“The most amusing thing about a pantomime horse is having to shoot it twice.”
The story is still told that carlos Castaneda heard of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl and mistakenly worshipped an axolotl, an antlered albino tadpole the size of a parsnip. For two years the cute smile of the drifting creature convinced him he was onto something, until he realised he was projecting and turned his gaze to a broader screen. The story is challenged because, after all, who could believe it? Regardless of the controversy, Castaneda’s fakery gave us some of the greatest yarns in the ghost story tradition, reaching a sweet-spot of folk invention in The Power of Silence.
The sticky infinity of unformed ideas is so rarely visited by humanity that many notions have assembled themselves in exasperation and crowded forward for easy access, with free offers to attract the attention. Like brewers’ fruit left so long on the branch that it begins to ferment itself, the merest touch brings them into your hand. They are often so crass they can be nudged into the visible by the randomised combination of existing ideas, yet though requiring the absolute minimum of creativity, these easy pickings are generally ignored or bungled. Cryptozoologists love telling the tale of the carny who stitched a blowfish and a bat together, only to find he had created a lawyer. Many buildings in Helsinki have the colour, design and perforation pattern of a Rich Tea biscuit, which was presumably what the architect’s eye happened to fall upon when trying to think of something new. The precocious phrase ‘They won’t be expecting this’ proved sadly prescient.
Yet slip-ups happen, and we sometimes forget to evade those most obvious of original ideas which take any opportunity to present themselves. A now-famous artist accidentally folded a shirt in an impossible direction, lifting an extradimensional tent-flap which allowed several suspended curios into the basement laundry room. These bulging artefacts were slivers of a single higher-space object which, when reconstructed by topological extrapolation, appeared to be a seated farmer wearing a T-shirt bearing the phrase ‘Nature is not a river that flows behind our backs’. The artist’s subsequent career stretched the meaning of this phrase beyond the limits of measurement. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
While the truly original go unimpeded by monuments, others travel in people’s shadows, attached to their shade like pilot fish. The writer Albert Paine possessed several fragments of Mark Twain’s unfinished work No.44 and through apparent creative intoxication re-wrote large parts of it, publishing the result under Twain’s name as The Mysterious Stranger. Twain’s manuscripts were examined after Paine’s death and a more faithful version of No.44 was produced. It’s disconcerting to find that Paine’s version is more imaginative and satirically focussed than Twain’s. Paine’s experience is similar to that of established authors who free themselves up by taking a pen name, or McAuley and Stewart’s invention of Ern Malley to hoax the Australian poetry scene and their realisation that some Malley passages were actually pretty good. Writing wants to be good. It wants to be free to be good.
But those who fear originality – or fear the results if they try for it – flop on the chicken-bone pillow of the tried, deciding that the best we can do is refine the design. As far as I know, no profits from The Hunger Games went to Koushun Takami, or from Inception to Yasutaka Tsutsui. Will Banksy pay a fee to Arofish? These sloppy Trelawneys save the body and leave the heart, the mischief and moral centre that powered it. Without such a centre, satire can work for a little while like a squid valve, propelled by what it casts behind, but without direction. If Mark Leyner’s candy assortments were put at the service of something, he would have wrong-footed readers rather than allow them to get his zany number with no surprises.
In American Psycho, Ellis pretended to say what everyone knew already about consumer society, but when trying to embed what he really meant he found he didn’t know whether to shoot a cake or kiss an ostrich. He gave up, leaving only the decoy, a husk which met with great success and was taken as a standard template for the modern novel. To believe it went otherwise is to accept that he was a conscious fraud. Perhaps if a book is entirely empty we shouldn’t feel bad about filling it.
There can be wheel-spinning fun in taking the style of a previous work and outstripping its content. The first rule of Fight Club – you do not talk about The Day Philosophy Dies. Carlton Mellick III collected a tissue sample from the body-horror portion of Burroughs’ schtick and grew it into a gutty and glistening career, atop which his own chin projected like a keep. Kafka was painstakingly checking that every single word he wrote was turned in the same direction long before he took Little Dorrit’s Circumlocution Office and made it his own. His inevitability machines sometimes filled him with a fiendish glee and when he read his work aloud to friends he was often helpless with laughter. It takes stamina to make a book with one flavour all the way across like a ceramic brick wall.
Artists derive warmth from fantasies of civilisation destroyed by flood, asteroid or the right idea. Richard Jefferies’ post-apocalyptic After London of 1885 saw England overgrown by nature and swamped cities yellow with poison gas. While HG Wells would later draft in some aliens with three shoulders and no mercy, the cause of Jefferies’ apocalypse is far in the past and the world has become Stalker’s Zone. Some scenes have the creepy strength of 40 beaked elephants. Wyndham took After London and added some easily-killed walking flowers – survivalism for dweebs – in the fun Day of the Triffids. JG Ballard took it and wrote The Drowned World, adding nothing. The movie 28 Days Later copied Day of the Triffids point for point, but wryly replaced triffids with average London residents whose typical behaviour the unworldly hero attributes to a zombie virus. In a way this took things full circle, recalling Jules Verne’s 1863 book Paris in the Twentieth Century. Verne’s editor rejected the book, saying nobody would believe that fax machines could ever exist or that waiters could ever be so rude. By the time the manuscript was rediscovered in 1989, reality had surpassed Verne’s vision and the average capital city was a 24/7 apocalypse unsuited to sentient life. The literary carpetbaggers who descended on Paris in the 1920s never foresaw that their meaning would be changed by revisions to the world’s cipher key, even as they asked about the wireless in their hotel. Fitzgerald wrote a book that died soon after publication but continued to fool people because its hair and nails kept growing.
A challenge is presented when an idea or genre appears to reach its outermost limit, as in Greg Egan’s stunning Diaspora – though in that case no one has taken up the challenge and cyberpunk now reiterates in its own shallows. It’s been around long enough that people like Lovelace felt wretched for being only a century of sunrises ahead. Alfred Jarry’s cyborg sex book The Supermale, written in 1901 before anyone could stop him, begins as a mannered conversation piece and ends with the hero having sex 82 times in one day and escaping from a melting love machine, dying tangled in metal. Loose talk about electrodes was less acceptable in those days and Jarry walked bent like an elbow under the shelter of neglect and rain. His honesty is particularly noteworthy and unexplained. This marginal dynamo worked between wars and died before the fear-forged intelligence sump that followed, an event known in scientific circles as a ‘dolt spike’. Jarry himself invented pataphysics, ‘the laws governing exceptions’, when people had just been starting to like him. Basically it was a position paper for mayhem and monkeyshines. Where others saw a couple of sea urchins, Jarry saw a call to adventure. He had a pulmonary brain which beat so hard it jolted his head, producing several plays about the infantile Ubu, a skittle-shaped tyrant with a hunger-spiral on his belly. Those who didn’t understand it apologised on its behalf. Ubu was later the model for the globe-headed protagonist in Kure Kure Takora (Gimme Gimme Octopus), the 260-episode TV epic about an octopus whose thirst for power leads him into the drawbacks of tyranny, theft, betrayal and occasional rampages of unbelievable violence. Something failed is not necessarily something dead, and Jarry’s failure was so complicated it still has its own functional metabolism. His ideas are raided by those who don’t even bother to switch the plates and who sometimes feel rebellious as they test the pointless fencing of variants.
Today, among those who think that paper is the dead skin of magic, many don’t believe that early works are real. Hokusai’s centuries-old tentacle porn looks like retro-styled hentai. Works that appear closer together in time can require even muddier thinking by disbelievers. The oscillation overthruster in Buckaroo Banzai and the flux capacitor in Back to the Future take up the same position behind the driver. Doc travels in the fourth dimension and Banzai the eighth. Buckaroo’s car first appeared in the treatment Find the Jetcar, Said the President in the mid-seventies. The Doc’s car was written in the early 1980s. Buckaroo was released first by a year and contained several original ideas – but with time travel in the mix, who knows? Buckaroo is also notable for such a layering and compression of plot information that some viewers find it incoherent. Important details are mumbled by minor characters off-screen as a dozen visual shenanigans occur higher in the mix. But all the required information is there, and more. Up a few notches, Shane Carruth’s Primer consists of several spirals nested so tightly you could burn it like a briquette. The information it houses isn’t lush, while his subsequent Upstream Color is one big swoon smelling of burnt hair and medicine.
Creative genius can crop up anywhere, even – though rarely – in the upper classes. The latter’s abnormally high levels of criminality led to hopes of precocious inventiveness from that quarter, but nothing has happened. The well-to-do don’t do much. A small change of stance amid the plastic soldiers was exhibited by Pierre Bettencourt, who managed to be a brilliant outsider artist and writer while the rest of his family slumped on the senate and wallowed in financial ‘scandal’. Pierre specialised in mixed-media portrayals of Tiki-headed death gods having breakfast and the dream logic of his writing cleared a dappled path for Barry Yourgrau.
Most people settle, like soil over their grave. Even sainthood is standardised on an ironic, pre-chewed planet circled by satellites fitted with quotation marks. Lives are as sad as an angel’s dealer, carried away in the woozy gloom of group enthusiasm. Though a blessed relief, Burning Man’s briefness and homogenous flavour grieves those who gauge a culture’s richness by its points of concentration. There are movies, books and nations that we like enough to wish they were better. But interventions are met with incomprehension and hostility. There’s no point waiting for civilisation to raise its game to one in which someone like Kris Saknussemm is the pulp baseline and Kuzhali Manickavel is read as chick-lit. We can spectate the tragic squander of artists who do nothing with their freedom. Bowles’s characters navigate the world by planned collision and gravity, her Two Serious Ladies unaware of the street hazards of undisguised curiosity. She established a template still used by those who appear to be escaping while being directed as much as anyone when walking atop the maze’s walls – from books and movies in which we must sleepwalk with reactive nimrods to videogames in which none of the options are close to what we would do. For those who want their characters inside-out and electrified, Jack Vance’s are resourceful and self-directed, Delacorta’s languidly wired and self-controlled, and Haushofer’s The Wall is as much a relief as her character’s circumstances would be to anyone sane. But for the real thing, you may have to do it yourself. Hero worship is like misheard lyrics – they are never as good as you thought. Kiss the eyes of your donor once and move on. Imitation is creepy.