Yeah, and I know that it's a current topic, at least I find it a current topic and a hot
topic for discussion, which we can even find on the SFRA or IFA listservs, the mailings,
those who follow these mails, they know that.
And obviously I don't try to solve these problematics.
I just try to view this issue from a special angle, which is provided by my research on
liminality.
But first, some primary questions.
How are contemporary post-modern fantasy and earlier, but unconventional fantasy, interrelated?
How does the erosion of genre boundaries help us interpret former, well-known works of speculative
fiction?
How is such a phenomenon interpreted by at least a century-old mainstream criticism,
such as Bakhtin or Derrida?
Why do we consider genre overlapping a current technique, while most probably it just indicates
the recurrence of previous artistic principles and literary methods?
These are the questions which I intend to investigate, do not necessarily answer in
my presentation today.
It seems almost like an axiom that, as post-method observes in the postmodern chronotope, post-modernism
can be conceived as a shift in the indicators of space and time, a shift that brings about
a situation in which simple orientations in the phenomenal world that require differentiation
between, for example, past and present, inside and outside, real and representational, have
become problematic.
That was my thirst.
In my PhD thesis, I call this spatiotemporal ambiguity, cognitive and social uncertainty,
liminality, following and refining Victor Turner's notion of liminality with the help
of such thinkers as J. Hillis Miller or Homi Baba.
My basic assumption is that liminality is detectable in the entirety of Henri Lefebvre's
famous triad.
I'm not going to quote his sketchy phrases, but basically, in other words, it is tangible
in social place, architectural and scientific understandings of space, and in the artistic
philosophical representations of space.
The main focus of this presentation today, of course, is on representational spaces,
that is, the liminal chronotope in recent literature, especially contemporary science fiction and
fantasy movements.
This is the new 21st-century paradigm, as Gary Wolf and Emily Abima have named it, popular
fiction such as interstitial writing, new wave fabulism, new weird, and the slipstream.
Numerous contemporary writers draw on these trends, such as John Crowley, Kelly Link,
China Mieville, Peter Straub, Nick Gaiman, James Morrow, Jonathan Liethem, Gene Wolf,
and so on.
These authors intend to place themselves in the interstices of high culture and pop culture,
fantasy and postman and revolutionary fairy tales, horror and science fiction, acquiring
a liminal space for and within their fiction.
Of course, the question arises, on which textual levels, in what sort of thematic and formal
structures can liminality be detected?
Why could we?
Why do we call this fiction liminal or interstitial writing?
First, the texts that I analyze hover on the brings of mainstream and popular culture.
The target audience is a blend between the regions of mainstream and genre literature.
Gaiman, for example, is a fantasy writer whose novels are categorized as bestsellers.
On the other hand, he is an essential member of the new wave fabulists, a movement that
appeared in the literary magazine Conjunctions.
Furthermore, the authors free freely to quote not only the conventions of fantasy, but also
traditions of canonical literature.
For example, Jeffrey Ford's brief and yet complex The War Between Heaven and Hell wallpaper
clearly evokes Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classical piece, The Yellow Wallpaper.
The influence of Latin American magic realism is tangible in Brian Francis Letterie's interviews
after the revolution.
Levee or LaVey Tither's shoes is centered around Hemingway's motives, such as war,
passion, fishing, the sea and so on.
Second, I find it highly important that these authors are in the edges of various subgenres
such as fantasy, horror, fairy tale, detective fiction and science fiction.
As Wolf and Beamer point out, although there are significant differences between the contemporary
trends of slipstream in new weird, new wave fabulists and interstitial arts foundation,
it is common that they all quote freely drawn the furniture of horror, fantasy, science
fiction as well as the conventions of domestic realism, memoir, surrealism, even nonfiction.
Cecile Castelucci's The Long and Short of Long-Term Memory is a good example of a text
quoting nonfiction.
Discussing the philosophical, ethical, problematics of remembrance, the story draws on the psychological
understanding of trauma and neuroscientific lecture notes about memory.
The text overly refers to H.M., who is one of the most famous patients in the history
of neuroscience.
H.M. was a bit similar to the main protagonist in Christopher Nolan's Memento, loses his
capacity to form long-term memories, but he can still use his old memories and he's going
to still use some kind of short-term memories.
Third, I identify cases of narrative liminality when the reader oscillates among various perspectives,
focal points, styles and intertextual registers.
Unruly narrative structure, experimental style, shifts in point of view, disrupted
chronology, meta-fiction, embedded tales characterize this fiction.
The authors occasionally draw on the form of blog, flame words, interviews, oral history,
lecture notes, autobiography and meta-fiction.
In other cases, it is the defamilized point of view, the strange narrative voice or visual
perspective, the focalization that is foregrounded.
For example, the unhappy end of a romantic relationship is explained from the perspective
of the writer's muse in Camilla Bruce's story.
In Beamer's Morton Ghostly Hospital, the focalizer narrator is a spectral being whose
invisible presence is very similar to Wender's Wings of Desire, subtly influences the lives
as human characters.
The narrative voice and focalization is often doubled, demonstrating Faramandlsson's liminal
fantasy.
In her liminal fantasies, the pretense of the narrator that nothing unique is happening
doubles the narrative perspective, as the restrained, naive voice of narration becomes
echoed by the reader's growing wonder and estrangement.
As Mendelssohn argues, we sit on the subconscious of the point of view character quietly screaming,
but something is wrong."
Gaiman's When We Went to See the End of the World by Downey Morningside, age 11, can serve
as a prime example of Mendelssohn's liminal fantasy, in which apocalyptic events are narrated
by a child who rarely gets surprised by the fantastic nature of her adventures.
The strange point of view of the narration is due to the narrator's age, quoting Mikabal,
a small child sees things in a totally different way from an adult.
Reality is just as much fantastic to the protagonist narrator as the apocalyptic and supernatural
events that her family encounters.
As Bethany Alexander points out, quote, the contrast between the bizarre images and her
lack of reaction gives me the shivers.
Of everything on her family's trip, the element that she gives the highest word count is the
potato salad.
Fourth and perhaps foremost, there is a general tendency of thematic liminality in these texts,
which blurs the boundaries of self and the other, organic and artificial, human and mechanical,
and most of all, between the real and the fantastic or fantastic virtual.
The portal between the ordinary and the magic realms is a crucial liminal space in fantasy.
In many cases, however, the question whether the protagonist has gone through the portal,
on which side the character remains ambiguous, and so the whole fantastic place becomes a
liminal space, evoking Todorov's theory of the fantastic or junk loose equipoise.
Liminal fantasy texts hide the threshold, suggesting that the boundaries between fantasy
and reality are elusive or insignificant, thus creating humorous and surreal overtones.
The fantastic is no longer interpreted as a ram different or distant from consensus reality.
Fantasy and the fantastic word overlap in a playful or pleasant manner, indicating the
run of the mill are remarkable nature of fantastic events.
And now I would like to talk a little bit about gaming's murder mysteries, and with
the help of these stories, kind of as a case study, I try to explain some other characteristics
in these trends.
That is so powerful, I think, today.
Although it is just a short story, it becomes a medley of subgenres.
It first resembles intrusion fantasy and horror, then becomes portal quest fantasy
and detective fiction, until finally, due to its unreliable narrator, evokes certain
characteristics of liminal fantasy.
The story starts with a first person singular narration.
The narrator describes himself as a British visitor in Los Angeles, an alien character
who is lost in the city of angels.
Besides evoking misleading references to an autobiographical reading, gaming is a British
author who lives in the US and has Hollywood connections.
The opening scene depicts an uneasy space that constructs the latency of horror, which
often feature a protective space, one that cannot be ruptured and a sense that such a
rupture is imminent.
The narrative protagonist meets a stranger who turns out to be Raggle, the angel of revenge,
who brings on the intrusion foreshadowed by the setting of evil Los Angeles.
He tells a story that takes place in heaven before the human universe had been created.
Because of his desire to hear the story, the protagonist, the first narrator, and because
the story is being told to him, the narrator, the narrative, rarely intervenes or expresses
his surprise, with his silence accepting the perspective of the angel, the second narrator.
The narrative's absolute acceptance of the alien viewpoint reiterates the willing suspension
of this belief, evoking the conventions of portal quest fantasy.
Portal quest fantasies form a category in which the authority and the reliability of
the narrator must be asserted for the reader.
Raggle's advice about how to listen to or read his fantastic story could be a guideline
to the implied reader of many traditional portal quest fantasies.
Don't worry about it.
You got to understand a lot of the stuff I'm telling you, I'm translating already, putting
it in a form you can understand.
Otherwise I couldn't tell the story at all.
You want to hear it?
The portal quest fantasy, as well as murder mysteries, draws on the club story conventions,
although Raggle's stories recounted only to one person, not a group.
Club stories, as John Clute argues, often introduce, quote, tortoise in a way that eases
our suspension of this belief during the duration of the telling, unquote.
But as Clute observes, contemporary fantasy writers most often utilize equipoise, total
of uncertainty, instead of the suspension of this belief.
The stories reduce the fantastic, quote, into a word of force codes, laming of story.
Mendelsohn also stresses the stunning, frequently subversive first person narration of the new
way fabulous, quote, many of these stories are told.
The use of the first person narration in so many of these tales suggests that the authors
are deliberately relying on the collusive aspect of the club story, and then they fracture
that structure, unquote.
In case of Kali Ling's The Hortlock and Magic for Beginners, the third person narration
suggests that the narrator is a character.
So there's another phenomenon that the narrator is always somehow in the center, usually takes
place, takes part in the event.
Kali Ling is a bit different.
She's using the kind of, a bit similar to the Skars narrative.
In which the narrator seems like that he or she is part of the story, although we are
not quite sure.
He doesn't become a character, but he knows the characters too intimately.
And often addresses the reader or the narrative in a direct manner, again kind of indicating
the Skars narration, which the Russians like Gogol used so often.
So again it becomes tricky.
We are not quite sure whether the narrator, where the narrator stands.
It's a homodiagetic or heterodiagetic narrator.
Is he part of the story or not?
In the stories of the New Way Fabulist, the club story conventions are often turned upside
down as a result of experimental, metafictional, subversive narrations.
Again Kali Ling's Lull or Magic for Beginners may serve as another, are the prime examples
of this phenomenon.
When there are transgressions between the narrative levels, strange loops, metallapses
between the narrative levels, characters migrate wonder from one lover to another.
And they even do what Machia calls the violation of the hierarchy of narrative levels, which
means somebody in an embedded world starts to see events which happen in the frame world,
or they shouldn't be that way, because traditionally it's always the frame world which can kind
of control and see into the embedded world.
But in these days the embedded world somehow will be able to see what's happening outside
in the frame world.
We are not asked to join a consensual reality, but instead perhaps to accept that all realities
are embedded.
Murder mysteries undermines the conventions of the portal quest fantasy and the club story,
because of its increasing resemblances between the frame story and the embedded story.
The two levels of narration generate the structure of misanabim, as the embedded story seems
to repeat the frame, mergers and interrelated investigations take place on both levels,
both narrators are sexless, remembrance and amnesia is a key issue in both cases, and
so on.
Everybody knows what misanabim is, but it's just there, just in case.
The fantastic and the real story, the frame and the embedded tale become inseparable
and metallaptic, spiraling together to create an uncanny, double-layered structure.
Newman's short story also diverts from the intrusion fantasy conventions, which focus
on an outsider disturbing the peace, chaos interfering with the structure of order.
Question arises, who is the intruder, the outsider who disturbs order and peace?
Again, it becomes similar to Kali Ling's Stone Animals, which is a great horror story, in
which there is a family moving to a new neighborhood, and we are not quite sure who is the intruder.
Maybe they move there and it's already a fantastic place full of rabbits, people who are incarnations
of rabbits, or maybe they still are in reality, and the rabbits somehow interfere, intrude
into their reality, and even if they do, are they the good guys or are they the bad guys?
Do these rabbits protect them, or are these the rabbits that try to mess up their life?
We have no idea during the whole story, I think.
In Murder Mysteries, the narrator becomes a suspect, making it impossible for the reader
to decide who represents order and chaos, innocence and sin, reality and the fantastic.
The game and short story become similar to Christie's The Merger of Roger Aykroyd, where
crucial information remains hidden from us, quoting Todorov, the narrator neglects to
tell us that it is he who has committed the murder, end quote.
Thus, the final disclosure reinterprets the whole text, evoking an ironic reading of the
previous chapters, quote, I'm rather pleased with myself as a writer, what could be neater,
for instance, than the following, the letters were brought in at 20 minutes to nine, it
was just on 10 minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread, I hesitated
with my hand on the door handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had
left undone, or true, you see, but suppose I had put a row of stars after the first sentence,
would somebody then have wondered what exactly happened in that blank 10 minutes?
Any statements?
The question, of course, arises, do we need to focus on the overall presence of genre
bending and narrative games only in contemporary speculative fiction?
Do we need to consider interstitial writing, liminal fantasies as contemporary phenomena?
After all, former experimentations and genre crossings could hardly be interpreted as recent
or rare unique phenomena.
And that was what my question indicated yesterday about Barzak's Saracen, because I read Saracen
almost the same way as I read these liminal fantasies, kind of the same technique works
in there, which is a text from the 19th century and from mainstream or naturalist or realist
fiction.
Miki Bar, for example, stresses that vision and narrative perspective was never as unified
as the authoritative discourse pretended that it was.
Or in his introduction to interfictions 2, little advertisement, interfictions 2, and
you can get this book, it's a new trend, in his introduction to interfictions 2, Harry
Jenkins dates back interstitial art to the era of the studio system in Hollywood from
the 1920s to the 1950s.
Todorov, Butler and Clute take such literary techniques ever present in the history of
fantasy literature.
Friedman also says in his Critical Theory in Science Fiction that subgenres always function
only as stylistic marks that authors and readers consciously use.
Quote, genre is not a classification but an element or better still a tendency that is
active to a greater or lesser degree within a literary text that is itself understood
as a complex structure of totality.
Analogous arguments by genre critics of mainstream literature could be brought up endlessly from
German romanticism to Russian formalism and deconstruction, as David Dapp candidly explains
in his Modern Jana Theory.
Manilsson dates back ironical liminal fantasies to Hope Marley's Latin Domest and John Aiken's
All You Ever Wanted, 1926 and 1953.
I trust that traces of such tradition could be found even earlier.
Parody or irony has been eternally present in literature, serving at all times as an
unavoidable productive creative approach to tradition.
As for revolutionary fairy tales, which these authors often use as well, Jack Zipes points
out that the desire to mock and rewrite fairy tales emerged historically soon after the
genre conventions and motives had become established in the collective mind of the audience.
In other words, innovative and mocking fairy tale rewritings are nearly as old as fairy
tales themselves.
A generation establishing a tradition is almost instantly followed by those who parody the
tradition.
Thus, when 21st century writers rewrite fairy tales and fantasies by inverting or multiplying
traditional narrative perspectives, they do not only confirm a contemporary and postmodern
trend in literature, but also follow a long-established convention.
This statement, of course, questions the existence of a rupture in literary history such as postmodernism,
which would create a gap, a limit, a temporal limit, a temporal gap between pure texts and
kind of subversive, liminal, experimental, interstitial stories.
But with this, I have to say I came to a deadlock, a paradox, a snake biting its own nail, because
I do believe in postmodernism.
You can try to convince me otherwise.
Thank you for your cooperation and for your attention.