Next in Our Year of Reading at the Irreal Café — Missing by Luis Garcia

[posted by Alice]
Luis Garcia’s first published collection, Missing, contains thirteen stories, most of which give us complex and sympathetic descriptions of characters who, let’s say, don’t live straight-edge lives. Missing was brought out in 2017 by Jitney Books, a small publisher focused on the work of “Miami-based authors writing about Miami in Miami.” The cover art, with its commingled faces and almost cubist shifts in perspective, is by Luis Valle, a muralist and fine artist who has long been part of the Miami art scene. Luis Garcia is trained as a fine artist, too, and his descriptive prose tends toward showing the reader rather than telling the reader, to coin a phrase.

In my comments on Ian Seed’s work, I said that if a writer doesn’t challenge or startle me at least once within the first few pages (or present me with something irreal, but more about that later) I tend not to read on. From the beginning, Luis Garcia challenges the reader with his strong language and his insistent reminders that his characters are complex personalities with complex motivations and lives that are not simplistically determined by their drugs of choice. As a result Garcia grabs and holds the reader’s attention in ways that leave us a bit breathless and disheveled at times. And though some of the descriptions of the lives and lifestyles in Missing become almost too intense at times, they are always challenging.

In an interview posted on the Jitney Books site, Garcia says that he took “a forced, state-funded vacation” for eight and a half years, during which time he read Pynchon, Joyce, and Burrows, among others. He also wrote many pages of prose which eventually made up this volume. In his work I can see hints of the grotesque images Pynchon packed into Gravity’s Rainbow, combined with elements from the phantasmagorical Circe episode Joyce included in Ulysses, as well as influences from Burrows’ outrageous hallucinogenic imagery in Naked Lunch, yet Garcia is very much his own man. He creates well-drawn characters who inhabit the Little Havana he describes with empathic clarity or who live the demimonde South Florida lifestyle he skewers so thoroughly.

As coeditors of The Cafe Irreal, G.S. Evans and I have received a fair number of stories that describe drug experiences and the unusual thoughts and/or events that result from these experiences, and their authors present these stories to us as irreal.  But they’re not. Yes, we know that drug experiences don’t coincide with what most people perceive to be reality, and the user’s speech and thought patterns and behaviors can be highly unusual. We also know that a wide range of people, from shamans using peyote to Coleridge waking from his opium dream to write “Kubla Khan,” have had their creativity enhanced and their insight deepened and their pain eased by a variety of hallucinogens and narcotics. But descriptions of their experiences don’t undermine reality in the way irreal fiction does because what’s going on in the story takes place in the mind of the person using drugs and not in the world around them. And I’ll show you what I mean by taking a closer look at two of the stories in Missing.

“Master Printer,” is about Manny, a student who is also a patient at a Methadone clinic. Manny needs to find a job and at first a gig as a giant taco advertising a local restaurant seems to be his only option. But when he begins to work as a printer at a photo lab, he starts to think like an artist and begins to curate the found photo art that’s all around him. Garcia shows us the moment at which Manny discovers his artist-self:

And all these happy accidents, cameras going off unintentionally: A dog’s blurred mug pawing the shutter. A kid’s-eye-view of a mom’s spectral figure giving chase.
And I have feelings I’ve never felt.
My heart an egg boiling in water.
Falling almost in love.
A sort of Peeping Tom.
I am.

I forgot to say that Manny is usually high on the job, but one day after he’s been working at the photo lab for a while he drops acid and goes to get his Methadone and then goes to work. And because he’s so high he begins to print photos with great speed and intensity but with some unusual results. At the same time his view of his place in the cosmos deepens and broadens:

Here I am.
Creator of memories in color of color.
The means by which we stop time’s coil, the only means to take short breaks and just…look.
Time’s breather.
Where time’s out of Time.
Proud to be here, part of it, tinkering around, making it all happen…

Though Garcia’s compelling prose keeps us interested in Manny’s artistic awakening, everything strange in this story takes place in Manny’s head and not in the photo lab around him. What then happens to Manny involves humor and pathos in equal measure, and “Master Printer” is a great story. It is, however, more real than irreal.

The title story in Missing also hints at irreal possibilities and again takes its strength from a drug experience. There is so much in “Missing” that grips the reader – starting with the opening description of the ocean at night and a sleeping pod of dolphins:

You can see in silver light seven dorsal fins huddled together abob in the black water. In the water’s divots dance sequins of reflected stars and the occasional filigree of one shooting across the sky. There is no moon, only stars, and the stars’ points are sharp. They hang up there without twinkling and, down here, a negative sort of wind sucks air for complete stillness. The air is clear, and the only sounds are the purl of seawater on the dolphins’ backs and the plosive push and breathy who from their nostrils, their blowholes.

Two friends, Victor and Brian, take a boat out into this starlit night to celebrate Victor’s birthday with fireworks and other pyrotechnics. They talk about dreams, and Victor tells Brian about the way dolphins sleep, with half their brains awake at any point in time, and they experience the ocean at night as a fearsomely beautiful place. And of course some things are so unexpected that we think they can’t be real, and some things are so beautiful they can be almost phantasmagorical. In this story beer and some other mind-altering substances help to ramp up the impression of strangeness and beauty:

Brian gets up and goes to the Igloo’s ice for another DT and uncorks it and takes a nice, long, pull, standing before Victor smoking in the captain’s chair. Brian’s pretty tanked. He sways like the ocean but the ocean is still. Brian’s always taken aback by the Atlantic’s 360° blackness, its desolateness. He swivels his head from shoulder to shoulder, slowly, considering the space of sea, the googol of stars above and below, the how fucking far from everywhere they are.

But what happens next, though unusual and unpredictable, is not impossible and is not irreal. Which isn’t in and of itself a bad thing, but for us the irreal is the holy grail of the reading experience. And though the story is a good one, I’m always searching for the undermining of reality that signals an irreal story. So I’ll take a closer look at two other stories in Missing to show you what I mean.

In the story “Burping Birds,” which was published in Issue #60 of The Café Irreal, we find a mix of the painfully real and the irreal. As the story opens the narrator says he is “reluctant to explain to you why I am back here,” and we begin to read the story as a letter, wondering who it’s intended for. We learn that the narrator reads and re-reads Chapter 33 of a book whose purpose he’s unable to determine and which contains a sentence fragment he wants to use in a story. The narrator presents details of his life piecemeal and after he has described his situation, he says that four months ago he began burping birds, sparrows to be exact, and he asks if his intended audience would believe him if he reported this. We take from this that he is an unreliable narrator of sorts, though there’s nothing impossible about much of what he describes, even when he says that he reads the King James Bible outloud in a mock-Monty-Pythonesque British accent or that some of the inmates keep mice and spiders for pets.  But he insists that he used to burp birds which “come out alive and well and apparently unharmed and hop happily onto my finger, ruffle their feathers, look at me quizzically, but then soon fly off, for they are by no means tame.” Then back to a more familiar reality as he describes a cell mate and a prison preacher. He also talks about other possible writing projects that include “cobbling together a story about a reality show about the making of a documentary about a family addicted to watching the reality show about the making of the documentary of themselves” and “a story about a footlocker mouse” to let us know in that he is a writer, albeit one with an unusual imagination.

Later on he says his “passerine eructations” stopped as soon as he got to his current cell and he hasn’t burped since. So were the burped birds “real” or were they hallucinogenic? The narrator says, “Burping birds? You think it is difficult for you to believe?” Of course it is, but he returns to this notion more than once as he tries to communicate his feelings. Even if this story describes an all-too-real scenario some of the time, near the end when the narrator says, “But still you swim from dream to dream in me. In this way you have gained access to my most sordid corners. And there, I am not sure which words, which images are yours and which are mine,” we think we might be reading an irreal love letter, which points to what we don’t know, undermines what we think we know, and works to keep its narrator balanced in an unsettling present moment.

And then there’s the very short piece called “The Boy Who Wanted to Make Things Fall Up,” which is a sort of irreal fantasy. Because he wanted to do what the title indicates, the boy studied both science and the occult and had some unusual successes: “Once he got a maple leaf to crawl across his desk. Another time he got a matchbook to hover inches from his palm.” But the boy grew into a “round-faced, double-chinned, doughy man, a magician who lost control of his powers,” and though he succeeded in doing exactly what he set out to do through application of his magic, he still managed to fail as a magician. This undermines our expectations of the way a magician practices his art, whether we’re thinking of the show biz magic of Harry Houdini or the wizardry of Harry Dresden/Harry Potter. And in the short span of this story we come to empathize with a failure which seems to be personal and not the result of Faustian bargains gone wrong. The ability to signal this kind of complexity in such a small story is a further example of Garcia’s range as a writer.

You can hear Luis Garcia reading from his work at Jolt Radio on the third Tuesday of every month. In the first episode, you can hear Garcia talk about his life, including his time in prison, and then hear him read “Master Printer.” In the second episode, he reads “Beautiful People,” which he calls a bedtime story for adults.

You can buy Missing at Jitney Books.

[In this time of trigger warnings, I should say that this collection contains enough material about drug use and sexual situations that I believe it’s really not for kids — or sensitive adults.]

Reading at the Irreal Cafe — Avenging Cartography by Ken Poyner

[posted by Alice]

The cover of Avenging Cartography, Ken Poyner’s recently published volume of short fiction, shows a difficult-to-map-or-measure seascape (or is it a landscape?) under a small but surprisingly bright moon.  Though the title of the collection isn’t drawn from any of the stories it contains, maybe the cartography in question refers to finding one’s way around the fictional landscape. The subtitle promises us “flash fictions roundly sounding your borders,” and we are given guidance to the terrain of fantastical storytelling that goes beyond noting “here be dragons,” though there be dragons here as well.

Throughout the nearly twenty years that we have been editing The Café Irreal, G.S. Evans and I have received a number of stories that confuse the undermining of reality required in the telling of an irreal story with the undermining of narrative convention. People send us stories that unfold using wordplay reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s work, that use Joycean stream-of-consciousness, or that are fractured and playful and artful in the manner of some surrealists. But when all is said and done, either there is no plot at all in these fictions or what is happening in the story is as stolidly realistic as the narrative is fanciful.

As I read Avenging Cartography, I was struck by the fact that Poyner frequently undermines narrative conventions, while at the same time he consistently maintains his non-realist story-telling. And so as I read, I was impressed with the variety in both form and content. Yes, some of these stories are science fiction and some are fantasies, but most of them explore the possibilities of story itself – that is, they tell irreal and fantastic stories while at the same time giving us narrations to puzzle over. And Poyner’s poetic language is an added incentive to read them all.

In an anthology called Points of View, whose editors group the stories according to narrative technique, “anonymous narration” is said to be used in stories that “… resemble fairy tales, legends, and myths, which frequently omit character point of view and the inner life. This itself tells us already something about the purpose of such stories and what they are about.” “The Minister’s Black Veil” by Nathaniel Hawthorne and “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson are included as examples of this technique, and these are also the two stories in the anthology that seem to be most irreal. The black veil and the lottery, respectively, point to many undisclosed meanings, and the stories undermine our expectations of how a small-town congregation should relate to its minister or how a small town might conduct an important public event. Like Kafka, Poyner sometimes uses a kind of “anonymous narration,” even when the stories seem to be told from a first or second person point of view. But though he is often traveling near the landscape of irrealism, he is not always within it.

Some of the pieces in Avenging Cartography are more allegory or morality tale than irreal story, such as “Cocking the Fulcrum” in which punching down is viewed as a way to ease life’s tensions and increase sexual tension, or “The Children of Passivity” in which monsters in the closet seem to double as the odd phenomena that inhabit our ids, much like those monstrous beings that made life so complex in the film Forbidden Planet.

Many stories begin with an impossible or highly unlikely premise – like the existence of giant feral chickens in “Reasonable” – and then follow that unlikely premise to its likely conclusion. This piece becomes ironic commentary on factory-farming and the human ingenuity required to hunt worthy prey, though it is still not exactly what we mean by irreal.

And then there are science fiction stories like “A Change of Address,” which satirizes a very Earth-bound phenomenon, the creation of mortgage-backed securities in which the value of a mortgage is sliced and diced and then bought up by an unknown number of hedge funds so that it’s hard to say who owns the debt. In “A Change of Address” the same thing happens on a station in orbit around another planet, and the language of the banking industry is transported to another world resulting in a clever jargon-fest.

“The Lightning Gatherers” works more like a poem, focused on one notion – that a group of itinerant people gather to collect lightning when there’s a really big storm – and once the notion has been established the language is everything. The piece is full of fine-tuned, well-honed descriptions like “And then the first lightning strikes come distantly down, a peeling back of the far off next-of-kin dark. The lightning gatherers watch, but the atmospheric show would be too much racing up the road for harvest. They pick up their bags and stand facing the storm, the crowd of them clicking its claws and swinging its legs like a preening crustacean.” The language energizes and fascinates, but there are none of the pointers to an unknown meaning that an irreal story would contain. We know that this is what a lightning gatherer would do if there were lightning gatherers, and the whole piece springs from the notion that lightning can be harvested but not from an ongoing attempt to undermine reality itself. The story is full of beautiful language but not irreal.

Allegories and personifications can be found in this volume, along with extended metaphors. In “To Dwell in the Forest,” the beings – human beings? – who destroy the forest they depend on begin to grow leaves on their backs, the women’s hair becomes fern-like, and they produce the “thatch children, the bramble children, the stick children,” who did not even remember the forest.

But when we get to “Relative Economics,” we enter a more irreal realm. Each paragraph in the story begins with the sentence, “It is to be the execution of someone,” and we are told about the economic and implied sociological benefits of this execution but not why it will happen or what kind of society would do such a thing. Our expectations are undermined and our sense of the real is challenged. If we return to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” we remember that the person who is selected seems to be a kind of scapegoat or sacrificial victim to propitiate unknown forces, but in this case the narrator implies that he gets a sexual thrill from the impending event and absolutely everyone will be there. That’s about all we know for sure.

“Suspicion,” which begins with the simple notion of losing a favorite pen, leads not to the search for the pen or the happiness of finding it or the sadness of acknowledging its loss but to the octopus-like thief who deserves to be punished for his deed. The narrator tells us it was his housekeeper’s carnal needs that led to the theft in the first place, and of her the narrator says, “I understand her appetites, her need for those eight arms to wrap seductively, seditiously about her; to feel the scrawl of his ink on the paper edge of her neck; to listen to his erotic clicks and fathoms; to feel the bare mercury of his suction cups on her periwinkle skin.” When we add the fact that this octopus villain may have taken the pen to scavenge its ink, we return full circle to the missing pen, but our expectations of a tale of revenge have definitely been undermined.

“Joy in the Sense of Place” is about a man who carries his testicles in a bag, and yet it is told with such dedicated detachment (until the end) that it seems as though it’s something that Kafka himself could have written or perhaps is what the fragment “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor” with its errant bouncing balls actually implies. (I often say that “Kafka is a guy thing,” meaning that as a woman I don’t completely understand his fixation on his father nor the ambivalence toward bachelorhood/fatherhood that informs so much of his work.) Despite the fact that he is comfortably familiar with the concepts of wife and home, Poyner gives us a sort of Kafkan ambivalence about the male role from time to time as well.

Poyner’s personal symbology ranges from a focus on the hardscrabble nature of capitalist economics to a use of animals, most notably chickens and roosters, as characters or plot devices. But unlike what we find in the work of a writer like Donald Barthelme, there’s most often either a straight-faced stoicism to these pieces or even a touch of sadness and poignancy. Yes, stories like “Relative Economics” are amusing (and there is such a thing as irreal humor – see the stand-up comedy of Steven Wright for starters), but Poyner has a way of telling us highly imaginative tales that contain comic moments but which also encourage us to see the nature of our plight and that of every creature around us.

Avenging Cartography is available from Barking Moose Press, and it contains the story “Suspicion,” which was published in Issue #49 of The Café Irreal.

Beginning Our Year of Reading at the Irreal Cafe: New York Hotel by Ian Seed

Books by Ian Seed

[posted by Alice]

I admit that I’m a restless reader and one who is attracted to the irreal. If a writer doesn’t undermine reality at least a little and doesn’t challenge or startle me at least once within the first few pages of a novel or volume of stories, I usually don’t read on. During my Year of Reading at the Irreal Cafe (see previous post), I decided to start with New York Hotel by Ian Seed and I readily finished this latest collection of Seed’s prose poems.

The cover of New York Hotel is nicely designed but features a fairly realistic if slightly off-kilter photo of an old brick hotel. We can see architectural details, such as wrought-iron railings, ornate architraves and a neon sign that reads HOTEL, and according to the acknowledgement on the back cover, the photo does depict an “Old hotel in New York City.” But though I was concerned that the concrete image on the cover meant that Seed was going to present us with a more concrete fictional depiction of reality than he has done previously (Kafka, after all, didn’t want an insect to be portrayed, even from a distance, on the cover of Metamorphosis), this did not turn out to be the case. In this slim volume I found Seed’s usual rich mixture of the real and the irreal, which makes reading it a compelling yet unsettling experience.

Or maybe I should say that reading these short pieces one after another is rather like having a series of small, restless dreams while napping on a train. In these dreams we might encounter people from the past, have anxiety-producing experiences, find ourselves in unusual places, or encounter the fantastic. And when we awake, we are discomfited by the intensity of the remembered dream and also by the disorienting effect of not being in our own beds and possibly not even in our home city or country. The unfamiliar permeates our most ordinary experiences, as is the case in New York Hotel (and other collections of Seed’s work) when believably realistic descriptions are enriched by the presence of the irreal.

As I noted in an earlier essay, I believe writers have personal symbols that they use over and over again — Leonora Carrington’s horses and Borges’ labyrinths come to mind. From among Seed’s apparent personal symbols, I am especially intrigued by how often he has made reference to male American singers who were popular during the mid-twentieth century. Mind you, this is not his most frequently used symbolic reference, but it’s one I have especially enjoyed and which has been used in a surprisingly irreal way.

In an earlier collection, Makers of Empty Dreams, Elvis and Elvis impersonators appeared in “In the Anniversary TV Special, the Real” and “In the Empty Church.” Both prose pieces touched on the wishful thinking of ardent fans who believe that Elvis is still alive. But in the former this possibility is considered against the background of an Elvis impersonator contest, while in the latter Elvis makes an appearance after his death, singing in a voice that is “more powerful than it had ever been.” These very short pieces portray Elvis fans, impersonators, and the singer himself in a way that succeeds in undermining all our expectations.

Elvis makes an appearance in New York Hotel as well, though he is implied and not named in “Loved” in which a woman named Priscilla weeps over the fact that “our adoration had killed her loved one.” In two other pieces, “Festival” and “American in Rome,” the narrator sings Elvis songs in situations that undermine reality as we know it. In the former prose piece, the venue is a park that “stretched away as far as the eye can see”; in the latter, the narrator sings “All Shook Up” to an enthusiastic Pope, who claps and sways to the music. An attentive crowd, and finally the narrator’s ex-wife, are equally moved by his performance.

In this volume an aging Jerry Lee Lewis also makes an appearance in “The Killer,” playing his boogie-woogie from a wheelchair, “the music as beautiful as ever.” This piece doesn’t strike me as irreal (Lewis was known as The Killer and is still alive and performing), but my reading of the story is enriched by the Elvis references in the above-mentioned prose pieces. And in “New York Hotel,” a Gene Kelly impersonator, who has crooned “Singing in the Rain” through an underpaid lifetime, is given a chance to tell his story and is portrayed in a sympathetic and offbeat way that is also gently irreal. Seed inserts these formerly popular American singers into places and situations that undermine our expectations, leading to effects that are sometimes comic, sometimes poignant, and often irreal.

If you read our guidelines, you will see that The Cafe Irreal is entirely devoted to irreal short fiction under 2,000 words. We don’t publish poetry at all. Having said that, I acknowledge that we do sometimes publish prose poems that display elements of a story — character, plot, setting – and which also show reality being undermined as an irreal story does. This quality is notable in Seed’s work, and his prose pieces (often called prose poems) have appeared in Issues 23, 42, 47, 55, 59, and 63 of our web publication. In fact, “Generation Gap,” “Free Will” and “Loved,” which you will find in Issue #63, also appear in New York Hotel.

You can buy New York Hotel by Ian Seed at Shearsman Books.

 

Our Year of Reading at the Irreal Cafe

[posted by Alice]

Yes, I know, The Cafe Irreal Coeditors have been ignoring this blog shamefully of late, but that’s about to change.

First off, a little history: In June of 1998, G.S. Evans and I uploaded what we called Issue 0 of The Cafe Irreal to the internet. That was a long time ago in internet years, and it’s worth noting that next year we will celebrate our twentieth anniversary of tending this small but influential webzine. Though Issue 0 itself no longer exists (it was basically a call for submissions), you can get a very good idea of what The Cafe Irreal looked like back then — built with all those awkward old HTML 4 tags, some animated gifs, and a boundless enthusiasm for the irreal — by going to this Second Issue page.

Now flash forward almost twenty years: We have a responsive HTML 5 site that uses more static graphics, but we still have boundless enthusiasm for the irreal. And that’s why, to celebrate our upcoming twentieth anniversary, we are launching our Year of Reading at the Irreal Cafe. It actually began on February 1 of this year (hey, I had to read something to comment on before I could make this announcement), and it will conclude on February 1 of next year when we present our twentieth anniversary issue. Look for commentary on collections of short fiction — and maybe some plays — by contributors to The Cafe Irreal, beginning on February 9 February 10, 2018.

Reader Expresses Assessment Directly: Miéville Is Effective Vanguard In Livening Literary Evolution

[posted by Alice]

“As is the case with the rest of his books, the reader already has the sense in the first pages that there is something else in the narrative than what should be there according to his/her expectations, the sense of a perpetual disquiet which doesn’t disappear and even at the end does not bring us a catharsis but only further questions.” from Matous Hrdina, “The Language of the Fantastic, the Politics of Language: the Permanent Literary Revolution of China Mieville” in Issue #16 2016, A2. (translated by G.S. Evans)

The reader finished reading the novel and was puzzled. The reader was I. She tipped her head to one side as though she had just been swimming and there might be water in her ears, but what was actually inside her head was a complicated reaction. She was thinking deeply about this novel, and she had a lot to mull over.

She was accustomed to reading unusual fiction, I think, such as weird fiction and irreal fiction, but Miéville’s short novel defied classification and, especially in the beginning, the sometimes mannered prose was hard to like; she continued to hold her head to one side and thought about the books by China Miéville that she had read before. She liked Embassytown and The City and the City but had always hesitated to call this writer irreal, especially since he so often insists that his fiction is New Weird.

OK, I’ll stop. But rest assured that I am not parodying This Census-Taker. The novel has affected me, making me feel as though Miéville’s purposeful obfuscation, his prose that switches from first to third person and back again from the very first paragraph, his tendency to hint rather than explain, his use of steganography (meaning that a message is concealed within other text as in the title of this blog post) – all these devices lead the reader to stumble along sometimes, wondering where I am being led, but in the end I don’t want to give up. In other words, This Census-Taker is a compelling read in spite of its complex and purposeful opacity. The reader is asked to pay careful attention, to work for meaning, yet (as Matous Hrdina noted in the above quote) meaning is often withheld. Even when the reader solves the simple steganographic puzzles, the meanings of those solutions are obscure.

I don’t know whether or not this is a secret Bas-Lag story, as Christina Schulz at Strange Horizons claims (http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2016/03/this_censustake.shtml). I’m not sure if it’s true, as Francis Spufford at The Guardian has it, that “Repeatedly, as a writer of the fantastic, [Miéville] forces a redefinition of what fantasy can be.” (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/02/the-census-taker-china-mieville-review-novella) I don’t claim to know precisely what Miéville is doing, but I do know about the effect his work has on me as a reader.

It certainly undermines my expectations about genre. The story itself, which begins with a boy running down a hill, screaming, frantic to tell others that his mother has killed his father (or the other way around) at first seems more like a murder mystery than anything. But I usually read a murder mystery to find out who murdered whom and why, and there’s so much sleight-of-hand misdirection going on in this novel that solutions are hard to come by. There are fantasy elements (those keys the narrator’s father makes and what people do with them seems a lot like magic) and there are science fiction elements (the lives of those children who live on a bridge and “fish” for bats remind us of other dystopian stories), but This Census-Taker revels too much in its own obfuscations to be easily categorized.

But despite its tendency toward opacity, This Census-Taker is quite certainly about an outsider and an immigrant who may also be a killer. It also remains resolutely and purposefully a story about a child who feels unsafe in his own home and community. And there are plenty of the strange and disturbing images we might expect to find in New Weird fiction. In the end, though I’m not inclined to call it irreal, I am inclined to say that you should read it for the practice it will give you in reading a narrative that compels you to turn the pages as much as any thriller does, eager to reach the explanation at the end, and more than anything else, when that explanation does not entirely satisfy, leaves you eager to see what this writer will have to say next.

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More Serendipity

[posted by Alice]

A few years ago I posted “Reading, Serendipity, and a Little Synchronicity” on this blog. Since then, I have written some essays at my Digital Gloss blog about finding books serendipitously. Because irrealists might be interested in some of these books, here are links to a few of the posts:

Unbalancing Act: Helen Oyeyemi’s what is not yours is not yours

Is Tom McCarthy ‘a Kafka for the Google Age’?

“The Food of Angels” and “A Hunger Artist”

Curtains by John Briggs

[posted by Alice]

When I first looked at the photographs in John Briggs’ Curtains, the phrase “glimmers of irreality” came to mind immediately. Each of the photos in this book is a small introduction to the mysteries that we may find when we look carefully at the material world. The book also contains Briggs’ short essay on how he came to take the photos and then manipulate them so that they became “windows on the unreality we live in.”

In October of 2013 Briggs and his wife were walking near Westminster in London, and the curtains hanging in the windows of the Old British Admiralty building caught his eye. For him the cascading and rippling folds of these curtains exuded a “sumptuous, classically sensual feel.”  He photographed them until a policeman asked him to stop taking pictures of a government building.

When he got the photos home and examined them on his computer, Briggs was disappointed that the “glowing, gauzy folds” he had seen in the man-made fabric of the curtains now seemed more harsh than sensuous.  He tried some digital techniques to draw out the curtains’ sumptuous appearance once again, but it was not until 2015 when he experimented with solarization, inversion, and other techniques that he was able to find ways to reveal to us what he had seen on that October day. In this slim volume we are shown both the “normal views” of the curtains and the images in which the application of these techniques brought out true complexity and strangeness.

John Briggs is a Café Irreal contributor and author of Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos among other works, so we share with him an appreciation of the times our normal concept of reality is undermined. Impressed with the strangeness these photos convey, I carried Curtains with me to Prague and spent some time looking at it. Then last week while in London on our way back home, Greg and I made a special detour to the Old British Admiralty to see for ourselves the “puddled” curtains Briggs photographed.

After our visit to the Admiralty, I appreciated the images in Curtains even more. Though I often photograph architectural details and rich textures and I seek to convey in my own images the above-mentioned “glimmers of irreality,” I wouldn’t really have given the Admiralty curtains a second glance. The fact that Briggs chose to photograph them and then made his photos yield two dozen mysterious and complex images is a project that impresses me with its deceptive simplicity.

In Being and Nothingness Sartre described being-in-itself – the objects we encounter in the external world – as a plenitude of being, full of itself, and manifesting itself in an infinite number of aspects. When we really look at a physical object and are able to see, in Briggs’ words, “what’s hidden in plain sight all around us,” we begin to appreciate the true complexity of the in-itself. Briggs’ photos are beautiful works in their own right, but they also teach us how to stumble into strangeness and to find the “whimsical and profound” in the everyday.

Addiction to the God Drug: an Irreal Notion in China Miéville’s Embassytown

[posted by Alice]

China Miéville is a science fiction writer who frequently describes his own work as “weird fiction.” His 2011 novel Embassytown is a complex and unusual psychological science fiction novel that focuses on linguistics, and though it is not as irreal as his 2009 effort The City and the City, there is an irreal notion at Embassytown’s core. I’ll try not to include too many spoilers in this post, though you can find a full synopsis of the novel here, and there’s a thoughtful and well-written review of the whole book here. But I intend to limit myself to describing the particularly irreal notion that is at the heart of the novel, the idea that extraterrestrial beings become addicted to a type of speech, which is referred to at times as the God drug. To describe it, I will use Shimon Sandbank’s idea that some fictional notions, such as those in Franz Kafka’s work, present us with “so many pointers to an unknown meaning.” But first, though Embassytown is mostly (good) science fiction and not irreal fiction, I need to describe briefly the events that take place in the novel.

In the far future time that is the novel’s setting, humans have travelled out into the galaxy in a diaspora that has taken them to the edge of known space. The novel’s narrator, Avice Benner Cho, is a woman who was born and raised in Embassytown, a human colony on a farflung world called Arieka that is inhabited by an intelligent and unique species. Avice earlier left Arieka to became an Immerser (which means she has the skill to pilot starships as they pass through the Immer, which seems to refer to travel though hyperspace), and after a number of years of living as an Immerser she returned to Arieka with her linguist husband in time to experience the events depicted in the novel.

Embassytown is a place designed to give humans an appropriate environment (such as air to breathe) on an otherwise inhospitable planet, and it is the home of Ambassadors who can speak with the Ariekei in their own language. As a result of the Ambassadors’ efforts, humans can exchange technology and goods with the Ariekei, who are mostly treated respectfully by the colonists and referred to as the Hosts. The Hosts are never completely described, but they are large creatures with chitonous shells who have two wings, a number of legs, and multiple eyes. Their speech is referred to as Language, and Avice tells us that in her wide travels throughout the galaxy Language seems to be unique. It is especially difficult to speak because it requires the expression of two separate sounds or words from separate mouths at the same time. Because the Ariekei can only comprehend these sounds if they are emitted by a conscious being and not if they come from a recording, human Ambassadors are actually a pair of cloned humans who have a special empathic link that allows them to learn to speak two separate but necessary parts of Language simultaneously. In this way they can be understood (though imperfectly) by the Hosts.

Avice has a special relationship to Language in that she was made a simile by the Ariekei when she was a child. The Ariekei are fascinated by the human ability to speak something different from the realities they think and see, and unlike humans they find it nearly impossible to lie. After they come into contact with humans they periodically hold Festivals of Lies at which they make feeble attempts at lying and seem to find the experience oddly stimulating. The Ariekei also create similes to enable them to speak in ways that are not strictly true, and they sometimes recruit humans to undergo various experiences which are then used in a type of figurative speech. Among segments of the community of humans in Embassytown there is a cult of celebrity honoring those who have been made similes — these include “the boy who swims with the fishes” and “the girl who was hurt in the dark and ate what she was given.” The latter is the simile Avice has helped to make possible.

When the Bremen authorities send a new Ambassador, Ez/Ra, who is unusual in that the two humans involved are not clones of each other, the Hosts are so overwhelmingly affected by Ez/Ra’s speech that they become addicted to it. This addiction leads to violence and conflicts that have never before been experienced on Arieka, but it’s not necessary to talk any more about the novel’s plot (which would frankly involve a number of spoilers) in order to say that it is the nature of addiction to Ez/Ra and their way of speaking Language that gives us the irreal element in this novel. This addictive speech is sometimes referred to in the novel as “the God drug.”

When the Hosts hear Ez/Ra speak, they are thrilled and overwhelmed, and after a short time they so desperately need to hear more that they are unable to carry on the normal business of their lives. And so of course the first notion that the idea of Ez/Ra and addictive speech points to is an obvious meaning related to the consequences of addiction in the lives of the addicts. Because Embassytown is a colony this addiction can be seen as part of a manipulative ploy on the part of the colonial administrators to get what they want on Arieka. Despite the frequency of German references and words (for example, Bremen is the name of the administrative center to which the Ambassadors and their staffs must answer; the word immer, which refers to space travel that collapses distances the way wormholes do, is the German word for always), the story implies the kinds of colonial relations that sprung up during the British Empire. (Miéville is British after all, and the colonists in Embassytown do speak Anglo-Ubiq.) The addiction to Ez/Ra and subsequent warfare therefore remind me of the Opium Wars, during which Britain and China fought over the fact that the British were illegally importing and selling opium and wanted to force China to open its markets to foreign goods. Ez/Ra’s speech and the notion of the God drug can be seen as an unethical way for colonizers to manipulate the indigenous inhabitants of an important colony, but many other concepts are implied. I can think of at least five other meanings that Ez/Ra’s speech or the God drug points toward, without actually being fully explained by any of them:

1. The two voices needed to speak Language and the almost supernatural power of Ez/Ra’s speech bring to mind Julian Jaynes’ book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. In this book Jaynes put forth the notion that ancient peoples, the Greeks among others, experienced a divided consciousness in which one of the “voices” that seemed to speak to them inside their own minds was interpreted as the voice of the gods. (Note that the name Ezra is Biblical in origin, and the Ra half of the name makes reference to the ancient Egyptian god of the sun.)
2. The two voices needed to speak Language and the addictive nature of Ez/Ra’s speech also remind us that the voice of the writer is speaking inside the reader’s head. Depending on the reader’s opinion of the writer, this can sometimes become nearly addictive. Perhaps Miéville himself has experienced irrational loyalty and a clamoring for more output from his fans (remember that the word fan is a shortened version of fanatic).
3. The language of the novel itself is compelling and propels us forward because we want to find out what will happen. Such is the nature of storytelling, which is a kind of lie. When the Ariekei learn to lie and use figurative speech, they also become capable of telling stories. Which reminds us in turn that Embassytown itself is a story.
4. The hints of German language in the novel make us think about the effect that Adolf Hitler’s speech had on the German people — a kind of hypnotic and extremely enthralling influence that is part of the reason why people followed his lead into the unspeakable horrors of World War II.
5. Language is inevitably spoken by all Ariekei before the events described in the novel, but after Ez/Ra comes some Ariekei mutilate themselves so they cannot hear and cannot be addicted to Ez/Ra’s speech. Yet these mutilated Ariekei are able to communicate with each other, which leads to the realization that Language is not the only language.

The notion of two humans known as Ez/Ra speaking an extraterrestrial language in such a way that addiction and chaos result is truly a weird notion, and it gives Embassytown glimmers of irreality. However, in my opinion, the Ariekei themselves are not actually irreal. They are speakers of a language that can be spoken by and understood by humans. Much more alien are the aliens created by Stanislaw Lem in Fiasco or the Strugatsky brothers in Roadside Picnic, who are so different from and/or advanced beyond humans that they can scarcely be comprehended.

Quirky Narrators and Occasional Irrealism in George Saunders’ Tenth of December

[posted by Alice]

At the Café Irreal we often receive stories which the author considers to be irreal because they feature a strange or unexpected narrative style. Sometimes the narrator of these stories uses unusual language or the narrator may have a psychiatric problem or is delusional because of illness. But the story itself depicts events that can actually be explained by the narrator’s mental or physical state (or unusual manner of speaking). To us these stories, though they might be entertaining and well written, are not irreal at all — we want to see reality itself, not an individual’s consciousness, being undermined in some way.

As I read George Saunders’ most recent short story collection, Tenth of December, I couldn’t help but notice that almost every story in the collection features a first person or third person subjective narrative style. In most cases the narrator also uses odd colloquial language and may also be mentally or physically impaired. Many writers in the United States — from Mark Twain onward — have shown a strong preference for quirky and colloquial narration. Examples would include Alice Walker in The Color Purple and J. D. Salinger in The Catcher in the Rye. Like both Walker and Salinger, Saunders crafts memorable narrators and often makes serious points about the nature of our society, how it is going awry, and how social problems affect the lives of ordinary people. But even when he is writing stories that could clearly be called science fiction, Saunders’ stories are not particularly irreal.

Tenth of December gives us quite a range of quirky narrators, and Saunders uses their narrative quirks to show us, in the space of a short story, what their lives are like and how they relate to others. In “Puppy” we feel a sense of revulsion toward both the woman taking her children to look at a puppy and the woman whose puppy is at the center of the story. We see into these women’s lives, know their thoughts, and are given their rationalizations even as they do ugly things. This is not always pleasant, but despite an odd incident in the puppy owner’s yard, the story is not irreal. In the science-fiction-inspired “Escape from the Spiderhead” we come to see the narrator from a more sympathetic point of view, despite what we know to be true about him. This story takes Stanley Milgram’s experiments to a new level, as managers psyche themselves and others up to do unspeakable things. (Milgram’s 1965 study on obedient behavior saw “teachers” giving electrical shocks to “learners” despite the pain the learners seemed to endure.) But though the setting of this story is near future and the narrator’s language and explanations are constantly altered by the administration of drugs, the story is sadly plausible and again is not irreal.

In my opinion the only story in the collection that has a truly irreal aspect is “The Semplica Girl Diaries.” This is not because of the narrative style, which reminds me of Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books, nor because of the near future or alternative universe setting in which most things are very much like our own world. It is instead because of the existence of an irreal phenomenon that is never fully explained, in much the same way that Kafka never tells us why Gregor Samsa turns into a very large insect. In this story the narrator is a father trying to keep a daily diary for benefit of future readers (a nice device that lets the reader know why he explains things so completely) and worrying that his family is not able to enjoy a high enough standard of living. He describes his life in a frequently annoying yet likeable way and says, for example, that he doesn’t like rich people because they make poor people feel “dopey and inadequate,” but he also wants what rich people have. We know that he is not well off — his bumper falls off at the beginning of the story, he says that people at work only ever see him wearing a a blue shirt or a yellow shirt, and his credit cards are nearly maxed out. When he comes into a small windfall in the form of a $10,000 “Scratch-Off win,” he consults with his wife and they decide to upgrade their landscaping so their daughter can have a birthday party at home and feel comfortable inviting her better-off friends to her house. The investment works well, the party is a success, but one of the upgrades the family has made — the installation of four SGs — upsets the family’s other daughter, a sensitive girl who worries about the pain and suffering SGs might experience.

We don’t learn very much about these SGs (Semplica Girls), but we are told that they are women from economically and politically challenged societies. They are brought to people’s homes by a landscaping company that also sees to their physical needs while they are engaged in the service they are being paid to perform. This involves dressing in white smocks and being hoisted into the air, attached to each other by “microfilament” that joins them brain-to-brain, so that they float above people’s backyards. And because of interviews done by one of the daughters, we even learn some “fun facts” about the narrator’s SGs, including their names and that they hail from the Philippines, Somalia, Moldava, and Laos. But I think that this odd notion of the SGs, which is at the heart of an otherwise only slightly nonrealistic story, has more depth and resonance than the illustration at the New Yorker site implies when it shows the white skirt hems of four brown-skinned women float-flying above a koi pond. Nor do I think it is accurate to describe them as “third-world women strung up as bourgeois lawn ornaments” as Gregory Cowles did in his February 1, 2013 review of Tenth of December in the New York Times. I think that the SGs are truly an irreal notion, every bit as much as Gregor Samsa waking up to find he’s been turned into a very large insect. The idea that young, mostly dark-skinned and dark-haired women would be hung so thoughtlessly in people’s backyards calls to mind the wide range of suffering inflicted on dark-skinned people, such as lynching and the mistreatment of undocumented workers. The surgeries they must undergo also call to mind the surgeries women endure to participate in the sex trade (breast enhancement, etc.). SGs wear white, float above the ground and are often described as singing, bringing to mind an image of angels; yet, several times in the story we see a tethered dog suffer at the end of its chain so we can also see SGs in terms of the sad life of a yard dog. In many ways the SGs point to an unknown meaning, even as they also more obviously show us the irrational spending that fads can induce and the suffering of deprived and impoverished humans in our world. And finally, as the diary ends abruptly, we are also left feeling that the fate of the SGs will affect the lives of the narrator’s family who are running the race to the bottom themselves, their two daughters perhaps more vulnerable than they know. The irreal plight of the SGs is inexplicable yet surprisingly meaningful.

An Irrealist Perspective on God Help the Child

[posted by Alice]

Toni Morrison’s latest novel, God Help the Child, was published in April of this year. Though Morrison has chosen an uncharacteristically modern setting for the work, God Help the Child treats themes familiar to readers of her other novels. In particular it focuses on the notion that, “What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.” These are the words of Sweetness, mother of Bride, the beautiful young woman at the novel’s core. And though the book is about a mother’s failures in the care of her children, it is also about the failures of our society to provide children and their families the support they need – and the ways that racism worsens those failures.

John Gardner said that in all of the forms of non-realistic literature authors tend to translate “details of psychological reality into physical reality,” as happens in our dreams. And though Toni Morrison creates realistic stories with believable characters as she depicts African-American life in the United States, she sometimes brings one or more nonrealistic elements to bear as the story unfolds.

In God Help the Child a nonrealistic trend develops after Bride’s lover Booker misunderstands something she plans to do and walks out on her, saying “You not the woman…” This half-uttered statement, unclear in its implications, not only sets in motion Bride’s journey to the small town of Whiskey in search of Booker, it also seems to trigger her transformation from an exceptionally beautiful mature woman to a prepubescent child. Booker impugns Bride’s womanhood and leaves her without another word of explanation, after which she begins to lose her most womanly attributes, thereby becoming more like the child who experienced the events Booker fails to understand in the first place. And what Bride hasn’t told him is that, in order to win her mother’s approval, when she was a little girl she testified in court that a teacher had sexually molested other children, something she knew to be false.

Earlier in the novel Bride’s mother Sweetness describes her young daughter as “so black she scared me” and herself as “light-skinned, with good hair.” Bride’s dark skin was taken as a sign of Sweetness’ infidelity by Bride’s biological father, who left the family shortly after she was born. Sweetness also says, “Her color is a cross she will always carry. But it’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not.” Sweetness’ negative view of Bride leads her to be a cold and demanding mother who only gives her daughter affection and approval after Bride testifies in court according to Sweetness’ expectations and sends an innocent woman to jail.

To her mother’s surprise, Bride grows up to become a successful businesswoman (with her own cosmetics line, YOU, GIRL), and she is able to use her striking looks to her advantage. But when the woman she falsely accused is released from prison, Bride tries to make amends and is beaten up for her trouble. When Booker, confused about why she would try to make up with a child molester, reacts in the way that he does, Bride begins to experience physical regression to childhood. Her pubic hair disappears, the piercings in her ears close up, she loses her womanly curves, and Bride’s panic and despair as her physical allure is undermined provides at least some of the energy that helps her to come to terms with her past.

Of all Morrison’s novels, God Help the Child reminds me most of Sula, which takes place in an earlier era, mostly prior to World War II. Sula also deals with the hurtful ways parents fail their children, and it contains a scattering of events that seem to represent psychological realities translated into physical ones. As a result the novel shifts between realistic depictions of people’s lives and irreal events that undermine reality. These less realistic aspects include the scene in which Sula slings a child into the lake and leaves him to drown, as well as the presence of a trio of motherless boys named dewey who, despite their differences in appearance and family origin, all answer to the same name and become indistinguishable from one another. A major way in which Sula differs from God Help the Child, however, is in its treatment of community. In Sula the people who live in the African-American section of Medallion, known as the Bottom, are able to function as a community, albeit a sometimes claustrophobic one, whereas God Help the Child implies that our narcissistic individualized contemporary world tends to undermine all human relationships.

Shortly after God Help the Child was released, Toni Morrison gave a reading at the 92nd St. Y in New York. During a discussion about a turn toward the self in the 21^st century and how it affects personal development, Morrison says, “And one of the ways you get to be a whole person is you stop thinking about your little self. Am I pretty? Am I not pretty? … And start doing something serious for somebody else.” Though some movement toward community takes place in God Help the Child as Bride tries to understand what happened to her and begins to help others — including another abused child named Rain and Booker’s elderly aunt, Queen — the novel uses the stunting of Bride’s developed womanhood to show how hard developing as a whole human can truly be – especially when family and community fail us.