Alasdair Gray, ‘Lanark’ (1981)

 

Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) laminates two narrative lines, disposing them into four books (though Gray, perversely, orders the books: 3, 1, 2, 4). One of these is set in ‘our’ world, mid-twentieth-century Glasgow, and follows the childhood and young adulthood of Duncan Thaw: severely asthmatic, a talented if unconventional artist—like Gray himself, though Thaw’s fate is grimmer than was Gray’s: alienated, disaffected, constantly ill, he eventually drowns himself in the sea. The other narrative is the Fantasy component of the story. After his death Thaw wakes in an underworld version of Glasgow called ‘Unthank’, a place without daylight governed by an oppressive, Orwellian logic. This takes its place in a notable tradition: as for example The City of Dreadful Night (1874) by Scottish poet James Thomson (who wrote as ‘B.V.’), or Scottish novelist Margaret Oliphant, who rendered hell as an industrialised, lightless underground polis in A Beleaguered City (1880).

Posthumous Thaw falls in with a group of young people, a clique centred on a character called Sludden, who meet in the ‘Elite Café’. But as Thaw was an outsider in ‘our’ world, so he proves in Unthank; and his earthly eczema becomes hyperbolically rendered in this afterlife as ‘dragonhide’, a sickness by which his skin transforms into thick scales. Before his draconic transformation is complete Lanark itself is swallowed by a titanic mouth in the ground, and Thaw awakes in a Kafkaesque ‘Institute’, a kind of hospital that exploits its patients under the pretence of curing them, from which he resolves to escape. After these two versions of death—drowned in our world, Unthank swallowed by the earth—we learn that the next time Thaw expires he will ‘actually’ die, and the novel ends on this nihilistic, or perhaps nirvanic, note.

Gray worked for many decades on this novel, and its appearance in 1981 was in a sense untimely. It owes much to Mervyn Peake’s pseudo-Gothic fantastika, and anticipates by 20 years or more the surge of interest in ‘Weird’ fiction, but nothing else like it was being published at that time. Still, though it stood alone, it was a hit, and has remained a cult classic. Hard as it is to ‘fit’ into a narrative of genre fantasy in the 1980s, it is harder to decide whether the novel engages politically—published as it was at a politically divisive and highly agitated time—or not. For novelist Jonathan Coe, Lanark is ‘the quintessential political novel … its theme is the individual’s relationship to society, and this theme is inscribed not just in the narrative but in the formal apparatus of the novel itself, which embeds the story of the hero’s coming of age in the framework of an Orwellian dystopian fantasy.’ [Coe, ‘Nae new ideas, nae worries!’, London Review of Books, 30:22 (20 November 2008), 18]

Sara Wasson and Emily Alder see the resurgence of interest in Gothic, and the various neo-Gothic texts of the years 1980-2010, as indices of ‘late capitalism and its discontents’: ‘the 1980s saw an economic transformation in the West’ and neo-Gothic addresses the ways ‘the human subject [had] become increasingly biologized, the ideological hold of liberal humanism over the foundations of identity destabilised … with the Gothic not only unearthing the hidden, be it repressed desire or secret anxiety, but also as itself a thing of desire’ [Sara Wasson and Emily Alder (eds), Gothic Science Fiction 1980-2010 (Liverpool University Press 2011), 8, 14-15]. Gray, a socialist and Scots nationalist, devoted much of his life to political engagement, through pamphlets and articles as well as speeches; and the frontispiece for the novel riffs on that of Hobbes’s Leviathan, as if Lanark itself is a midrash upon the collectivised vision of polity of Hobbes’s vision, as standing against his fundamentally dystopian sense of life as nasty, brutish and short.

And yet—as you can see, Gray has altered Hobbes when rendering the legend of his version. The original, in the Introduction of the Leviathan is: ‘For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE which is just an artificial man—though bigger and stronger than the natural man, for whose protection and defence it was intended’ (by ‘art’ Hobbes means ‘thoughtful planning, contrivance, design’; the word was used, in the 17th-century, in contradistinction to ‘nature’, and refers to all that happens artificially rather than naturally). Gray changes this to: ‘By Arts is formed that great Mechanical Man called a State, foremost of the Beasts of the Earth for Pride’. Pride, clearly, is not the same thing as ‘protection and defence’, and arts, in the narrower 20th-century, sense of the word, were the business of Gray’s life, drawing, painting, design. Lanark includes a number of what we might call metafictional gestures, including an epilogue in which Gray introduces himself into his own story, but this frontispiece has already tipped the nod. Lanark is an intensely personal novel, looking not forward to the deracination of global capitalism and neoliberalism of the 1990s and 21st century, but back to Gray’s own childhood. The ‘fantasy’ of the book actualises and externalises the existential claustrophobia of a being-in-the-world curtailed physically by asthma and weakness and psychologically by neurodiversity, shyness and difference. It is a book of large scope, and many pages, that reverts repeatedly upon small spaces, imprisonment, being swallowed rather than swallowing. It is, I know, a precarious business bringing purely subjective responses into a work of what ought to be disinterested criticism, but I can perhaps report—as an individual who has suffered lifelong, and continues to suffer, from debilitating asthma—that when I first read Lanark as a teenager I was deeply struck by how accurately Gray represents the experiential aspect of that disease in this novel. Newer drugs make it more manageable now, but that was not Gray’s patience in the 1950s (or mine in the 1970s and early 1980s) and Lanark vividly captures how chronic, pervasive breathlessness shrinks one’s existence, seals one away in clinging cellophane. It is no coincidence that Duncan Thaw dies (the first time) by drowning. There is, believe me, nothing worse. ‘Thaw’ is a another kind of ironic reimagining, like Gray’s personalised arts-and-crafts Hobbesianism (which reverts Hobbesian collectivism upon one individual’s experience, and that individual Gray)—the Norse god Thor is the epitome of superabundant strength and outgoing-ness, where Thaw is physically weak and debilitated. But just as Thor wrestles the great ocean-dragon Jörmungandr—the ‘Midgard’ or World Serpent—that seeks to crush the breath from him and drown him, so Duncan not only wrestles asthma and an Eliotic ‘death by water’, he actually begins to transform into a dragon, and his experience renders Unthank as Midgardian, between the daylight of ‘our’ world and the final destiny of Duncan below in absolute death.

Of course, in a slogan popular in the decade when Gray completed his first draft of Lanark, the personal is political. The novel flirts with this: Sludden, expatiating on the proper role of work and love, says: ‘perhaps I've surprised you by putting work and love in the same category, but both are ways of mastering other people’ [Lanark, 6]. A grim sort of blurring of the personal and the political—though, we could say, perfectly Hobbesian. But elsewhere the ‘political’ is troped as a kind of hideous self-division. In Unthank Lanark meets a woman called Nan, who relates a strange sickness that afflicted him:

“I began to grow mouths, not just in my face but in other places, and when I was alone they argued and shouted and screamed at me. Sludden was very good with them. He could always get them singing in tune, and when we slept together he even made me glad of them. He said he'd never known a girl who could be pierced in so many places. … But they drove even Sludden away in the end (the mouths did), because as I grew worse I needed him more and he didn't like that. He was going into politics and he had a lot to do.” Lanark and Rima cried out together, “Politics?” and Rima said, “He always made fun of people who went into politics.” [Lanark, 371]

Ultimately Lanark represents a withdrawal from the social, from the intersubjective—from politics as such—into a private fantasy. It’s not a very comforting fantasy, but the retreat into the merely personal often is not comforting. Gray’s next book, 1982 Janine (1984), though a kind of masterpiece, further embeds this retreat: its narrator abandoning himself to elaborate erotic reverie and sexual fantasy even as he laments the failure of his fellow Scots to (a phrase Gray adopted from poet Dennis Lee, and made into his own slogan) ‘Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.’ Gray published many other things, but Lanark and 1982, Janine remain his two major achievements, riffs on ‘fantasy’ in, respectively, a generic and a sexual sense. Lanark is a great novel of Glasgow, and rehearses inter alia that city’s sectarian tensions between Catholicism and Protestantism—in itself a reason for the book’s Fantasy.

Tad Williams, ‘Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn’ (1988-1993)

 Williams is, to this day, best known for his Tolkienesque trilogy Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, comprising The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Stone of Farewell (1990) and To Green Angel Tower (1993). These very lengthy novels—the third one so ample its half-million words had to be split between two separate, blocky volumes upon paperback publication—detail the rise of a lad called Simon Mooncalf, from his lowly status as a kitchen boy in the castle of dying King Prester John, to saviour of the realm. Williams calls his Middle Earth ‘Osten Ard’, his elves ‘Sithi’, his wizards ‘mages’ and his Old Forest ‘Aldheorte forest’, folding into his story magic swords of power, enigmatic prophesy, wicked sorcerers, quests, enchanted scrolls, intelligent wolves, trolls, and all the paraphernalia of an enchanted pseudo-medieval Europe. What makes his trilogy different to the, by the late 1980s, excessively over-familiar fare of post-Tolkien heroic fantasy is the detail: the novels give us great shovelfuls of specific detail, a textual strategy Tolstoyan in ambition if not in execution. It means that the series is slow to start, the curtain rising on several hundred pages of scene-setting and authorial throat-clearing that a reader may find immersive, or else frustrating-offputting, depending. Eventually a larger story emerges from the welter of detail: Ineluki the Storm King, undead ruler of the Sithi, blights the land with the power of his dark wrath, forcing the scattered remnants of humanity to rally at the ‘Stone of Farewell’. Simon, rising from servitude and adolescence into an important adult role in the ‘League of the Scroll’, is caught up in the final battle of good against evil.

Williams’ prose is prolix but inexact. Of Ineluki, we are told: ‘he has become a smoldering ember of despair and hatred … he exists to see the present state of the world obliterated and its injustices made right, but his only window is anger’ [Stone of Farewell, 123]—writing that, in a general sense, communicates its meaning, even if it leaves us pondering how a smouldering ember can have a window and how such fenestration can be constructed out of so unsolid a material as anger. Late in the trilogy, Simon thinks back on all he has been through.

These old stories are like blood. They run through people, even when they don’t know it or think about it. He considered this idea for a moment. But even if you don’t think about them, when the bad times come, the old stories come out on every side. [To Green Angel Tower, 190]

Important, I feel, to keep your mind focussed at all times on the fact that blood is circulating around your body in a network of veins and arteries. Stop thinking about it, even for a moment, and it’ll start oozing out from every pore. Memory, Sorrow and Looooooong.

Randall Garrett and Vicki Ann Heydron, ‘The Gandalara Cycle' (1981-86)

 

The ‘Gandalara Cycle’ novels were co-authored, according to the books' title pages, by Randall Garrett and Vicki Ann Heydron. In fact they were written by Heydron, from a series of notes provided by Garrett, her husband (he having at that time a higher profile amongst SF fandom). The first novel in the series, The Steel of Raithskar (1981), sets-up the premise: first-person narrator Ricardo Emilio Carillo, an elderly and infirm university professor in ‘our’ world, is taking a cruise in the Mediterranean when a giant fireball crashes into the ship, as is typical of these sorts of cruises. Ricardo passes through ‘heat, pain and blinding light’ to awaken in the body of a young and vigorous man called Markasset, in the orientalised cod-Arabian fantasy-land of Gandalaran (a map is provided). Markasset embarks without excessive delay upon a series of adventures, alongside his companions: the beautiful female illusionist Tarani (she ‘speaks in a low and vibrant voice that set my spine tingling’) and a giant intelligent cat named Keeshah with whom Ricardo shares a telepathic bond. Seven novels.

In The Steel of Raithskar Ricardo is suspected of stealing a sacred jewel called the ‘Ra’ira’ and must prove his innocence via the expedient of questing-about, fighting people with swords and generally getting to know his new land, all the time riding his cat-friend like a horse. The Gandalarans are not surprised at Markasset’s consciousness being supplanted by a mind from another world: ‘it happens,’ an old man called Thanasset tells him, if ‘rarely’ (‘maybe once a generation ... I have read the accounts of most, if not all, of the Visitations’). To begin with, Ricardo/Markasset is often distracted by memories from his previous life (‘there was no way to say coronary thrombosis in Gandaresh’ [69]) but as the series goes on he increasingly immerses himself in his fantasy idiom and forgets his former life: adventure, fighting, sex (discretely rendered) and all the satisfactions of youth in a magical realm. There are giant white apes, beautiful princesses, a desert land, mysterious magicians, an ‘All-Mind’ overpower: all very John Carter of Mars in flavour. One thing that Burroughs doesn’t give us that Garrett-Heydron does is a strange (or at least, strange to me: I daresay this only indexes how square and sexually-repressed I am) tooth fetish: ‘I kissed her, tantalizing my tongue on the rounded tips of her large canine teeth. All thought was swept away’ [230]; ‘Her canine teeth were as well-developed as mine. Somehow, they looked even better on her’ [50]; ‘Her large canine tusks looked eager’ [207]. Phwoar, and so on.

There is rather a lot of bourgeois comfortableness in what is, notionally at least, a feudal bronze-age Arabian world:

The room we had first entered was merely a wide hallway with chairs. It led into a large, private sitting room which connected with several other rooms, including a tiled balcony where meals were served. We were in the private sitting room now, and Tarani was adjusting a fold of the gown while Zefra admired herself in a polished-brass mirror. [The Bronze of Eddarta (1983), 130]

They may not have discovered how to smelt iron, but these are people who appreciate the benefits of a private sitting room and comfortable chairs. Priorities in cultural/social evolution.

In the later volumes, Ricardo travels to the land where the giant intelligent cats come from, and also meets the draida, ‘dog-like in the same sense that the sha'um were cat-like’ [The Well of Darkness, 19]. So all your pet-needs are catered for. Eventually Tarani becomes new High Lord of Eddarta, announcing her intention to end its corrupt traditions of slavery, though this doesn't go smoothly to plan. Still, there are consolations:

Her lips were soft, responsive, eager. With a thrill of joy I slipped my hand under the fabric of her tunic and caressed her breast, full and firm. She moved and made a sound—and we took the time, then, to be free of all our clothing. [Well of Darkness (1983), 96]

Hot!

Gandalara is always hot, but the reflective quality of the sand in the desert made it seem suffocatingly, blisteringly hot. [The Search for Ka (1984), 260]

Hot!

Evan Winter, "The Rage of Dragons" (2019)

‘The fighting men and women of the Chosen were already onshore, were already fighting and dying’ [3]; ‘He grabbed the man's wrist, breaking it across his knee. The dagger fell to the sand and Tsiory crashed his forehead into his opponent's nose. With his enemy stunned, Tsiory shoved all his weight forward, forcing the rest of his sword into the man's guts, drawing an open mouthed howl from him that spattered Tsiory with blood and phlegm’ [10]; ‘Tau stabbed and swung at limbs and faces. He sliced away someone's fingers, praying they'd come from an enemy's hand’ [44]; ‘Aren lifted his sword to defend. Kellan adjusted, hitting him on the wrist, separating hand from forearm’ [111]; ‘Blood from the wound on his face dripped on the floor’ [125]; ‘The jagged cut Lekan had given him was bleeding through its scabs. The man's head had felt like a rock when he'd slammed it into Tau's face’ [151]; ‘He hit him in the shoulder and then, as Jengo hopped back in pain, he cracked him in the neck. Jengo made a strange high-pitched sound and went down’ [179]; ‘Tau drew his arm back, near to blacking out from agony, and lashed with his remaining sword, slicing the demon across its chest’ [239]; ‘Tau fell to the murky ground and felt his insides spilling out. He looked down and cried out in pain and horror. His intestines were exposed to the air, ropes upon ropes of them. He reached down to try and push them back. The pain was indescribable’ [265]; ‘The creature closed its jaws on the back of his neck, cracking his spine and dragging him to the ground. With his spine severed Tau could not feel the leg or his rib cage being torn open by the two demons. He could hear them though, as they slopped up his innards and shook his body with their jostling’ [311]; ‘Tau's head lolled. He was dying. It hurt. It hurt so much’ [315]; ‘The bastard shot his other sword out and low, burying a handspan of bronze in the meat of his left hip. Kellen screamed and fell’ [415]; ‘Tau launched himself into the fray, swords whirling, and the closest man took a dulled blade to the face, shattering his eye socket’ [417]; ‘... a warrior woman with full lips, caramel skin, and astonishing green eyes. She moved like an ocean storm, her bladework brilliant. He took her hand off at the wrist and she gawped at him, as if to ask why he'd done it. He wanted to tell her he wasn't sure, but his bronze was deep in her breastbone and there was nothing to say that would have meant a damn’ [443]; ‘Tau dropped, cutting through the man's calf with his blade. The Indlovu began to fall, and as he did Tau drove his sword through his skull. The dead man collapsed on the tiled floor’ [486]; ‘She fell to her knees and clawed at her neck, and blood erupted from her ears, mouth, nose and eyes. With fingers clawed, she tore at her face, peeling stripes of flesh away in rolls. She opened her mouth wide, as if to give birth through it, and vomited a torrent of filth, her arms giving way as she did’ [491]; ‘The pain coursed through Tau like a tsunami ... he looked down at his wound. The demon had him open from belly to groin’ [509].

It's exhausting.

I'm not saying its badly done. If you like this kind of thing (which is to say, if you like ultraviolent Fantasy war-adventure with lots of hack-n-slash) then this, I would hazard, will prove the kind of thing you like. But, sheesh. I'd suggest ‘ugh’, but I really not sure Rage of Dragons rises to the level of a Lawrentian or Burroughsian ‘ugh’. Not to damn with faint praise or anything. What I'm saying here, it should be evident, reflects my own squeamishness as much as anything else.

It's a larger question, of course. Larger than this one novel, I mean. Why is contemporary Fantasy so often so ultraviolent? Is it the same reason why so much of contemporary culture more broadly is so in hock to ultraviolence? I read reviews of the recent Harley Quinn flick Birds of Prey that praised the movie specifically for its representation of violence—visually inventive, say the critics; fun, they say; well-choreographed they say, as if grievous bodily harm is an elaborate and expressive dance rather than an affront to our collective humanity. Such celebration goes, it seems to me, in tandem with critics praising the movie for putting women in front of and behind the camera, a tacit argument that Birds of Prey dramatises the revolt of oppressed womankind against patriarchy. Don't misunderstand my weariness, here. Manifestly, patriarchy is a structural violence, and manifestly men are often actually violent against women. But it seems to me the myth of the ‘kick-ass femme’ reproduces, rather than deconstructs, both those things. As if Harley Quinn could figure as a role model to any but the most morally amaurotic! I mean, it's possible that that's exactly where we are. But one hopes not.

I understand, of course, the argument that says: this is neither a representation of, nor a call to, actual violence—it's cartoon violence, like Tom and Jerry. Still, Tom and Jerry used to be a five-minute interlude between Crackerjack and Blue Peter. Now it's the whole schedule. Sure, we chafe against the restrictions of Civilisation and Its Discontents, and (sure) those discontents stem from the way we must constrain our desires and aggressions in the face of the provocations of others. But the fantasy that acting out our violent instincts would free us from this bind is as fatuous as it is mendacious. Do it really need saying? Physical violence in facile books and films simplifies, frees, acts cathartically and manifests graceful physicality; but physical violence in real life is always ugly, always upsetting, always graceless, never effects any longer-term catharsis and always, always but always complexifies and degrades the situation into which it is inserted. Violence is another word for intolerance—is, indeed, the purest somatic embodiment of intolerance. If intolerance, more broadly framed, is our problem, injecting more intolerance surely isn't the solution, howsoever we urge ourselves on with self-assurances that our intolerance is the good kind, not like their nasty and bigoted intolerance, and so on, and so forth. But, look: I'm getting preachy. You know the drill. I've hummed and ha'd around this question before, and at some length. Still harping on tortures? Apparently so.

There's an episode of The Sopranos (‘For All Debts Public and Private’ I think it is) where Tony gifts Christopher the identity of the now-retired cop who killed his, Christopher's, father. Tony drives him to this man's house and waits outside as Chris goes in. Later, during his session with his psychoanalyst Dr Melfi, Tony confesses that he sat in the car thinking about the ‘beating’ taking place, and wishing it was him, inside the house. This is connected, we assume, with Tony's sense that he's not as young as he used to be, his fear of waning powers. But Melfi's question, with respect to this desire to be where the beating was actually happening, is perceptive: ‘giving it?’ she asks. ‘Or taking it?’

Reading this novel, and having read many like it, I find myself struck that two things are always at play. On the one hand there is the idea of violence as something you inflict on others, others ‘who deserve it’ (to free you from any qualms your conscience might try to insert into the situation)—the idea, in other words, of violence as freeing, a freedom both from societal constraints and from your own motivations, thoughts and prompts (hence: an acte gratuit). But always, alongside this fundamentally sadistic notion, runs the masochistic one. The Rage of Dragons puts enormous emphasis on the long, exhausting and often painful training its characters must undergo, and spends as long on the wounds our guys receive as the ones they inflict: gloating accounts of enemies being hacked to pieces, and equally gloating accounts of we ourselves (that is, our fictional proxy) being on the receiving end of others' violence. Maybe that fictive jink that divides the universe in goodies (us) and baddies (them) isn't quite the get-out-of-jail-free card our conscience needs. Perhaps we must receive as much violence as we dish out in order that we are able to continue dishing it out. An eye for an eye, we might say, cuts both ways.

It's certainly hard to deny that movies from Rambo to Starship Troopers and Captain America: Winter Soldier are as much about how much violence and pain our hero can absorb as they are about how much he (in most cases it is a he) can direct against others. Swapping out the kick-ass hero in favour of a kick-ass heroine does not challenge or upend, but rather internalises and intensifies, this structural relation. It's not actually a case of ‘women have been on the receiving end of this kind of crap for generations, now it's our turn to dish it out’. That's for several reasons I think, and not the least of them is: men are on the receiving end, and always have been. In life, but egregiously so in art. Sylvester Stallone squatting in a cave and gurning in agony as he sews up his own wounds without anasthetic: Rambo is much more a masterpiece of masochism than it is an outwardly projecting power-fantasy. And that makes a kind of sense, doesn't it: because the System (Power, Foucault would say) absolutely depends upon our capacity to absorb its punishments—upon, in fact, our ability not just to take this, but to convince ourselves that we should, that this is the logic of reality, even that we secretly enjoy it. It isn't us, but we're encouraged to believe it is. In truth, as Ballard's Richard Pearson says in Kingdom Come (2006) ‘Violence is the True Poetry of Governments.’ So here we are.

Violence is a physical action, and its representation in art is an emotional prompt (to exhilaration perhaps; or disgust). Which is another way of saying: violence is not an idea. Me, I'm old-fashioned enough not to wish to forego the idea that SF is a literature of ideas. The problem is that an idea is always a constraint upon emotion; an idea is always a formulation, and therefore a formalisation, which is to say: a form. All the bollocks about violence as something to be ‘choreographed’, as a kind of ‘dance’, is a fundamental and, I think, self-serving evasion of the truth that violence degrades form, is always about breaking shit, not forming it. Our confusion (one, I'm tempted to say, structurally imposed upon us) is our belief that our guilt merits violence, along with this ideolegeme's correlative that violence is the necessary idiom of all punishment. But it need not be so. In Coldness and Cruelty Gilles Deleuze argues that ‘even guilt and punishment do not tell us what the law is.’ Rather he says, they ‘leave it in a state of indeterminacy equaled only by the extreme specificity of the punishment.’ He adds: ‘this is the world described by Kafka.’ Oh for a properly and fully Kafkaesque Fantasy novel today! Vain hope, I know.

So, yes: I suppose I'm suggesting this style of writing, so common today, only superficially appears sadistic. It's actually masochistic, in this specifically Deleuzian sense. In place of sadism's essentially institutional, apathetic and quantitative powers, connected as they are in our post-Enlightenment epoch with the demonstrative reason of the superergoist state, these sorts of novel are exercises in Deleuzian masochism. These works only mimic heat; they are in fact cold. They pay mere lip-service to justice and liberation; in fact they are cruel, qualitative and contractual (since the reader knows in advance what to expect here and will be angry if they feel ‘cheated’ of that; but also in the way violence against the other is ‘paid for’ in the currency of violence absorbed by the self).