Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
The subject of a holocaust—and the one we call The Holocaust—can I use it in fiction or does it use me? Will you object to my appropriation and should I care? In any case, when compelled to speak of such darkness, language copes, shifts, concentrates.
If it isn’t true that to “write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”1 nor that it makes it “impossible to write,” I am sure that in every tent of character we pitch within fiction, however sweet or escapist, there is in some corner, now, unimaginable death.
Such violence and degradation, often paired with “unspeakable” challenges, gape. Particularly for those without personal experience of one. But we all have an opinion. A weight. A hollow. A stone beneath one hip in our slumber. For example, though not a Jew or First Australian, nor Cambodian or Rwandan, carrying other acts in my own history, I found Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow offensive because it treated the Holocaust as a scrimshaw, though perhaps not as honest as a sailor’s whittling. In that story, the smoke disappears into the chimneys of Auschwitz and the human beings are de-incinerated and then unburned and ejected from the ovens. And so on. This distancing effect casts the actions into a relief they did not need, for they are as awfully delineated without this. Perhaps the intention was to clear the area of temporal verbiage, appropriation barbs, other writing; perhaps, by separating the ontical from the ontological, the cloud of facts from the meaning of people’s existence, it would reinvigorate the reality of this damned episode, reconnecting it to the historicity from which it has been removed by so much politics; or inverting, as he says in his Afterword, in order to make sense of an upended morality—maybe it was just a neat conceit, wholly conceived, not at all boyishly applied and not rationalized by all of the above to a situation for which it was horribly inappropriate and not stolen from Philip K. Dick at all. Whatever, it angered me. I wanted to chuck this book across the room. I don’t know if he wanted that.
Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2009), is a story of Australia’s European invasion and how a transported white convict settles upstream of the greater Sydney area in a place he has no idea is already inhabited. There is cruelty, and there are disaster and massacre. It’s awful. Of course it’s not industrial destruction. I was not offended, though of course some have been. Grenville has engaged with those accusing her of “whitewash”:
Kossew quotes the section headings from the novel (“100 Acres,” “Thornhill’s Place,” etc.) as another example of me “displacing the story of Indigenous possession.” Once again, Kossew doesn’t credit me with even the most elementary understanding, or demonstrate any awareness of the irony of those titles.
The whole point of the book is to question the colonist’s mechanisms for asserting ownership, including measuring and naming. The content of the relevant chapters makes it clear that, for example, Thornhill may think it’s “Thornhill’s Place” but it’s not. Reader and author are figuratively exchanging glances behind the back of the unaware character.
Amis responds as well. In a TV interview in Australia in 2014, well after Time’s Arrow’s publication:
MARTIN AMIS: I respect many of the people who say that—George Steiner, Cynthia Ozick, for instance—and I understand—I understand their uneasiness. But it’s—philosophically, it makes no sense at all. Fiction is freedom. It’s arbitrary to say—to erect these no-entry signs. It makes no sense. And also it’s sort of—it has a whiff of self-righteousness. It’s a way of saying, “I care so much about this that...,”—well, so do I and I’m writing a novel about it because I care about it. I took onboard a remark—the very clarifying remark by a Jewish-Canadian writer, I think he is—or was—Michael Andre Bernstein, who said that the—our dealing with the Nazi genocide is central to our self-understanding, that it’s something you have to take onboard. And W.G. Sebald said that no serious person ever thinks about anything else. And, of course, not everyone will feel that way or feel that it’s central to their self-understanding, but I think it is, and that’s why it seems to me inevitable to write about it.
TONY JONES: Primo Levi took the view that one must not understand the Holocaust because no normal human could possibly do that.
MARTIN AMIS: Well he says—let me explain. He says to understand something is to absorb it, is to contain it and even to empathize with it, and he said, “And one must not do this. One cannot do it, because those drives and hatreds are not just anti-human, but counter-human.” He says, “It is a hatred that is not in us.” Now that—there are a lot of people who say—Claude Lanzmann, for instance, who—who made Shoah—says that any search for explanation or elucidation or motive is obscene. Now, I always distrust that word—”It’s totally obscene to do this.” Well, you know, you may feel that way, Claude. (Fried, “Martin Amis Talks about Nazis”)
And I agree that we must look. But it may also be impossible to do so without letting the darkness work on us. It is perilous.
The difference between these two approaches is that Amis has achieved explanatory distance by means of a gimmick, however heartfelt, however ironic his gestalting of time, and Grenville has zoomed in. Her irony is felt and his intellectual, hers understood and his inappropriately playful. Far, far more of what Grenville notes is how “Reader and author are figuratively exchanging glances,” where reader and author have no time at all for the characters, their own reality being everything.
Understanding genocide from inside is indeed so important if we are to make any sense of the way the personal coping and hoping scales up to national frenzy or rule of law. Yet the simplified use of a mechanism reflects no good understanding of the use of the fantastic in working out the world. It is a joke variety of fantastical when applied to a whole novel, which gives it an air of a fable at best. Two Jews and a horse walk into a bar. No.
This is probably not the best way to introduce Anna Tambour’s Smoke, Paper, Mirrors and Jack Dann’s Concentration. These two books deal with some hard history, raising a trigger warning before the reader has reached my gems about both of these fine writers’ texts, using them to consider how naturally a writer of the fantastic can sidestep what might appear to be traps. There can be advantages to the fantastic telling.
On the face of it, these books could not be more different. Dann’s 2016 collection, gathered over just about 40 years, is titled seriously and marketed that way as well. A first take on Tambour’s book is that it’s a short entertainment; it’s subtitled a short saga for our times [sic] and it has something mysterious on the cover and a jokey quote.
Dann is invisible yet present in his measured rendition of felt images and poetic meditations. It is writing partaking of the sf/f megatexts as well as literary and hermetic immersion of the child who reads everything, cereal packets and maps and ancient tablets.
Tambour gives me the sense of riding her subjects through the halls of a house and yard where she’s sending crockery spinning and geese flapping before her. While equally voracious in a library, she’s also often out with a lens turning stuff over to see what crawls out. It isn’t just a joke; it’s a variety of cosmic drunkenness.
Both writers are in the struggle for a language to deal with the bottom, the point beyond which we cannot go.
If Modernism began on the closing pages of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, its admonition to forget that we see bound up with this first 24-hour industrial war, perhaps it finished with Primo Levi’s, “Then for the first time we notice that our language lacks the words to express this offence, the demolition of a man.” And his Lagersprache, camp-speak, a search for new forms, and a remembering. Genre, too, weathered the same moments, though there is a temptation to regard its preoccupations as universal and unchanging.
Dann, in his poignant “Tea,” makes literal the shielding of events beyond understanding, and with the symbolic removal of the shielding, his Holocaust survivor decides to leave judgement to her God. This might read like the most conventional piece in his new collection, sentimental even, with any moves beyond reality confined to the on-stage action and its currents more with Alain-Fournier’s (“the past was like the cruel photographs of Auschwitz that Lorelei had once seen in a book: ash and bones and hollow emptiness”); flashbacks, the staple of stories of buried trauma, are themselves submerged. In “Down among the Dead Men,” a collaboration with Gardner Dozois, we read “Better to dream of bread than to get lost in the present. That was the fate of the Musselmänner” [those who have been demolished]. In “Tea,” Dann’s Lorelei doesn’t mention she is a survivor, though Jack Dann himself does characterize her as such, and she does not confront those who might be responsible, given an opportunity.
Is this a slip? Is this veering away from the deeply fabulous, the far-flung science-fictional and mystical imagery, the universalization and rather cosmic personification of a post-Holocaust philosophical skepticism in the later story “Jumping the Road,” toward a little magic in a teacup? When Lorelei screens out the world in what would be a sign of madness so clear it invokes Wilhelm Reich’s orgone accumulator designed to break down muscular rigidity and free the memory of bad things, it is described as one of the few meaningful acts of her life. At the story’s close she takes a suspected war criminal, who, it is implied, is relieved at the prospect of his own death, onto the porch for tea. It is not the shielding and perhaps not forgiveness either that allows her to sit down with this man; it is the knowledge that, by her lights, he will be judged beyond human capacity, certainly beyond hers. God or not, punishment comes.
This view, one I share, is deeply offensive to those for whom evil deeds come at no cost to the doer.
Yet Dann isn’t leaving it up to a god entirely. Her name notwithstanding, Lorelei is connected to divinity when she is looking down at the tea leaves:
It was like looking down at a microscopic land cut with streams and valleys; but almost in the center was a cross; exposed hairlines of porcelain ... had the sense that she was looking down into a strange, wild country; she imagined that she was seeing a specific place, a town, perhaps, for there were houses and roads, and surrounding the town were hills. The black lumps and scatterings of tea looked like a deep forest, and she imagined she could see people, masses of people in ... but only dormitories came to mind.
This is no ordinary tasseomancy. Lorelei is sitting in judgment, which places her in the seat of a god she believes will reach a war criminal even if she does not realize it. I am making quite a lot of this story because it touched me and because its fantastika is almost concealed, its language is all of smallness. The living room is a “postage-stamp”; Fleitman’s knock at her door is “a slight, tentative tapping”; Lorelei can “recognize deep and symbolic truths in the most mundane gesture or odd happenstance”; and so on. Just as the whole Holocaust is concealed from the foreground, from proportional reflection, until it is spotted in a cup of tea.
Tambour begins far away from the action, also focusing in tightly on mating—no, lovemaking—butterflies, before reaching far back in time to make a connection between the family running a present-day Turkish-Australian nargile café, the Bulgurluoğlus, and the maternal great-grandfather of a character we have not yet met, a Mr. Zhang. The action begins in earnest during the reign of Empress Dowager Cixi, who ruled from behind a curtain—though not a foil one—and the events following the Second Opium War, in which over 18,000 Chinese were killed or wounded compared to 69 British. It was a period of constant and ruthless conflict, with Japan, with Europe, and internally. Reparation with interest for the Boxer Rebellion to the colonizing powers eventually came to over two trillion of today’s dollars. Over 27 million Chinese died from opium following this period. Proportionate to the population, that’s roughly equivalent to 100 million today.
This blood is present in Tambour’s short novel but not often seen. The historical action is broad and anecdotal and in 220 short pages covers from about 1890 to well over a hundred years in the future (judging by the sea level rise). We get smart, tough, even divine individuals living through many horrors directly, though unlike Dann’s Concentration, the horrors are not as much the point. Time is repeatedly seen as a circle. And at least with respect to the reforms in China, we see several attempts, all abortive in their own way, from the Hundred Days Reform to the birth of modern China at Tiananmen Square. These are bloody or end in blood.
Quite late in Smoke, Paper, Mirrors, where it quite naturally unfolds the connection between a Turkish café in Australia and the Zhang family with the descendant of our first Zhang, Arthur, arriving from China as a student who, following the June 4, 1989, events at Tiananmen Square, was allowed to remain in Australia by the prime minister’s intervention, the plot swirls around the resolution of the mystery of the butterfly mating. An old lady also intervenes in Zhang’s life. Is she Guanyin, goddess of mercy? Or is Guanyin responsible for her possible transformation into a butterfly? No, neither. Withholding this information makes it a kind of metaphysical thriller. Then we’re off again beyond the present.
As to the future, there is no “How did we get here?” There are a few novels with varying levels of science-fictional savvy, following this path these days—following a character or a family from past to future history. Like Samuel R. Delany’s family saga Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, here we are concerned with what concerns the people of the future.
There is magic in Tambour’s science and science in her magic or at least her scholarship.
Mating, laying eggs, flight, eating, metamorphosis. Evolutionary, developmental, and personal metamorphosis, historical. An awful lot in this book. As with her magnificent Crandolin, perhaps too much. Yet it is not a book measured for a market, and we need more of that. Tambour has, I hope, quite a few more coming. And I hope that the market finds her. The language she is evolving for telling the kinds of wild and biting stories she is interested in is part vernacular, part natural historian, full of wit and pulling its drama from an assumed sharing of empathy for those in the predicaments in which her characters find themselves. The Cultural Revolution is carried within the two generations who endure its circumstance, and its reaction and their expression is our drama. An indirect telling again, more powerful without the interior language of some literary fiction or science fiction pretending to literature. The Revolution is present and its blood demonstrated, but necessarily only partially told in so short a space. It is not deadpan, transparent language. Its frequently light tone is not inappropriate because hard events are not milked for melodrama, and because Tambour so plainly identifies with her characters, its metaphors arising at least partly from interior lives. We see a beautiful fruit and vegetable shop, a transformation of a person into a vast insect, her liberation, and her travel back in time. Is the author mixed up in this? Yes, but poetically: it isn’t worked out, and I suspect it isn’t closely plotted, a joyous slap in the face for all those longing for formulaic fame in an age when formula is as exploded as paper publishing.
Whereas science is proving that intention is a mystery to us, the supposedly voluntary motion of a finger outstripping the signal in the brain where we “decided” to move it, Tambour’s characters seem to recognize this instinctively. Their exteriorizing magic allies them to the magic that is out there, the other element to Tambour’s fantastic. This kind of magic is, in Tambour’s universe, factual. Just the way things are.
Jack Dann is a grizzled tar on the deck of fantastika. Not one of the pirate sailors of the Caribbean movies yet a hand who has witnessed mighty fish, strange weather, and many battles, and his new book covers a breadth of approaches to genre with the confidence all of us should share.
Dann has crewed with just about everybody, editorially, as mentor, as brother, collaborator. In his story with Gardner Dozois, in which a vampire feeds on the Musselmänner in Auschwitz, crouched behind the challenging false logic of a vampire (there ought to be a scholarly collection of such diatribes) is the fact that the predator and the prey are both outsiders to the Nazi death machine, self-actualization the aspiration of all machines and those who tend them. We have seen Nazi vampires before, but I haven’t seen much work that asks why a vampire would be imprisoned in the first place. “Down among the Dead Men” is a minor classic.
The sun was coming up in front of them, a hard red disk in a sickly yellow sky, and to Bruckman it seemed to be a glazed and lidless eye staring dispassionately into the world to watch them flail and struggle and die, like the eye of a scientist peering into a laboratory maze.
The vampire is not hidden from such a gaze, but he is the disease of every man for himself and cannot be killed by it. He is born in it.
“Down among the Dead Men” ends with the logic of selfishness spreading horribly on beyond the individual vampire. The man is demolished, and his false hunter-and-prey model persists beyond the Nazis’ own demolition. A win in such circumstances is no win at all.
The longest in this collection and here seen more widely for the first time, the short novel The Economy of Light, recalls both J.G. Ballard and Lucius Shepard in its pace and dispassionate voice, its description of the facts around subjects and their beautiful tension with the meaning or otherwise of events and of essences. The piece is full of circumstantial facial portraits that reach into their subjects. In “The Economy of Light,” Dann deals more literally with the problem of the limits of rationality and the use of intellect—including culture—in the pursuit of progress.
Much has been made of the relationship between Primo Levi and Dante, the twentieth-century lagers, and the medieval Hell. In Levi’s description of his communication of the Ulysses canto of Inferno, he writes of being able to communicate the meaning of the verses—those he can recall from schoolboy drill—to the “Pikolo” (Jean Samuel) despite his friend’s inability to speak Italian. What is it he is so confident of? Surely not the meaning of individual words, or much beyond proper names. It is beyond rationality. Perhaps this is what that chronicler of ordinary people doing awful things calls “porous,” the seeping in of a situation and an intention via personal representation.2 Levi is finding transcendence and taking Pikolo with him. It’s a historical moment where the culture (Levi later admitted) served the Nazis as much as it pulled at himself and Pikolo/Jean from the brighter side of things, a moment in which the memory of even the eternally tortured Ulysses could work as a celebration of virtue and through that celebration defy this mechanical attempt to demolish the whole concept of individual morality, of individuals altogether. A schoolboy sees Ulysses as a hero no matter the eternal torture this got him into.
In the Amazon jungle, Jack Dann pushes his Nazi hunter beyond rationality with the fantastic serving to bring home the lesson that vengeance doubles itself and transforms the avenger and avenged-upon alike in a bitter exchange (a transformation covered more conventionally in the Dozois collaboration). Throughout this story, Dann points out the various ecological consequences of the machine rolling over it. This is a hell as much as the lagers were, infernal machinery turning land into a baked plate, dolphins and other animals on their way out, nature striking back at the globalized industrial expansion outside as much as inside the hunter, “Meester” Stephen. Nature abhors an imbalance. The journey is not so much into the heart of darkness as into its gut. Stephen’s cancer is cured, and he gains revenge but discovers justice as well. We see a difference here between his own use of magic and that of his bruxa housekeeper, whose dream penetrates the other as she is penetrated, using culture and intelligence to grow individual morality and individuals where Stephen succumbs and loses his self in the eternal torture of becoming his enemy Mengele.
This is in its own way a darker tale than Levi’s If This Is a Man. In asking us to consider “if this is a man,” Levi stumbles upon the recommendation posed in Dante’s Inferno,
Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance
Your mettle was not made; you were made men,
To follow after knowledge and excellence.”
As if I also was hearing it for the first time: like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment I forget who I am and where I am.
Levi asks and answers positively, joyously, at this stage of his life, despite everything, close to the year of Dann’s birth. In another century, Jack Dann is deeply troubled about political and market opportunism going Nazi. His original piece in this collection, “Trainspotting in Wineburg,” is set in an Australia controlled by the elements behind some of the populist movements of today where various other elements in society are being rounded up and rolled through the Nazi machine. This is a scenario in which multiculturalism, in which Australia is now a leader, has been demolished. Religion plays a part in this, deception, and ... trains. As with Auschwitz, trains. This story provides the book’s direct political connection, touched upon in The Economy of Light and played out on a personal level between Stephen and Mengele. It, too, offers a bleak view of the forces at play here.
Here is a darkness which might later drive one to suicide, in Levi’s case, or, in Stephen’s, entrapment in a nightmare of living death. Is it not possible, after all, to elucidate a holocaust? There is a dread over the battle between the right use of the intellect and the motivation to just let the train roll on without the mediation of virtue. Dann is on Hannah A’s side, the done-to:
Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.
If a free market is an unconscious process of distribution and technology its means of instantiating its will in the facts of our lives, we are riding a jaguar in Dann’s jungle. Nobody is in charge. Shareholder beasts. Demagogue dreams in 140 characters. Politically, we inhabit Dann’s powerless universe right now whether we believe in a ruling class or not.
The conclusion to The Economy of Light could be read as coming to terms with the evil in the world by understanding it, but for my money this is not what happens. Stephen is worse than dead. There is no compromise via this kind of psychological acceptance with horror, neither personally nor in the dismal science of supply and demand.
Tambour is faced with a messier, less clear-cut genocide. In China, millions died but because the regime never crumbled to exterior forces but rather to internal change, the story is still in play. How many died? Why? Was it understandable? She appears to sidestep these questions, without approval or avoidance, merely no time for anyone but the people she’s following. Like Dann, she is also pessimistic about a solution, but the essentially poetic imagery with which we are left is no nightmare; even if it is a whimsical answer to the repeating history, it still concludes that all we can do is slow the spiral of metamorphosis from butterfly to grub (human) and back again.
Janet Malcolm has written about how in nonfiction, circumstances do not bend to the tools of narrative so neatly. People’s motives are unknowable. The facts are not all settled. Even the ones we think we know are contested. This is not to say reality is unknowable, just that the universe does not care if we cannot end a story. Lives end but do not conclude. Fantasy and its literary sister, science fiction, too, are open-ended, in that the background is a character, exposition and symbol are actors, there is a relationship to fact much less settled than in more literary genres. In this sense, the very need to suspend disbelief to make room for fantastic elements therefore attests to a deeper truth in fantasy.
In Tambour’s fiction, the feeling that the fantastic elements are open-ended in the Janet Malcolm sense is always present. The strangeness of the universe, including its dark qualities, does not fit with the way you would like me to shape this story, Meester, she is saying. Your requirement for closure will not be met. Your desire for blame and justice is replaced by individual experience. We find this, too, in Jack Dann’s work, particularly in the unsettled—and unsettling—Economy of Light, “Jumping the Road,” and “Timetipping.” In Tambour’s work, particularly, a simultaneous far distance, far future, mysterious guiding metaphysics, and a concentration so close that the statistics about deaths from famine or genocide do not find their way in.
The fantastic and fantastic language fill the gap between experience and identification. This gap arises even at a single remove. It spans identities. If the figures out of this fantasy are not dynamic, driven by money or by overintellection (vain or otherwise), we see them as cliché at best or, at worst, cultural appropriation. Compassion is what animates the extraordinary, poetic, symbolic, in this particular situation. Two writers have successfully approached difficult subjects with a depth of energetic concentration which, of course, both writers would cop to ahead of the driving empathy. In a touching afterword—with typical eccentricity—Tambour describes a meeting with someone who wanted to share their suffering, from which she fled. She describes this as humiliating and shameful, but to me it is indicative of how hard it is to speak at all of such stuff. This is why we write stories, or we’d just say the stuff.
Paul Voermans lives in Reservoir, Victoria.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodore. “Cultural Criticism and Society” (1949). Translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber. In Prisms. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994.
Dann, Jack. Concentration. Hornsea, Yorkshire: PS Publishing, 2016. <www.pspublishing.co.uk/concentration-hardcover-by-jack-dann-4173-p.asp>
Fried, Ronald K. “Martin Amis Talks about Nazis, Noves, and Cute Babies.” The Daily Beast, 9 October 2014. <www.thedailybeast.com/martin-amis-talks-about-nazis-novels-and-cute-babies>. Accessed 17 September 2017.
Garner, Helen. This House of Grief. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2014.
Grenville, Kate. The Secret River. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2005.
——. “Whitewash.” November 2009. <kategrenville.com/whitewash>. Accessed 17 September 2017.
Levi, Primo. If This Is a Man (Se questo è un uomo). Turin: De Silva, 1947.
Tambour, Anna. Smoke, Paper, Mirrors: a short saga for our times. Wivenhoe, Essex: Infinity Plus, 2017. <www.infinityplus.co.uk/book.php?book=atspm>
1 Adorno’s aphorism should be read in context: “It is dragged into the abyss by its object. The materialistic transparency of culture has not made it more honest, only more vulgar. By relinquishing its own particularity, culture has also relinquished the salt of truth, which once consisted in its opposition to other particularities. To call it to account before a responsibility which it denies is only to confirm cultural pomposity. Neutralized and ready-made, traditional culture has become worthless today. Through an irrevocable process its heritage, hypocritically reclaimed by the Russians, has become expendable to the highest degree, superfluous, trash. And the hucksters of mass culture can point to it with a grin, for they treat it as such. The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely.”
2 In Garner’s harrowing This House of Grief, a strong point of connection with readers, a way in to the unimaginable, is the very denial of the facts where dead boys are seen swimming like fish from their murder scene and surface magically alive to play with their murderer, his crime undone. The denial magnifies it, breaking the reader’s and writer’s hearts together. Here is porousness in fantasy.
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