon further, I suspect.

Recent Comments

Jim Clarke on In the beginning
Lise Andreasen on A taxonomy of reviewing
Russell Letson on A taxonomy of reviewing
socrates17 on The Mysterious Disappearance o…
Checkmate in Berlin… on A year of big books and little…

Archives

Blogroll

  • Big Other
  • Paper Knife
  • Ruthless Culture

Adam Roberts Arthur C. Clarke Award Arthur C Clarke books of the year Brian Aldiss Christopher Priest David Mitchell E.L. Doctorow Frederik Pohl Gene Wolfe George Orwell H.G. Wells Harlan Ellison Helen MacInnes Henry James Iain Banks Ian McEwan Ian Watson Isaac Asimov J.G. Ballard James Tiptree Jr John Banville John Clute John Crowley John W. Campbell Keith Roberts Kim Stanley Robinson Lucius Shepard Martin Amis Mary Shelley Maureen Kincaid Speller m john harrison nina allan Patrick Leigh Fermor Philip K. Dick Robert Heinlein Robert Holdstock Robert Silverberg Russell Hoban Samuel R. Delany Stephen Baxter Steve Erickson Terry Bisson Thomas M. Disch Thomas More Ursula K. Le Guin William Boyd William Gibson William Shakespeare Winston Churchill

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Through the dark labyrinth
    • Join 1,694 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Through the dark labyrinth
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar