Ordinary Catastrophes
Paradoxes and Problems in Some Recent Post-Apocalypse Fictions
CHRISTOPHER PALMER
Send me, sir, a few trifles to read, but nothing about the prophets: everything they predicted I assume to have happened already.
Madame du Deffand to Voltaire
In a recent essay, Perry Anderson offers a parable that reflects on the novel as a form. He tells how Franco Moretti and Carlo Ginzburg visited the Metropolitan Museum in New York; Moretti paused before a Vermeer painting with a lucid depiction of everyday life and proclaimed, “That is the beginning of the novel”:
In other words, a narrative of ordinary people in a familiar setting—neither epic nor tragedy. Ginzburg then spun around to a portrait by Rembrandt on the opposite wall, of the disfigured painter Gerard de Lairesse, his nose disfigured by syphilis, and retorted: “No, that is the beginning of the novel.” In other words, the anomaly, not the rule.1
The implication is that the novel exists in a constant tension and dialogue between the everyday and the anomalous; the present chapter examines a medley of inventive recent post-apocalyptic fiction in the light of this tension. Post-apocalyptic fiction throws both the everyday and the anomalous into uncertainty, but in this uncertainty new ways of controlling or even defeating the fear of apocalypse become available. Apocalypse is by definition exceptional and fearful, yet imagining apocalypse is a pervasive cultural habit; often through its valuing ordinary decency, contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction interrogates the nature of “the ordinary” in a situation in which the ordinary is itself in question and ordinary decency often turns out to be itself anomalous. What is everyday, what is ordinary or normal, is thrown into doubt after the apocalypse, when social forms all have to be reestablished or reimagined. Language struggles to bridge, or paper over, the gap, seeking to normalize the new but often simply banalizing it. And if what is normal is in question, so too is what is anomalous. After a glance at Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, published in 1971, this chapter traces these considerations through three more recent novels, Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma (1998), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), and China Miéville’s Kraken (2010).
In what follows, discussion concentrates on a series of figures who present themselves as ordinary—often in contrast to exceptional figures of power and violence—yet whose ordinariness turns out to be distinctly and even spectacularly extraordinary. It is a tendency that no doubt follows from the democratic desire to find heroism in ordinary people, narratively released when the fiction embraces the comic—but this tension takes a paradoxical and problematic form in the texts under discussion. Narratives of apocalypse form a tradition that frequently degrades into routine. Nuclear disaster and ecological collapse are too important to be ignored—in fact they cannot be ignored because they haunt us in their demand not merely for emotional and imaginative response, but for action. But nuclear disaster and ecological collapse (and their many siblings regarding possible catastrophe) are easily drawn upon through reliable images and appeals. Brian Stableford has argued that the nuclear gloom of the 1950s gave us the sense that the future is “a kind of continuing catastrophe”2; if so, recent waves of unease about ecology and about Earth’s future will have surely reinforced this. Yet, as Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. notes with regard to SF during the 1950s and 1960s, “the enthusiasm with which sf writers wiped the slate of civilization clean to construct postapocalyptic scenarios struck many as unseemly.”3 Apocalypse threatens to become cliché because we have lived with it too long; its imagery and its impressive effects are too readily available. Textually speaking, we face not “the end,” but “the endings,” as Miéville explores in Kraken, where people have become “endsick.”4 The catastrophe as an event so devastating that it ought to be unique in fact has dozens and dozens of precedents and variants. It is both anticipated and déjà. There is, then, some cultural need for skepticism, if not about the real threat of disaster then about our habit of imagining it.
Yet the habit of apocalypse also opens opportunities: if apocalypse is dreamed, then this can give the dreamer power; if apocalypse is repeated, then the repetitions open space for comic excess. The combination of need and opportunity prompts a series of complex and often comic moves in the texts under discussion. The setting of these novels is often local, but when the putatively ordinary is brought into closer focus, its nature and potential tend to be questioned and complicated. What part might ordinary people and ordinary decencies play in narratives of catastrophe and apocalypse? What is the ordinary anyway, in a new world in which social reality has changed, in which, arguably, anomaly has now become normal? A recurrent pattern is one in which ordinary decency is both found to be anomalous and to be locked in a conflict with power and violence that can be resolved only by the action of some third, even more anomalous force, which is not ordinary and sometimes not human. This can be first explored in Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven; in the later novels to be discussed the pattern recurs in a more complicated form, and the questioning of the ordinary and everyday takes in the whole of contemporary society as well as individuals.
In The Lathe of Heaven the ordinariness of George Orr is seen as a depth of dignity and integrity, but the series of radical and inadequate rearrangements of reality that his “effective dreaming” brings about cannot simply be blamed on his antagonist/partner, the monstrously egotistic Dr. Haber. Each of the new realities that Haber induces Orr to dream into existence is flawed in a fundamental way. The result is not without comedy; for instance, racial difference is abolished along with racial discrimination in one reality when everyone ends up gray in color. Orr dreams new realities with the literalness characteristic of dreams, and the effect is a series of comic anticlimaxes as well as a series of new demands from Haber, and new unsatisfactory dreams.
Orr stands for being, and its depth, while Haber stands for doing, and its blindness; the moral structure of the novel is clear, as is not so clearly the case in the later novels to be discussed. Haber becomes megalomaniac and all-powerful in the latest world he has had Orr dream into existence, while Orr reacts to the extremity of interference with the grounds of being—an interference in which he feels he is himself participating—by dreaming away the human race. Their relationship has reached deadlock. The deadlock is broken by the accidental introduction of amiable aliens who become Orr’s helpers, to the homely tune of “With a Little Help from My Friends.” They make a third term that unlocks the impasse between Orr and Haber and brings a halt to the succession of radically rearranged but ironically flawed situations the pair had brought about. Haber is driven mad and reduced to silence, Orr is freed of his ability to have effective dreams, and reality settles into commonplace mess, to which the aliens calmly adapt.5
I now turn to three recent novels that are somewhat less easy to schematize than The Lathe of Heaven. In Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma, Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and Miéville’s Kraken we can see evidence of the response to the cultural habit of apocalypse in three broad features: catastrophe is repeated; catastrophe is subjective; catastrophe is taken for granted. To expand:
• Catastrophe is repeated: the novel involves a series and variety of catastrophes.
• Catastrophe is subjective: it is dreamed or imagined, often by a given character—this is one reason for the variety of catastrophes just mentioned, but it is also the point at which relations between the dreamer and the universe can be reimagined and some of the terror of apocalypse can be dispelled.
• Catastrophe is taken for granted: the event is not explained in the novel. Given the way humans behave, the event is too predictable to be worth explanation. If it didn’t happen this way it would have happened some other way; it is as if the event has already happened, so that, at least potentially, it is reincorporated into the ordinary, and thus available for comic play.
The value of comedy in this context cannot simply be assumed, however. It may be that to make a comic narrative of the way in which catastrophe is a cultural habit is indeed to free us from fear, but the threat of catastrophe remains real, and our situation is often made grimmer by this very habit of imagining catastrophe. Oryx and Crake is the case in point, a grim, angry novel in which the ordinary has been corrupted by the banal, by banality of cultural imagination, and catastrophe results. Girlfriend in a Coma and Kraken are more freely comic, as well as more affectionate in their grasp of the everyday, but both these novels depict worlds in which reality is ungrounded, and the flux of change and crisis threatens to sweep away ordinary values and commitments.
GIRLFRIEND IN A COMA (1998)
Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma6 reflects the familiarity of narratives of apocalypse in two main ways. First, it does this by staging the end of life as we know it, annihilating all humans except a group of ordinary thirty-something friends in Vancouver. Then it reveals that this has all been faked, at which point they are returned to the moment before the catastrophe and asked to live as dedicated prophets of change in their restored suburban world. If all fiction of catastrophe is meant to alert us to the dangers of the future and critique how we live in the present, then this one renders the device absolutely naked, running considerable risks in the process, since the revelation that the catastrophe was faked tends to badly strain reader credulity. Second, it refuses a certain kind of dignity and seriousness to both present and future by the way it is written—clever, restless, flippant, mocking the heroic by its vocabulary of brand name and pop culture references.
Girlfriend in a Coma is very concerned to define its narratee; the reader is asked to become that ultra-contemporary person who is both totally saturated in media, pop, and brand-name culture and is also cynically knowing about it, possibly thoroughly sick of it. Given the novel’s unfailing, almost relentless cleverness, and the omnipresence of the conditions that supply the novel’s range of image and reference, it is not all that difficult to become this inscribed or desired narratee. Easy recognition of reference and allusion enables you to get the jokes but reminds you that your head is just as full of rubbish as are those of the main characters.
Girlfriend in a Coma offers a history of a group of suburban, middle-class friends from high school (1978) to early middle age (1997 or thereabouts). They go from the clever flippancy and aimlessness forgivable or even likable in the young to a more desperate clever flippancy and aimlessness not so attractive in thirty-somethings, knowing themselves that this is no longer attractive. Even though some of their decisions in these years show that they want more meaning and a larger perspective, the language of the novel never gets beyond the immediate-contemporary of consumer and pop culture; this being a point-of-view novel, this is their language, the architecture of their minds. Amazing things happen, and Coupland riskily takes on the challenge of making us believe in them: a girl goes into a coma and awakens seventeen years later, fully alert, having experienced visions of an ominous future while she was in coma; the ghost of one of their friends makes increasingly frequent appearances, and in the last part of the novel directs and changes their lives, speaking almost always, however, as the teenage sports star he was when he died; the world ends and all humans on the planet, except the main characters, fall asleep, die, and rot, to the accompaniment of a great deal of turmoil and mayhem.
Coupland sets himself to convey all this, and subsequent revelations and reversals, in the language of brand-name consumerism, comparisons to the shared currency of pop culture: “‘Comas are rare phenomena,’ Linus told me once. ‘They’re a byproduct of modern living, with almost no known coma patients existing prior to World War Two. People simply died. Comas are as modern as polyester, jet travel, and microchips.’”7 It’s not exactly that this range of reference is banal or trivial, though it sometimes is, and both characters and author know it; it’s that it all has a use-by date, making for an almost painful clash between the global or anomalous events recounted and the way they are described in the currency of that year’s rock group or favorite candy, which almost by definition will not be next year’s.
Girlfriend in a Coma is a risky and almost brutal exploration of the way in which apocalypse narratives are imagined, done so as to critique the present. This time the end of the world as we know it, though detailed with great vigor and made as effectively real as any we might read or see on screen, is simply faked. It is staged by unknown powers who might well be divine but are never investigated, and who use the teenage ghost Jared as their angel. Its purpose is to teach the main characters a lesson. It is a bit of a shock for the reader. Why violently yoke an effective novel about teen slackers-cum-early-middle-age-slackers to a fantastic story of drastic anomalies (a ghost, a seventeen-year coma) and wholesale catastrophe? Why these people? They are characterized and fleshed out, but only as characters in a teen/slacker novel might be, so that their ordinariness and their imprisonment in the culture of their time seems problematic in this different context where we have ghosts, a kind of miraculous rebirth after seventeen years, and the end of the world. Yet they are marked as special in being selected as the (apparent) sole survivors, and then in being chosen as prophets of challenge and questioning when it is abruptly revealed that the life of the world will now resume as normal.
Is this outcome to be seen as the apotheosis of that valuation of the ordinary as anomalous and special that we have been tracing, or a kind of parody of it? It can’t be the latter, because the novel makes it plain that nothing and no one else can be relied on. We—ordinary but privileged in our prosperity and freedom8—got ourselves in this mess, and so, absurd as it may seem when we look at ourselves (that is, at Linus and Wendy, Ham and Pam, Richard and Karen and Megan), we ourselves will have to get us out of it.
A good deal depends on the novel’s analysis of the contemporary condition, which is seen as going beyond mediocre suburban narrowness or tacky consumer waste or slacker narcissism. It is gradually defined as a kind of absence. This diagnosis emerges in Karen’s responses to her friends and the society around them when she revives from her long coma and is asked how she finds things now: “Her friends have become who they’ve become by default” (137); the difference between the world she left and the world she returned to is “a lack” (215). There is an emptiness at the center of people’s actions.
At one point Richard meditates on dreams: “Dreams have no negative. This is to say that if, during the day, you think about how much you don’t want to visit Mexico, your dreams at night will promptly take you to Mexico City” (60). Later, he recalls reading Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953): “In it, the children of Earth conglomerate to form a master race that dreams together, that collectively moves planets. This made me wonder, what if the children of Earth instead fragmented, checked out, had their dreams erased and became vacant. What if instead of unity there was atomisation and amnesia and comas?” (61).
This must be what Karen, in her coma, has glimpsed: “She saw a picture, however fragmentary, that told her that tomorrow was not a place she wanted to visit—that the future was not a place in which to be” (61). Karen’s own version of this, after she revives, is more critically pointed: “It’s pretty clear to me that life now isn’t what it ought to have become” (155).
The people of the present have had wealth and ease and freedom, and they have squandered the future.9 Beneath the umwelt of brand names and pop culture, offered half nostalgically and half satirically, is an absence; it is figured in Richard’s idea of Childhood’s End flipped to its negative. It follows from this diagnosis that apocalypse, when it comes, is doubly negative: it is a comprehensive end, marked by death, confusion, and degradation, and with no replacement (no post-apocalyptic society, only a group of friends wasting time)—but it’s a fake anyway. Like everything else in the novel, it is imaged in the terms of pop culture. Several of the main characters have been working as technical experts providing fake blood and gore for TV and movie producers. Richard, visiting them, opens the wrong door: “Left alone, I wandered round the building and saw a door that was slightly ajar. I opened it, thinking I might find a studio. What I found instead must have been a corpse storage room, a room unlike any I could have imagined—men and women, children and aliens; whole, cut in two, doused in blood; arms and legs stacked like timber; glass bottles of eyes and shelves of noses” (90). Richard could never have imagined this, but his friends did; they even imagined a version of his girlfriend Karen, shrunken and gray-haired in her coma, and Richard stumbles across it. Almost everything has been imagined already, and then turned into cliché, or a pile of grotesque discards in a room, and it is from this that people find themselves perceiving disaster when it comes: “Without warning, the Esso station by the Westview overpass explodes like a jet at an air show—bodies like ventriloquist dolls puked into the sky as though in a cartoon or an action-adventure film” (188) … “Below them, the fire on the sloping neighbourhood burns like a million Bic lighters held up in the dark at some vast, cosmic Fleetwood Mac concert” (262).
Because almost everything has been imagined already, and repeated to the point of cliché, the novel reaches for the extreme and implausible. When the extreme and implausible do come, at this climactic point, in the form of catastrophe, they are captured by the already imagined, or are in danger of being captured by it. Of course we have nothing with which to imagine what has not yet happened but what we have already imagined, but Coupland underlines how banal and mediatized this imagination is: the jet at an air show (already something seen on the TV news) becomes something in a cartoon or an action-adventure film. To mention a thing is to mention its brand name, often in our society and always in Coupland; brand names for a second seem so ubiquitous as to be cosmic. A million lighters at a concert (even a Fleetwood Mac concert, even Bic lighters) really would seem grand, but the effect of this is to distract the reader into thoughts about cosmic concerts rather than about the fires of the end of the world.
After he comes across his friends’ replica of Karen—“The fallen corpse was now leaning against a wall near an electrical subunit, as though freeze-dried” (91)—Richard drives off: “I wanted to see the real Karen, who only differed slightly from the plastic female replica I’d just seen” (91). It is not so: Karen awakes, becomes a pointed critic of what she sees around her, and, after the crucial revelation that the catastrophe was itself a fake, sacrifices herself and returns to her coma. If everything is to return to what it was before the catastrophe, and life is to resume, then Karen will have to return to her coma—though this doesn’t quite follow, since she had revived some time before the catastrophe. Coupland’s move here is perhaps gratuitous, but this underlines the lengths he is going to in underlining that our only hope is in the ordinary. Yet this pervasive sense that perception is dogged by what is already known in the form of cliché or familiar pop culture image, and that fakery is at the heart of pop culture, does put the novel under intense pressure. The novel does present a strong social diagnosis: contemporary culture has become hollowed out, a negative, and the future is being squandered. It stages a moral revival that is to be based on the ordinary slackers it centers on. In all this Coupland shares the imaginary of his characters, and makes the reader share it too; he never reaches for some standpoint outside and above the imaginative world of his characters. He accepts that in very important ways contemporary consumer culture has no outside, and the working out of this is what makes Girlfriend in a Coma so challenging, precisely because of its flippancy and brand-name allusiveness, which is, after all, a vital part of the imaginary that Coupland shares with his characters. The result, however, is that the diagnosis and the revival can only find expression in the medium of pop culture familiarity and witticism that threatens to undermine them because it is a symptom of the very condition that is being diagnosed. I don’t think it does undermine them, but it’s a close shave.
ORYX AND CRAKE (2003)
Coupland’s Girlfriend and Miéville’s Kraken, as we have seen and will see, engage not so much with the real-world possibility (or likelihood) of catastrophe as with the culture of catastrophe, and they set about freeing us from this by exaggerating it. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, in contrast, is a bitter diagnosis of playfulness, an angry condemnation of taking things lightly that imagines this flippancy as a disease of the imagination to which our own culture is horribly subject. In this context, ordinary decency is more powerless than paradoxically strong, and the narrative structure that was observed earlier, whereby the clash between ordinary decency and its antagonist is resolved by an anomalous third term, is muffled (as will be seen when we come to discuss the role of Oryx in the novel).
Oryx and Crake gives us a dystopia brought to an end by an apocalypse; after the apocalypse the text takes the form of a Last Man story. The dystopian society is divided between luxurious gated communities of the techno-scientific elite and “pleeblands” inhabited by the socially discarded.10 The Last Man is the point-of-view character Snowman, scabby, his memory going, caretaker of a tribe of Edenic post-humans genetically devised by his friend Crake. Crake, like Snowman a lover of Oryx, released the virus that brutally killed everybody else, in effect replacing humans with amiable, simplified successors. Crake is a brilliant, affectless scientist, highly valued in a world that he eventually destroys without qualms; Snowman in contrast is a graduate of the humanities-centered Martha Graham Academy, where those of the elite who are fit for nothing better end up. He is well-meaning but ineffectual.
We have here banal-cheery brand names, processes, gross transgenic organisms with silly names, nasty computer games also with silly or nasty names. The similarity with Coupland is clear, but the difference is that whereas Coupland, through his characters, admits to a complicity with the language of brand-name banality, Atwood remains fiercely alienated, and her diagnosis is much grimmer. This is a commodified world in which everything is a brand, and the brand names that Atwood invents both furnish it and convey her loathing of it. We have Happicuppa, BlyssPluss, an Internet game called Extinctathon, a live suicide site called niteenite.com, and so on and on. There are pigoons, wolvogs, snats, and the like: coarsely clever portmanteau names for hybrid transgenic inventions. The novel is a lot more interested in the brand names and coinages than in any technical or scientific details, because it is the mentality behind the names and coinages that shapes this society rather than the technical or scientific skill behind the various inventions and practices. In introducing new and sometimes marvelous inventions and practices, a science fiction has to devise names, often colloquial, that express how these inventions and practices have become normal in the novel’s novum. Here Atwood shears the name away from the thing (there is seldom any explanation of the imagined or extrapolated science behind it) and tilts the name violently toward the coarse and flippant.
The diagnosis is clear. This is an adolescent, game-playing, immature culture that Atwood depicts and loathes, its thinking based on fridge magnets (209). The world is ruined in a fit of “boy genius” superficiality (158), “just kiddie fun” (225). There is no chance that this culture contains within itself the resources to recover, and indeed even in Coupland, where that chance does exist, it requires a series of miracles to be realized. The outcome will be different in Kraken, because that novel sets the scene at a greater, more fantastic distance from the confining culture of contemporary consumerism.
Atwood’s style is angrily offhand. The decadence of the dystopia, the drugs, sex, and porn of the society that preceded and brought about catastrophe, is not enticing, and we would not expect it to be, but neither is the desolation of the Last Man story that is interwoven in Oryx and Crake at all redolent or evocative in the way that many passages of desolation and decay in literature are. These are pleasures and compensations refused. There are irregular gaps and speedings up in the narrative, a refusal of steady consecutiveness, as if this would be false to how things happen or are decided in this world. The tenor of the narrative is marked by “the usual,” “another,” “the usual strange accidents” (254), “same old stuff” (271); and, of the final annihilating virus, “it looked like the usual melting gumdrop with spines” (341). We are not being told anything new or anything we don’t know already. The novel’s fierce refusal of readerly pleasure and compensation, its persistence with a dialectic of the banal and the gross—Happicuppa and a genetically engineered headless chicken with twenty breasts and a mouth (“There’s a mouth opening at the top, they dump the nutrients in there” [202])—are the expression of how we are implicated in what it is seeing. Befitting the novel’s inverted narrative structure and the anticlimactic “revelation” of the disaster’s heavily foreshadowed origins, Atwood is not inventing here so much as provocatively reminding.
Snowman ends up doing the ads for BlyssPluss (a sort of enhanced Viagra, except that Crake has doctored it so that it leaves its users sterile). His feebleness as representative of the world of imagination points to something that is disturbing or maybe enraging this angry novel. It is a variant of what Fredric Jameson points to in his writings on the postmodern: the notion that art no longer has a separate sphere or role, the possibility that culture—the realm of play and critique, of imagination and the refreshed use of language—is now everywhere and so in effect nowhere. Culture is spread so thin as to be a mere veneer. In Oryx and Crake everyone is playing games, except that they are pornographic; play with language is widespread in the dozens of brand names that the novel devises, but always both deceptive and infantile. In this context, Crake, the affectless representative of the “socially spastic scientists” (205) at “Asperger’s U,” is a kind of distraction, a Villain with a capital V; the real problem is elsewhere. Snowman is a member of the class of symbolic analysts; he is working in the knowledge industry. It is the imagination that has decayed in the world of the Oryx and Crake, more even than the intellect.
Snowman is a mere observer; Snowman and Crake do combine to bring about completing the deaths of Oryx and Crake (Crake stages the event, and Snowman finds himself completing the scene), but the novel is not structured around their complex collaboration as was The Lathe of Heaven with Haber and Orr. It’s named for Oryx and Crake, not Crake and Snowman. What of Oryx, then? Does she figure as a kind of third term, an anomaly that might resolve the binary blockage between Crake and Snowman, as the aliens do in The Lathe of Heaven? It sometimes seems so, but (for this reader) the effect is inconclusive. Oryx is an elusive figure, for all that a child sold from somewhere in Asia into the sex trade and subsequently shy of intimacies and disclosures might seem to fit the grim world of the novel. We can’t even be sure that the child and adolescent of her past and the woman who is Crake’s possession and whom Snowman pines after are the same person.11 The two men combine to kill her, but neither really knew her. She slips sideways into her role as the mother of the Crakers, the human who has contact with them and nurtures them, and then after her death becomes their deity. Her elusive course through the novel is in contrast to the gross materiality of the world in which it is set, and to its emphasis on pornography, exploitation, failed marriages (those of Snowman’s and Crake’s parents), adolescent fumblings and yearnings, and the un-neurotic but purely physical sexuality Crake has bred into the Crakers: a panoply of behaviors in which love has no part. Oryx won’t receive or give love. The effect is tantalizing, and enriches the novel’s economy as a whole, but baffling. Oryx slips elusively through the novel without participating in it. The story of Oryx, Crake, and Snowman is itself peripheral, after all, because the disaster they precipitate is as if it had already happened. The power of the novel is not in its narrative but in Atwood’s powerful and angry analysis of contemporary culture and its destructive banality of imagination.
KRAKEN (2010): AN ANATOMY
China Miéville’s Kraken is a comedy of apocalypse: a riff on the mood of apocalypse that (while we read the novel) frees us of our fear of it by reconnecting the apocalyptic in the ordinary and everyday and by an anarchic splurge of images and possibilities: “Any moment called now is always full of possibles. At times of excess might-bes, London sensitives occasionally had to lie down in the dark.”12 As can be seen in this quotation, the narrating voice of the novel is freely inventive, not tied to the point of view of its usually bewildered characters, or infected by any pervasive banality in its imagined world. Like many of the novels under consideration, Kraken multiplies apocalypses—stories, sects, fakes, repetitions. The single overwhelming disaster on which the concept and frisson of apocalypse usually depends is fractured into competing fantasies and sects, and the narrative proliferates crises, all of which threaten to overset reality, only to give way to yet more crises. Further, Kraken reimagines the laws of transformation whereby a given state or phase might become something utterly different. These reimagined laws—to be discussed below—involve a literal relation of word and thing; they posit that there are no gaps in nature, not even between life and death; and they posit that the universe is persuadable and may respond to our arguments about its nature by conforming to what those arguments say.
In Kraken’s London there is a surplus of accessible and available transformation; transformation is everyday and not usually obtained by great effort or risky evocation of dark powers. This is a novel about London and Londoners; transformation exaggerates ordinary urban conditions:
“The tattoo was talking.” [Billy, early in the story.]
“Do not start that. Miracles are getting more common, mate. [Dane]
“It’s the ends of the world.”
“End of the world?”
“Ends.” (78)
Marge’s problem, when she asked on her bulletin boards where she should go, “as a noob in all this” to learn what London really was, was not too few but too many suggestions. A chaos of them. (248)
There will be a multitude of apocalypses: faked or seeming-ultimate events that threaten ultimate or startlingly fundamental transformations. Banal or very ordinary objects play a powerful role: a phaser (that is, a toy from the world of Star Trek), a key that has got mislaid and wedged in the tar of the footpath (247), a flickering lightbulb. Marge, one of the ordinary Londoners who has to stumble through to a solution, is for a while protected by a kind of magic iPod, which she programs with some of her favorite songs. As often in London Gothic,13 it’s scraps of wasteland, forgotten dead-end streets, overlooked courtyards, that are the scenes of the actions and the repositories of mystery or potential; “where the world might end was turpe-industrial”: “Scree of rejectamenta. Workshops writing car epitaphs in rust; warehouses staffed in the day by tired teenagers; superstores and self-storage depots of bright colours and cartoon fonts amid bleaching trash. London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness. Here was an arena of scrubland, overlooked by suspended roads” (357). Magic is spun out of the ordinary—a kind of origami can fold an ordinary object (in one instance, a cash register) into a new shape, and maybe can fold a man so he can get past barriers; or it can be used to kill, horribly. One of Miéville’s best inventions among the cast of habitués of alternative London is Jason Smyle, “the proletarian chameleon”: “Jason still plied his knack as he came, and the people he passed were momentarily vaguely sure they knew him, that he worked in the same office a couple of desks along, or carried bricks in the building site, or ground coffee beans like them, though they couldn’t remember his name” (234). In similar fashion, much later in the story, Billy and Dane, “hunted by all the violent sects and gangs of alternative London, are ‘disguised by how unremarkable they are’” (321).
Billy is an ordinary guy who works in the Natural History Museum, from which at the beginning of the novel the preserved corpse of a giant squid has been stolen. He had once jokingly, in a pub conversation, claimed to be a bottle baby, a product of in vitro fertilization. After repeatedly denying his status as some sort of prophet and thence the way he has been swept to the center of events, he realizes that the universe had taken his claim literally, by a mistaking or perhaps a pun. (The effect resembles what was observed in The Lathe of Heaven.) The solution to the mystery and the resolution of the crisis will come not from the giant squid in its huge container but from the glass container itself. Puns, wordplay, and coinages structure the action of the novel as well as its text. The ultimate threat comes from fire, as it happens a kind of time-fire, which, in burning, renders the thing burnt as if it had never been, ever: those swept up in the move to bring about this transformation are named Byrne and Cole.
Literalism is important to the whole project of Kraken. The magic potential of the universe (that is, this alternative but grungily grounded universe) doesn’t come from the esoteric or from ethereal forces but from transformations of the actual, from takings and mistakings that have the same basis, the same power to change, as puns, wordplay, mishearings. Extraordinary events and transformations happen according to fantastic but definite rules and processes; the anomalous is grounded in nature in Kraken as it is not in Girlfriend or Oryx and Crake. In the fantastic but rule-bound world of Kraken, the universe is attending to what we say or enact, is sometimes persuaded by it—“the universe had heard Billy and he had been persuasive” (461)—and sometimes mishears or finds a double meaning. The way the plot will eventually come to rest on words and ink, writings, reflects this metafictionally. There is an emphasis on unexpected, rudimentary, improvised episodes of communication, and on communication as a variety of sympathetic magic. The text mirrors this power of words; each new group or condition will be given a name—not just Teuthists or Chaos Nazis or Londonmancers but also the endsick, the krakenbit.
This literalism follows from Miéville’s love of thoroughgoing application, of taking a trope as far as it can be taken. So Wati, originally a model of one of those servants intended to serve the Egyptian upper class in their afterlife who rebelled against that servitude, has gone on in semi-immortality to organize all such beings into revolt or protest. As events unfold in Kraken he is leading a strike of the UMA, the Union of Magicked Assistants—a huge variety of those who drudge and are industrially exploited as familiars to magicians: mice, beetles, pigeons, and whatnot. The narrative of the strike—pickets, scabs, strikebreakers—is threaded through the text; meanwhile Wati also helps Billy and Dane in their flights and quests connected with the missing squid and the way in which the squid seems to be precipitating the apocalypse to end all apocalypses. To do this he manifests as a voice and a spirit—not, now, in the original clay model such as one sees in the Egyptian department of a museum, but in anything that is replica or statue-like, banal or dignified. He can go anywhere he can find these things, and Miéville entertains himself with varying them—the insignia on a car, a bronze statue, a crucifix on a necklace, a figure of Captain Kirk from Star Trek:
“How’d you feel about a Bratz doll?” Dane said.
“I’ve been in worse.” (177)
The magical rubs up against and is sometimes derived from the everyday, and the everyday comprises not only perennial trash and grunge but also banal contemporary things like Captain Kirk dolls.
Similarly the personage called “the Tattoo” is one of the two crime lords who are masters of the violence of the novel’s alternative London. He turns out to be a literal tattoo. He has been imprisoned in the form of a tattoo on the back of an innocent guy named Paul, and from there directs his minions, to Paul’s severe discomfort. Later, after a series of adventures, Paul will regain control of his self simply by having a tattooist sew up the mouth of the Tattoo. Earlier Paul and Marge had muffled the Tattoo with tape. The Tattoo, a man able magically to speak and command even though imprisoned as a tattoo on another man’s back, is nonetheless subject to ordinary conditions, such that if you plaster tape across his mouth he can’t speak. Who imprisoned him? The other crime lord, Grisamentum. Grisamentum is in violent quest of Billy and his allies in order to get hold of the kraken (or more precisely the apparently stolen or disappeared giant squid from the Museum of Natural History). He believes he can restore his own life by combining with the ink of the squid, and can do this by sympathetic magic or magic of literal proximity, whereby if something is near or even concerns another thing, it is on the way to becoming that thing. Grisamentum plans to melt the ink off the writings about the kraken that he has had his minions steal, and blend with that ink too. It all stems from a kind of power in metonymy, or in contiguity.
By this stage we need to invoke another aspect of the world of the novel. This is that there are no gaps in existence, only gradations that may be bridged or used as stepping-stones. It is a Derridean world of slidings and deferred differences, not so much interdependences as overlappings and metamorphoses. There is no absolute or broad division between death and life. Grisamentum is in process of coming back to life, by way of the ink of the squid and even of the writings about the squid or the kraken, added to his ashes. He utilizes “an interzone closer to life” (that is, closer than his apparent state of being dead), “a threshold-life” (401). Dane comes back to life after being tortured to death. The squid, dead and preserved in the huge glass tank of fluid at the museum, stolen, teleported to a truck, thence to the embassy of the Sea (literally thus: a place at which this vast power may be contacted) and back to the museum, comes to twitching life, dies again in self-sacrifice: transpositions, transformations. The way to spirit (that is, aliveness with more capacities than aliveness has in our world) is through matter, and often the grungiest of matter at that. Familiars or golems may be made out of “a hand-sized clot of mange and clumpy hair” (215) for instance; magicians and esoterics animate and give purpose to a flock of pigeons or a cloud of dead leaves. And even though the plot is largely concerned with keeping the missing squid from a bunch of criminals who are capable of reckless violence and torture, there is a sense in which no distinction exists between good and evil, because both sides are united by a similar kind of manic energy. No one is really in control of the oncoming apocalypse, and both sides have to become manipulators of the forces and factions of alternative London.
The ultimate villain, the one revealed after all the preemptions, fakes, false leads, and inconclusive, supposedly climactic battles, is a certain Vardy, who has no moral character, or at least none that has any kind of manifestation comparable to the highly colored nastiness of characters like Grisamentum and the Tattoo. Vardy is the anomaly among all these personages whose anomalousness is bound into the rules of transformation that otherwise prevail in the novel’s apparently anarchic universe, but he is a mere shadow of the resolving third terms we have noted in earlier texts; it is the reimagining of imagined apocalypse as the scene of a dialogue between humans and universe that brings about resolution in this novel.
Each of the novels that have been discussed rethinks and restages the relations of the ordinary and the anomalous in our contemporary, apocalypse-obsessed culture. It is the value of the ordinary, and the threats to it from contemporary culture, that shapes each novel. Each arguably offers a democratic imagination of apocalypse, or apocalypses.
We can observe a shift from The Lathe of Heaven through Girlfriend in a Coma to Kraken, though in each case the governing condition is that reality is the product of human dreams. The struggle against the apprehension of future calamities gives rise to guilt and anxiety in George Orr, the main character in The Lathe of Heaven; the universe responds to his effective dreams, often in unexpected ways that give rise to more problems, but otherwise it stands aloof, and help has to come from outer space. Resolution requires an analogous but grander anomaly in Coupland: a teenage ghost, a fake apocalypse. By the time of the carnivalesque Kraken, however, we can speak of a release of human fearlessness in the face of apocalypses, and here the universe is “persuadable,” though it seems to be only by luck that what persuades it is the version of itself that Darwin advanced, rather than the more violent versions on offer in the world of the novel. The trajectory from The Lathe of Heaven to Kraken is, then, one that illuminates the issues at stake with contemporary apocalypse, because of the variations played on the relations between the human dream of apocalypse and the universe’s responses to it.
These novels further suggest that the ordinary cannot be imagined without being put into relation with the banal and commodified. It is this contemporary condition that challenges Coupland and Atwood, in particular, calling forth their strongest diagnoses. Both Coupland and Atwood give us bizarre and weird worlds, but make us recognize them as our daily and familiar creations, not as alternatives. In the society of Oryx and Crake language operates to conceal and trivialize the horribleness of the products of science and commodity culture; Snowman’s ordinariness is mediocrity at best, and Oryx, the elusive outsider to the system in this novel, does no more than haunt the aftermath of disaster. Coupland’s dealings with the banalities of consumer culture in Girlfriend are ambiguous, and incite him to a series of risky narrative moves that only just come off. In this regard Miéville’s tactic in Kraken is noteworthy in its difference: Miéville seeks instead to redeem and revitalize the banal in ordinary things and to knit them into a thoroughgoing erasure of and play with the blurring of ontological boundaries. Kraken thus builds an alternative to our current world not out of extremity or radical difference, but out of its most familiar and most ordinary bits and pieces—and the effect is freeing.
Notes
Javier Marías, Written Lives, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa (London: New Directions, 2006), 99.
1. Perry Anderson, “The Force of the Anomaly,” London Review of Books, April 26, 2012, 3–13 (8).
2. Brian Stableford, “Man-Made Catastrophes,” in The End of the World, ed. Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 126.
3. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 160.
4. China Miéville, Kraken (London: Pan, 2010), 78.
5. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (New York: Avon Books, 1997).
6. Thanks to Rachel Ellis for discussions about Coupland.
7. Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 63. Additional references to this work in this section will be provided by parenthetical citation.
8. Ibid., 267–68.
9. Linus asks Richard what is the difference between the afterlife and the future:
“The difference,” I said, “is that the afterworld is all about infinity; the future is only about changes on this world—fashion and machines and architecture.” We were working on a TV movie about angels coming down to Earth to help housewives. (92)
10. Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 27 and throughout. Future references to this work in this section will be given in parenthetical citation.
11. See Veronica Hollinger, “Stories about the Future: From Patterns of Expectation to Pattern Recognition,” Science Fiction Studies 33, no. 3 (2006): 452–72. Hollinger suggests that it is almost as if Snowman is the only “real character” in the novel (467n.11).
12. Miéville, Kraken, 116. Future references to this work in this section will be given in parenthetical citation.
13. A subgenre mixing SF, fantasy, and horror, as discussed by Roger Luckhurst; relevant authors include Peter Ackroyd, Neil Gaiman, Iain Sinclair, and M. John Harrison. See Roger Luckhurst, “The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the ‘Spectral Turn,’” Textual Practice 16, no. 3 (2002): 526–45.