The Pinocchio Theory

I’ve caught up recently with a bunch of Warren Ellis “graphic novellas.” (Or, less pretentiously: comics). These are all short, compressed narratives: a complete story in 72 or 96 pages. Each one packs a punch and explores just one mind-blowing idea. Comics like these deliver entertainment + technophilosophy in a package that Hollywood (due to its high budgets and consequent need to play it safe so as to attract the largest possible audience) can’t match.

• Dark Blue, drawn by Jacen Burrows, is a horror/crime story with a VR setting. The main character’s psychotic world, in which he is a vengeful and violent cop, turns out to be a collective hallucination generated by a DMT-like drug. A virtual place “is encoded within the drug itself.” The drug shapes consciousness, even as consciousness shapes the drug. But strange and gruesome things start happening when consciousness at the point of death is caught within the drug’s feedback loop. A terrific, and terrifying, anti-utopian nightmare. If anything is possible in virtual reality, or in heightened psychedelic consciousness, then we’d better watch out for the worst.
• Red/Tokyo Storm Warning. Two stories back to back in a single volume, like those old SF and crime cheap paperbacks.
  Red, drawn by Cully Hammer, is about the stupidity of the CIA, and the last dignified stand of a retired hit man. It could also be read as a premonitory fable about the current Iraq morass. You can always develop more destructive weapons, but watch out or they will blow up in your face: you are never really in control of them. Here the weapon is a human one, a highly skilled and ultra-powerful killer; so we get to feel the emotions of the “weapon of mass destruction” itself. We empathize with the killer, whose very real anguish contrasts with the lack of remorse or humanity on the part of the powerful people who set him into motion.
  Tokyo Storm Warning, drawn by James Raiz, is all about cool monsters and robots in an alternative Tokyo. We know that Godzilla was invented in response to the trauma of the atomic weapons dropped on Japan. But Ellis literalizes this idea, bringing us to the very heart of one of the twentieth century’s great traumas. Childlike fantasy confronts the unimaginable horror of total annihilation, with strange results. Can there be poetry after Auschwitz? Can there be comics after Hiroshima?
• Orbiter, drawn by Coleen Duran, is in contrast deliciously light and upbeat. The romance of space travel, the mystery of First Contact. The aliens don’t want to take us over or anything. They simply want to meet us, and hang out with us; if only we could get over our panic aversion. We can’t really understand them — or vice versa — but that only adds spice to the encounter. The unknown is neither a threat of annihilation, nor a transcendent resolution of our problems, but rather a transversal dimension to explore. If we are children in the cosmos, the aliens are not benevolent parents (as they are in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and in 2001), but kids like ourselves, who just “want us to come out and play.”

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: comics writers like Ellis, and Grant Morrison, and Alan Moore, are really thinking about our culture, and our future, in ways that mainstream novelists and academics and critics cannot match. I get far more from them than I do from “serious” writers like Martin Amis and Richard Powers and Don DeLillo, good as the latter sometimes are. Comics are an oddly marginalized form, even in “popular” or “low” culture (think about how few people actually buy and read Spiderman comics, compared to how many go too see the movie version). But comics, with their low budgets, their innovative mixtures of text and vision, and their unabashed genre thrills and chills, are thrashing out the metaphysics of the twenty-first century.

Flyboy Action Figure Come With Gasmask is Jim Munroe‘s first novel. Although I didn’t like it quite as much as Munroe’s subsequent novels Angry Young Spaceman and the brilliantEveryone In Silico, it’s still a pretty good read.
Flyboy is set among a group of 20-something not-quite-slackers (well, they are too counterculturally committed to just be slackers; they range from artists to political activists) in contemporary Toronto. Ryan, the narrator, a sensitive and somewhat socially awkward dude, has the power to turn himself into a fly (and back again). His girlfriend Cassandra, an ex-riot-grrl-punk-rocker single mom, is able to make objects disappear. (These occult powers are never explained; the protagonists don’t know why they have such special abilities, they simply find they have them, and figure out how to use them). Ryan and Cassandra decide to become “Superheroes for Social Justice,” using their powers to fight against sexism, rapacious corporations, and government oppression. The book alternates between humorous satire, naturalistic depiction of countercultural mores, coming-of-age anguish, and right-on action narrative (among other things). This mix of genres is what gives the book its charm; it’s low-key, modest, and unassuming, but it keeps on coming out with memorable scenes and passages you don’t expect.
My favorite passage is the one where the narrator turns into a bee (instead of a fly), and escapes human anguish for a while (but only a while) by getting absorbed into the calm rhythms of working for the hive. Munroe manages to endow such surreal flights as this one with the same matter-of-factness with which he describes the narrator and his housemates teasing one another with dumb, frat-boy insult humor.
Munroe is also politically committed without being pious, something I value quite highly.
Jim Munroe self-publishes all his fiction, and offers some of it (including Flyboy) for free download on his website as well. He’s managed to get widely read and noticed, without having recourse to the usual corporate channels: which is an ethical and political decision and stance on his part. He supports other writers and artists as well, through networking, organizing reading tours, and putting out CD-ROMs.
Risking oxymoron, I’m inclined to call Munroe a pragmatic utopian. He’s an idealist, who does his best to avoid the compromises that most of us find ourselves making time and time again; but rather than high-mindedly preaching his ideals, he finds ways to actually make them work.

I’ve long had an aversion to the prose of Henry James. (How I prefer his brother, “the adorable William James,” as Whitehead calls him). There is just something so smug about Henry James’ prose, creepy and self-congratulatory and fussy and self-important and filled with hideous phrases like “in fine,” and “I daresay,” and “she hung fire.”
I often think of Henry James as the polar opposite of Proust (who is my favorite author of all time). James is all about the subtle folds and crevices of consciousness, where Proust is about those aspects of our emotional life where consciousness fails to reach (like “involuntary memory”). James fetishizes a narrow, instrumental “intelligence”; Proust is all about the limitations and failures, and ultimately the irrelevance, of such an intelligence. James’ characters are always calculating, always jousting for advantage, always manipulating one another, while Proust tracks the movements of passion, for good and for ill, in generosity and in cruelty, that are beyond calculation. James and Proust are both snobs; but where James takes his snobbery complacently for granted, Proust subjects it to lacerating self-analysis. And so on.
But Nightspore has been after me for ages to read James’ little-known novel The Sacred Fount, and his recent post quoting Rebecca West’s hilarious description of the novel (she writes that James “records how a week-end visitor spends more intellectual force than Kant can have used on The Critique of Pure Reason in an unsuccessful attempt to discover whether there exists between certain of his fellow-guests a relationship not more interesting among these vacuous people that it is among sparrows”) finally persuaded me to do so.
Well, I have to admit that The Sacred Fount really is quite something. It’s James’ parody (intentional or not, I’m not quite sure) and reductio ad absurdum of his entire aesthetic and method. Significantly, the novel features James’ only first-person narrator; and this very Jamesian narrator spends the entire novel discerning subtleties that simply aren’t there, ‘reading’ his fellows entirely incorrectly, congratulating himself for his own mistaken insights, and constructing a “theory” of human behavior that finally collapses into a black hole of irrelevance and inaccuracy (or collapses like a house of cards, to use one of the novel’s own metaphors). The ultra-subtle discernment of James’ prose turns out to be nothing but projection and interpretive paranoia; the novel’s seeming exploration of intersubjectivity is unmasked as a wishful solipsistic fantasy. Thus, the narrator goes to great lengths to describe to the reader his silent unspoken sympathy and commiseration with a ravaged woman, filled with desperation, at the end of her rope, her life blasted by passion, on the verge of total breakdown, courageously and beyond her own strength struggling to hold herself together only a few moments longer… only it turns out the woman is none of these things, but rather just a witty and skittish flirt.
What’s more, you can’t even say the narrator learns anything at the end, when the full extent of his folly is revealed to him. He sort of shrugs it off, admitting a kind of defeat, but with his faith in his own intelligence and discernment largely unshaken.
The entire content of the novel, including everything that makes any of the characters potentially interesting, is withdrawn at the end, leaving nothing but a void. The Sacred Fount is so wonderfully crazy and pointless a book, so extreme an exercise in style (albeit one that makes me cringe) devoid of any meaningful content, so dazzling a display of writing without any reason to write, an act of pure expression without anything whatsoever to express, that it won me over in spite of myself.

Tonight I went to a reading by the totally wonderful Kelly Link (whom I’ve written about before). It was part of the Clarion West speculative fiction series of readings this summer.
She read half of a story about zombies, and an animal shelter where dogs are put to sleep, and Canadians, and strange pajamas, and working retail at a 7-11 type store that’s open 24/7. It was melancholy, and sweet, and drily hilarious, and filled with all sorts of surprising, counter-intuitive leaps that nonetheless somehow made perfect sense.
Link is a writer so singular, and so acute, that she makes utterly irrelevant the usual distinctions between “genre” and “serious” writing, between storytelling and prose experimentation, between hard-headed actuality and fantasy or dreams.

Today’s New York Times Book Review illustrates perfectly what’s wrong with mainstream Anglo-American literary culture.
Exhibit One: the review of Julian Barnes’ new book of short stories. From what I’ve read of him, Barnes is a deeply unoriginal writer, utterly devoid of interesting ideas, with a humdrum style, and whose main stock in trade is to create kneejerk responses (through a judicious use of literary allusions) in order to reassure his highbrow readers that they are indeed reading Great Literature. He professes to love Flaubert, but his writing about Flaubert is distinguished only by its utter banality. And sure enough, the NYT Book Review says that his latest volume, “in ways both modest and grand, helps sustain a reader’s faith in literature.”
Exhibit Two:the review of David Foster Wallace’s new book of stories. The reviewer is quick to criticize Wallace’s “ostentatiously elongated, curiously bureaucratic, stubbornly overdetermined prose style” (translation: his sentences are too long). Now, I am not one of Wallace’s biggest admirers; his writing, though always provocative and interesting and hilarious, fails to entirely convince me. But, still, to criticize Wallace’s prose style! To object to the length and density of his sentences! If nothing else, Wallace is certainly a powerful and innovative stylist. He is doing something to and with the English language that deserves both notice and praise. His sentences are deeply pleasurable in their ornateness and richness of detail; and their twistings and turnings at once exacerbate and mock the hyperbolic meta-self-consciousness whose contradictions, necessities, and discomforts are Wallace’s real subject as a writer. Wallace’s prose style embodies thought and pushes at its limits; the drama of this style is the drama of postmodern irony and earnestness: a play of qualifications to the point of exhaustion, but also a manic, deeply comic energy. The reviewer clearly knows all this, but still he insists that… Wallace doesn’t have a heart! Which is sort of like criticizing Orson Welles for not being Steven Spielberg.
Exhibit Three: the review of the letters of Isaiah Berlin. Here, the reviewer freely admits that there are those of us who do not regard Berlin with reverence and affection. Me, I find him far too mealy-mouthed, as well as unbearably smug about his advocacy of moderation in all things. And I’m deeply suspicious of the way that he, like so many Cold War intellectuals, countenanced all sorts of vileness on the part of the “free world” because it was being done in opposition to the vileness of Stalinism (much as, today, Christopher Hitchens approves of Bush’s barbarities, because they are ostensibly being done in opposition to the very real barbarities of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein). But this objection evidently positions me, in the view of the NYT reviewer, as a member of “that species for which ‘anti-Communist’ is the harshest term of abuse (and which cannot be persuaded by any amount of evidence that it might have been quite a good thing to be anti).” I would have hoped that the end of the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union (one evil empire down, one to go) would have meant the end of such crass Manichaeanism as is evidenced by this reviewer’s anti-anti-anti-Communism. At least Berlin himself had the excuse that he was writing during the Cold War, which pushed thinkers of all positions into dualistic boxes. But such arguments have no excuse, and no point, today (unless the point is precisely to bully the unwilling into joining Bush’s so-called “coalition”).
All in all, these articles show the Times‘ instinctive adherence to an utterly anachronistic version of “literary culture,” and suggest its inability even to recognize anything that is vital or meaningful in Anglo-American culture (literary or otherwise) today.