“TO TOPPLE HEAVEN”: ROGER ZELAZNY’S ‘LORD OF LIGHT’

(with some PLOT SPOILERS)

“You wish to sack Heaven?” 
“Yes, I wish to lay open it’s treasures to the world.”
“This is to my liking.”

The scenario of Roger Zelazny’s ’Lord Of Light’ is that humans have colonised another planet, with the First (the original landing crew) co-opting Hinduism in order to act as Gods and keep themselves in charge. People do as they are told, or get reincarnated further down the chain. Though this involves more than cosplaying. While technology is strictly suppressed among their subjects, they hoard it for themselves to take on Godlike powers. All of which happened so long ago, they seem to have largely come to believe this tale themselves.

First published in ’67, it is perhaps one of the most Sixties of Science Fiction works. It inspired the classic Hawkwind track of the same name (released in 1972, though any lyrical connection is oblique). And there’s really two reasons for that…

Reviews are almost duty-bound to quote Arthur C Clarke’s famous dictum: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” (Though it seems it wasn’t coined until after the book appeared.) Which is probably normally defined too narrowly. This was the point where technology had become indistinguishable form magic even to those living in that society, let alone savages coming across a landing UFO. So the fusion of the mystical with the mechanical came to be a highly Sixties motif. Bowie’s ’Saviour Machine’, for example, was released in 1970. And here we’ve come across a prayer machine within the first couple of pages.

But also, and happily for us, it’s not the Sixties of the dawning age of Aquarius but the other Sixties - of iconoclastic cynicism, where established doctrine was by definition a lie, where all accepted wisdoms needed knocking down, even if there was little idea what to raise in their place. This is the Sixties of 'Sympathy for the Devil’, not ’All You Need Is Love’. 

And this is embodied in Sam, who dominates the novel from the first paragraph. Though one of the First, he has now decided to sack Heaven and end the Gods’ rule. He’s told “a world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.” Though not necessarily in that order. It's an attitude which proves infectious. Keen to be rid of him, but facing logistical issues in killing him off, the Gods instead award him Nirvana. His spirit is raised from this earthly realm, purely as a means of sending him into exile.

How he’s presented, we’re going to have to sneak up on that…

Novels have an essential choice of mode, between external and internal. They might start, for example…

“The tall man strode purposefully down the street, hat turned against the wind. He entered a small corner shop. ‘Good morning, Mr. Smith’ responded the shopkeeper, ‘you are after more cornflakes I suppose’. ‘I am indeed”, Bert Smith replied.”

…or alternately see it from the inside…

“His hat turned against the wind, Bert Smith strode purposefully towards his local shop. As so often, his mind was turned to cornflakes.”

Once the mode is chosen, they will normally stick to it. And in the first, as in my little example, once he has been named Bert Smith will be referred to as that from thereon in. He doesn't need reintroducing to us.

Zelazny does something more unusual. He introduces Sam by names in his first paragraph. (It is names, we’ll get to why later.) But there’s a recurrence of the second person, as new scenes begin with merely ‘he’ or ‘she’. Sometimes ‘he’ turns out to be Sam, at others someone else. It’s like regularly winding back to the beginning, placing us on the outside of events looking in again. Why do this?

Firstly, for the same reason as the external mode is always used. It creates an immediacy, throwing us into events deep-end-first, so we need to keep reading just to establish the basics. And its very much Zelazny’s style to drop us in this world and expect us to catch up. (This is one of those books which has how-to-read guides online.)

Also, there’s identity slippage. Sam and the Gods are forever going in disguise or changing their names. As reincarnation is a thing here, they can even change their bodies. So the question of who is who must continually be re-posed.

But most importantly, it keeps Sam at a distance from us. There’s both a narrative and a thematic reason for doing this. All the Gods have Aspects, a form of super power. Though unspecified, Sam’s is definitely cunning. Sometimes described as a Trickster, he defeats his enemies by outwitting them, by doing the unexpected. Which means we cannot know his plans before they do.

His decision to sack Heaven doesn’t occupy the book so much as cause it, yet his motivations are little dwelt on. The people he is ostensibly freeing he doesn’t seem to regard especially sympathetically, in fact he casually instrumentalises them in his war. And in the rare glimpses we’re given of the inside of his head, he seems almost a different character to the one on the outside.

“He thought upon this city [Heaven] and these gods, and he knew of its beauty and its rightness, its ugliness and its wrongness. He thought of its splendour and its colour, in contrast to that of the rest of the world, and he wept as he raged, for he knew that he could never feel either wholly right or wholly wrong in opposing it. raged was why he had waited as long as he had, doing nothing. Now, whatever he did would result in both victory and defeat, a success and a failure and whether the outcome of all his actions would be the passing or the continuance of the dream of the city, the burden of the guilt would be his.”

At one point he describes himself simply as “a man who has set out to do a thing.” Ultimately, we could reasonably assume he seeks to overthrow heaven for the sheer hell of it. And this seems central. Part of his plan is to spread Buddhism, to counter the ideological influence of the Hindu gods. He says at one point that he had no belief himself, that he masqueraded as the Buddha, yet “whatever the source, the message was pure, believe me. That is the only reason it took root and grew”.

And yet the opposite proves true as well. A non-believer cannot be disabused, a man who doesn’t really want anything can’t be bought off. He is able to depose the Gods without assuming their mantle precisely because he doesn’t believe in what he’s doing, because he simply plays at it. In the parlance of the times, he’s a Merry Prankster.

So his antithesis may not be his antagonist, Brahmin, but Niritti the Black One. Less for his choice of creed (Christianity) than the fanaticism which he holds for it. He has an army of zombies do his bidding, a dig perhaps less than subtle.

There’s also Taraka. Though the novel’s anti-colonial, this has a peculiarity to it not always dwelt on. The planet’s true inhabitants are not its people but bodiless forces described as demons. As Sam points out: “it was their world first. We took it away from them. To them, we are the demons.” Sam unleashes them at Heaven. Though powerful they find it hard to act collectively, a classic Colonialist trope.

Which suggests the demons perform some other function. At one point Sam becomes possessed by what passes for their head, Taraka. Which suggests the demon represents his own dark side. Taraka says at one point “it is of my nature, which is power, to fight every new power which arises, and to either triumph over it or be bound by it.” And once possessed Sam finds…

“He had been touched by the lusts of the demon-lord, and they were becoming his own. With this realization, he came into a greater wakefulness, and it was not always the hand of the demon which raised the wine horn to his lips, or twitched the whip in the dungeon. He came to be conscious for greater periods of time, and with a certain horror he knew that, within himself as within every man, there lies a demon capable of responding to his own kind.”

Though this street turns out to be two-way. His possession fails to hold because by turn he grants Taraka the curse of his own guilt. Inadvertently on his part, it simply happens. But it still seems a manifestations of Sam’s power, Sam being Sam. He will come at his foes from an unexpected angle, against which they are unprepared and defenceless, simply because that is his nature.

Questions are frequently asked about this book. Is it a form of Orientalism? Is Zelazny in sympathy with Buddhism as the true nature of religion, countering Hinduism with its caste system and other forms of social control? But just like Sam, Zelazny always slips free of them. He’s always somewhere else, himself espousing Sam’s playful attitude to serious matters. He cheerfully offered the explanation that he wrote the book to be uncategorisable either as Science Fiction or Fantasy. Sometimes he even mischievously claimed to have written it to use a single pun, which happens early.

And there may be good reasons for that. Not unusually for Science Fiction, he’s more a writer who throws concepts at the page like mud at a wall, a brainstormer not an architect. An elliptical narrative then becomes a handy way to disguise that, by suggesting at a bigger picture where this all fits together. But then, credit to him for realising that and acting on it.

So… sacking heaven and laying its treasures open to the world with the power of play. Is this the equivalent of a disruptive Yippie action in novel form? Well, sort of. But also, we should remember not just that Sam is one of the First, but that those he’s fighting over don’t get much of a look in. They appear, but come and go, none staying long enough to be called a character. The people don’t free the people here, the nice Gods free them from the nasty ones.

And Sam’s playfulness looks back to the insouciance of the original adventure heroes such as Robin Hood or the Scarlet Pimpernel. An attitude which was closely linked to their aristocratic origins. As said another time, the Pimpernel can effectively be reduced to one line from the source novel - “I vow, I love the game, for this is the finest sport I have yet encountered. Hair-breadth escapes – the devil's own risks! - tally ho! - and away we go!”

Then again, that actually seems pretty Sixties. The underground (as it tended to then be called) was ostensibly non-hierarchical but in practice led by figureheads who tended to come from privileged backgrounds. This all makes the novel more Sixties, rather than less.

Still… sacking heaven to lay open its treasures. That is to my liking.

’CHILDREN OF THE STONES’

Happy days! Our look at Teatime Dystopias, when kids' TV went weird (starting here), continues with a well-remembered if rarely repeated classic. We foretell PLOT SPOILERS!

Where There's Stone There's Strange

Like all great TV shows, ’Children of the Stones’ starts with a great credit sequence. And, like all TV shows made in the Seventies, it starts off with a very inexpensive credit sequence (see end). In fact, it’s just a bunch of close-ups of some old stones.

Of course, it’s the disorientating music that makes it, that gives it that eerie effect. It was described by Stewart Lee as “the most inappropriate children's TV theme ever penned.” (In his Radio Four documentary 'Happy Days'.) Needless to say he meant it as a compliment.

Admittedly composer Sidney Sager may have been at something of an advantage. In those staid days, science fiction and fantasy were permitted more out-there music and sound design than the norm, just by invoking that catch-all heading ‘weird'. I genuinely think that throughout my childhood, the only time I heard any music other than pop fodder was through science fiction shows. As a sensitive youth, I found that fear was more easily triggered by sound than by vision, particularly the uncannily ‘causeless’ sound of soundtrack music. When it all got too much, don't shut your eyes - cover your ears.

But the music comes to affect and infect the visuals, in a kind of sinister synaesthesia. As you listen to the voices (provided by the Ambrosian Singers) rising and falling, undulating and unpredictable, you start to see the misshapen stones the same way. In fact as the show progresses, great play is made out of their inscrutable shapelessness. Those undulations become like Ernst’s famous frottage artworks, when you were never quite sure what you were seeing and what you weren’t. (I suspect that at points fake stone props were deliberately used to suggest semi-subliminal clues of this kind.)

But perhaps most magnificent is the image above, where they’re held in contrast to the electrical boxes and measuring devices which our protagonists heroically take to them – the measuring rod held up against the defiantly askew. In many ways the image acts as a microcosm of the whole series, and much like the show it seems to pack in so much. As I once said of Paul Nash’s megalith paintings: ”Inevitably we come to see these things as outside ourselves, a puzzle to be solved with measuring tape and aerial photographs. Yet there's the nagging sense the answer is within us, one of those things we seem to know but cannot quite recall.”

As with ’Sky’ you could diminish 'Stones' by reducing it to a formula; it’s at root a mash-up of 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ with ’The Stepford Wives,’ with a dash of 'The Wicker Man' thrown in for garnish. But that would be to mistake the recipe for the taste, and the taste of that eerie opening remains.

Broadcast in 1977, only two years after ’Sky’, Children of the Stones’ is more insistent still on the fundamental weirdness of the English landscape, and is often cited as an example of the Old Weird Britain. This is less a genre (a set of rules which more or less associate with a mode of thought) than a mood. And this lack of specificity gives the concept a flexibility, a resistance to hard definition.

And 'Stones' knows how to play this ambiguity. Though both it and 'Sky' were ITV shows, we who grew up in the shadow of our parents’ snobbery cannot help but see ’Stones’ as an honorary BBC production, ’Blue Peter’ to ’Sky’s ‘Magpie’. This difference is there even as those credits roll. <i>’Sky’</i> is full of filters and post-psychedelic effects, here we’re just shown some stones. (It is hard now not to see 'Sky' as a period piece, while the lesser use of special effects allows 'Stones' to seem more timeless.)

While much of 'Sky' is chase-and-run, ’Stones’ has a more complex storyline which develops quite slowly. Clues marinade, events accumulate. (In fact co-author Trevor Ray had been an associate script editor on ’Doctor Who’, with which ’Stones’ shares both strengths and weaknesses. Most notably, it lasts seven episodes when it could easily have fitted into five or even four.) Those who think of Brit SF TV as extras in rubber suits shouting “boo!” at the screen will be somewhat nonplussed by all of this.

While Sky has some iconic force to his performance, the series’ acting in general is at best adequate. By contrast ’Stones’ has some name actors in chief roles, including Ian Cuthbertson and Freddy Jones. (Though admittedly that does expose the poorer child performances somewhat.)

Let's go back to 'Stepford Wives' a moment, because the similarities are so strong they throw an emphasis on the differences. Both used location filming heavily, but used quite different locations to quite different effects. 'Stepford Wives' is set in an idealised suburbia, as if a gleamingly pristine advert for a newly built estate sprang to life, so was shot in small town and suburban locations wherever possible. It's a bit like the way Portmeirion works in 'The Prisoner', you're aware you're looking at something simultaneously real (not a set, a real space) and artificial (an un-place with none of the feel of the lived-in).

While 'Stones' is set in a village. The makers based their fictional Milbury closely on the actual geography of Avebury, a Wiltshire village genuinely nested inside a stone circle. (From today’s perspective Milbury can seem pretty idyllic; with a population of fifty-three it can claim its own Post Office, museum and pub. In fact the pub seems to survive on precisely three customers. They must have been pretty heavy drinkers...) And this distinction between suburb and village is significant. Here it's the rootedness, the connection of everything to its own history which is the cause of all the problems. These aren't plastic people. These are stone people.

You can read in any book on Romanticism how Britain’s early and rapid urbanisation led to the veneration of the rural. The heart and soul of the country, clearly it wasn’t where we were. So by default it must be where we weren’t. As a child I was taken to see twee English villages in much the way I was taken to see the Crown Jewels at the Tower. It was worth seeing because it was so unfamiliar, yet at the same time supposed to be our heritage. This made it ripe for inverting.

And stone circles, aren’t they ideal for this? They’re kind of just <i>there.</i> They’re used as emblems of Britain, appearing on tourist posters and the like. But at the same time as being quaintly traditional, like country pubs and cricket greens, they’re foreign objects, sitting loftily on our landscape like they own the place, despite the fact we know little about why they were put there - defying our supposed smartypants modernity. We construct theories to explain away how and why “they” built them, like a kind of intellectual comfort blanket.

”Complete the Circle”

The story's central conceit is that Hendrick, Lord of the Manor, is using ancient magic to brainwash the villagers into docile happiness. He’s been at this a while, since roundabout the dawn of humanity. The main image of this is the circle, a word which comes up in every episode’s title. When the outsiders Adam and Matthew arrive, the circle vies with the straight line - the primary relationship of parent and child. In that earlier image it’s their magnetometers and other paraphernalia which are pointed hopefully at those old, weird stones.

In a key instance of the show's 'Blue Peter'-ness there’s none of 'Sky’s working class protagonist or its suggestions of the generation gap. Adam and Matthew are a father-and-son team, with Adam in the finely middle class job of academic researcher. (An astrophysicist, albeit one who seems confused between his own job description and that of a geographer.)

While ’Sky’s Arby Vennor has to abandon his regular work to get involved in the adventure, here it’s the father’s job which takes him there. Being “very clever at working things out” Matthew helps his father in his researches, and is essentially a junior version of him. As Adam gets rather pally with Margaret, the museum creator, Matthew does the same with her daughter Sandra. Generations don't gap here. They recur. 

It’s an unstated but fundamental rule that, when people go to Hendrick to be converted, they go two by two. In Matthew’s case, there’s a brief explanation that his mother has died. There may also be one for Sandra but if so I missed it. But notably everyone seems to be in a one-parent family, for example the Doctor and his son. This rule is upheld by Hendrick’s table/altar (below) only having three chairs. For a family even of three would risk counterposing the bigger circle with a smaller one.

The sole exception is the solitary Dai, who survives by avoiding the village, clutching his magic amulet and going into endurance bouts of loony mumbling. Alone he cannot fight the circle, so instead he continually dies and is reborn, the show’s equivalent of Kenny from ’South Park’. (There may even be a sneaky pun in his name.) Unlike others he’s not an outsider to the village, his exception just proves the rule.

Hendrick himself is not exception but variant. At first he’s rather like Goodchild in ’Sky’ an ominous presence prone to turning up unannounced, his urbane charm merely part of what makes him chilling. (Though he’s more the series’ answer to Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle from ’The Wicker Man.’) Though it’s often spoken of as the circle’s centre, we don’t get inside his manor house until the fourth episode, when we first see it through Adam’s eyes. From that point we are enabled to follow Hendrick from his own point of view. We find that instead of the standard parent and child relationship he has a butler, reinforcing his separation and authority. He is outside and at the centre of the circle he creates, his is the burden of command.

As Matthew points out, and like all great bad characters, the fantastic and terrible thing about Hendrick is that he genuinely believes he’s working for everyone’s good. His spell runs ”return to us the innocence that once we knew. Complete the circle. Make us at one with nature and the elements.” By making the villagers docile he purges them of all capacity to do evil, and in return gives them harmony and (in an interesting twist) intelligence.

Despite my heading it’s arguable how dystopian this series actually is. While ’Sky’ boldly tells us our whole way of life is doomed, ’Stones’ has a set-up which tacitly assumes that everything outside the village circle – in Adam-and-Matthew land - is okay. True, the village itself turns out to be a faux utopia, if one seen through almost from the start. In fact, at its most basic level, the series is about the conformism of closed communities. (This was the element picked up in the comedy film ’Hot Fuzz’, which is simultaneously tribute to and parody of the series.)

In this way, it’s tempting to see it as Enlightenment values trumping pagan superstitions, religion casting out the unknown versus science trying to understand things. Adam and Matthew represent a virtual roll-call of scientific rationalism – inquisitive thinking, individual identity and all the rest of it. They’re like science fiction characters trying to navigate through the tropes of a horror story, their magnometers like crucifixes against the strangeness.

Given the date, it would even be tempting to see it as a parting kick to the already waning back-to-the-land rhetoric of hippie subculture, with their feelgood mantras. Couldn’t Hendrick’s spell be the founding statement of some well-intentioned Home Counties commune?

And yet… Hendrick is himself a scientist, holding banks of computers in the deconsecrated church’s crypt. If the stones themselves are the dominant image of the series, this seems the broadening point, the image which connects it to the science fiction of the era. See the amp monoliths of the gatefold sleeve of the first Hawkwind album from 1970, above. Author Arthur C Clarke famously claimed “any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The Sixties and Seventies were the point where that became true of our technology, where our lives became besieged by an ever-increasing supply of devices and accoutrements - with us lacking the faintest clue how they really worked.

Also muddying the occult/rational waters, and with shades of ’The Tomorrow People’, Matthew develops psi powers. (Adam has a strong reaction when he touches one of the stones, suggesting he too is ‘sensitive’ but it is Matthew’s powers which develop.) So, rather than opposing Hendrick's magus with rationalism, their chief counter-weapon is itself a kind of shamanism.

The series might seem to resolve more neatly into good guys versus controlling baddies than the cosmic moral ambiguity of ’Sky’ or the conflicted wish at the heart of ’The Changes’, but the autochthonian is still given its seductive appeal. As the Wiki entry for the concept in Greek myth says, "they are rooted and belong to the land eternally.” Folk horror often uses protagonists as interlopers, going somewhere else within the UK (here less than a day’s drive from London) but finding it foreign soil. Yet unlike say *’The Wicker Man’* the incomers are seen not so much antagonists as the sick who need curing. Newcomers are incorporated until they belong. Milbury’s danger is through being someone else’s utopia. Welcome, friend.

Ultimately, circle versus line manifests as the conflict between circular and linear time. Events happen less in a causal than a fatalistic manner. The painting, found off-screen by Matthew before the series even starts, is an inbuilt plot spoiler - demonstrating almost everything that will happen. Dai lives a prisoner of circular time, living (and dying) the same events over and over. As Rob Young wrote in ’The Magic Box’, “when narratives engage with paganism and ritual, actions get stuck in a loop.”

Whereas Adam and Matthew are the champions of linear time; they must enter the village, complete a project and then leave. To Hendrick leaving is a non-concept. Notably they arrive by road, their journey interrupted when they (think they) see a strange stone figure jump out at them. And they defeat Hendrick through manipulating linear time, like it’s their element. (Check out the denouement for what I mean.)

Yet circular time is also, in a sense, accumulated time. Instead of the present arriving to replace the past, events recur, deepen like a coastal shelf. In an earlier piece, we looked at how Henry Moore’s sculpture explored his own fascination with the autochthonian. As the show’s name suggests, here this fascination becomes a phobia. The number of villagers not only equals the number of stones, in the end they turn into them. Perhaps the stones grow like coral, thickening with each iteration.

And the series does a good job of suggesting the vast timescales involved, rather than succumbing to attempt an inadequate literalisation. At one point, Hendrick takes umbrage at Adam's jibe at our primitive caveman ancestor. The inference is that he has good reason to take the insult personally. The “magus” he insists the caveman was, that's him.

Like ’Sky’, there’s no sense that victory is in any way complete. This war of linear versus circular time isn't really resolved – each just returns to its respective corner. And perhaps the point is that it can’t be. The picture, we should remember, predicts their escaping the village. Which it does by portraying a previous occurrence. And the coda suggests that circular time may already be reasserting itself and will always recur, like the seasons, no matter how many times it is defeated. This is a Manichean war, opposites endlessly attracting and then repelling one another.

The series as a whole is nicely open-ended; rather than being spoon-feed, you are left a lot of plot points to tie up yourself. However, there are times where you can’t help wonder whether those points do fit together, or whether you’ve been set a fool’s errand.

For example, it's debatable how much sense the conceit of stone people actually makes. Are they stones brought to life through these ancient magical forces? Have those people been in the village all these centuries, so the stones are their natural calcified form? But of course it’s there because it makes a great deal of symbolic sense - the stones quite literally have no free agency and are locked in a circle.

There's similar problems with the black hole/ supernova element. It’s originally a mystery what the stones are aligned with, it seems an empty section of sky. Then it’s revealed as a black hole which, back in the day, was a bright supernova. But Hendrick’s whole shtick is to dispel the villagers’ ‘evil’ into the repository of the inescapable black hole. If time is circular, how was that possible with the supernova? The star's collapsing seems there merely as a measure to indicate the vast timespan rather than a piece of internal story sense.

However, if not every piece fits perfectly, that’s no reason to throw away the whole picture. This series assumed its child audience were intelligent enough to follow it’s not-always-straightforward plot, run through some quite philosophical concepts and (at times) cope with being quite thoroughly spooked! Do they write ‘em like that any more? I’m not at all sure that they do...

The first five minutes, including that eerie opening...

SVANKMAJER’S ‘ALICE’

The Real Surreal

If you wanted a central image to separate this ’Alice’, by Surrealist Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, from more standard adaptations, take a central one – the White Rabbit himself. Rabbits can lend themselves to cuteness, they’re sometimes given to children as pets. But this is quite pointedly a stuffed rabbit, a taxidermy exhibit, with frequent references to its spilling sawdust innards and regular close-ups of its sharp chomping teeth.

It’s too easy to contrast him against the fluffy Disney version, so let’s instead use the gentleman in fur of Tenniel’s original illustration. This version isn’t something I’d be following down any holes, looking more like something more from an anxiety dream than Wonderland. (A word notably missing from Svankmajer’s title.) We might want to ask, where would such a critter come from?

If Svankmajer was a Surrealist, Lewis Carroll was often cited by that movement as a precursor. He was name-checked by Breton, the movement’s self-appointed Pope; made the subject of a 1931 essay by Louis Aragon; his Alice was twice painted by Max Ernst (if not terribly recognisably), and Carroll’s own drawings were even included in their 1936 New York exhibition. 

But were they finding a fellow traveller or press-ganging him into their service? To me the best take on ’Alice’ remains Mark Fisher’s. Beneath all the clean pinafores and innocence of youth lies an absurdist work, “the precursor of Kafka”. Which is precisely why it appeals to children...

“There is the feeling that Wonderland is Alice's world alone, yet she has no place in it. She is always late, in the way, misunderstanding what ought to be obvious… The adult world as seen by children is, precisely, a Nonsense world, incomprehensibly inconsistent, arbitrary and authoritarian, full of bizarre rituals.”

It’s vital, I think, to understand that at least the majority of the characters she encounters are stand-in adults. While the ever-analysed White Rabbit doesn’t really stand for any thing, not even Alice’s curiosity. The whole point of him is that he can’t be caught up with. Forever just out of reach, the elusive nature of answers.

And Absurdist isn’t the same thing as Surreal. A Surrealist Wonderland would be thrilling and transformative but also dangerous and destructive. While Carroll’s is ultimately confounding, sinister and incomprehensible. And this brings risk of appropriation. The same way the later hippie generation appropriated Alice into a reductive metaphor for drugs.

Wells famously stripped his film version of Kafka’s ’The Trial’ (1962) of any of the standard period detail. Similarly Svankmajer doesn’t de-Victorianise ’Alice’ so much as domesticate it down, strip it of any Technicolour Oz-like grandeur. For example, turning the famous fall down the rabbit hole into a descending lift. The majority of the film was shot in his own house.

Though there’s a bigger difference. The now-famous book Alice’s sister reads, as we all know, has no pictures or conversation in it. While the book Alice appears in is full to bursting with both. It’s stuffed with wordplay, while the film is (typically for Svankmajer) largely silent. But those visual symbols, occupy much the same place as words did for Carroll.

And much of Carroll’s approach is to treat nonsense consistently. If there is such a thing as Mock Turtle soup, it follows there must be a Mock Turtle to make it from. And the film follows similar lines. The White Rabbit is stuffed with sawdust, so when he eats he swallows more of the stuff.

A World Of Symbols

The film opens pretty much like the book - the summer’s day, the riverbank, the accompanying adult/older sister (it scarcely matters which), the book without pictures or illustration. The only addition is to show Alice diffidently tossing stones in the river, as if to alleviate her boredom. But then, when so many scenes from the book don’t make the screen, we get a Svankmajer invention - Alice effectively duplicating all this in her room. The toys and other items around her then become the cast list for the film. As Caryn James of the New York Times has said, it’s “a world of symbols come alive.”

Combined with which, throughout the film only Alice is played by an actor. Everyone and everything else is portrayed by puppetry or stop-motion. Plus, while the book is written in the third person, she narrates the film. As she also provides the dialogue, she’s both omnipotent narrator and lost intruder. And she makes little attempt to provide voices for others, they simply speak with her voice.

All of which is like child’s play, an attempt to make sense of the wilder world using toys as diminutive props. Alice spies on the bizarre happenings, but her face is stoic. Which upholds the central irony, that this world is made by Alice’s imagination yet she remains uncomprehending of it. Basic functions, such as opening drawers, work for other characters but not her. That deadpan scrutinising look, the “what can this be about”, is familiar to anyone who has ever dealt with children.

That emphasis on drawers, often using them as portals, may be because adults often try to keep children out of them, storing not-for-play objects in them. (One is shown containing scissors).

We’ve seen before two Surrealist devices as least as common as dreams, both of which come up here. One’s the single often-youthful explorer of a huge, multi-roomed house, as in the painting of Dorothea Tanning. The other’s the charged object. Which simply animates well.

Child animism is, at root, the presumption that all objects have their own life. And behind much of Svankmajer is an audaciously simple idea, that stop-motion animation is a perfect means to convey this. You can even take the object the child sees and bring it to life, or at least a kind of life. How easily an old sock and some false teeth can turn into a Caterpillar! What often seem the medium’s limitations, its jerky quality, its sense of animate unreality, suddenly transform into advantages.

‘Uncanny valley’ is used to describe the awkward interchange between cartoony symbols and realism, between a smiley face and a photo-realist portrait. And there’s something equally neither/nor at work here. It all seems to slip and slide, elude any categories we try to give it.

Much has been written about how CGI ‘smoothness’ is the special effect of neoliberalism, a spectacle which creates a disjunction between ‘realism’ and the real. In such an era, to see extemporising being foregrounded, pointedly showing false teeth attaching to a sock to make up a Caterpillar like giving away a magic trick, feels like being a thirsty person who’s fallen on water.

One of the more ambiguous cases for the child, and interestingly one we tend to push on them, is automata. Things that move, surely they must live. And both the Mad Hatter and March Hare are portrayed by automata. One has a wind-up key in his back, the other very visible strings. Their repetitive chatter and behaviour becomes like the stock dialogue of wind-up toys.

But unlike most adaptations this isn’t aimed at children. (Alice even makes a gag of this in her introduction.) Which raises the question, if this is all about child perspective, why tell us? When we mostly gave up on socks being sentient a while ago. The answer’s in something else Alice tells us in her introduction - “Close your eyes, otherwise you won’t see anything”.

Like many Surrealist phrases, this might seem an invitation to dream, dream dream your days away. But these dreams are not sweet. It’s more an injunction to close our eyes against the things we have decided we know, to shut out the consensus reality we have built. Svankmajer has said his practice was to keep hold of the way he saw the world when he was seven. (We already looked at his earlier short ‘The Flat’, which has a similar character-vs-objects duality yet with an adult protagonist.)

The Three Alices 

But at the same time as a look back to child psychology this a film about the changes brought by adolescence. Alice doesn’t just change size, she’s always awkwardly the wrong size for her world, too big or too small. (Though some of this occurs in the book I don’t think it was Carroll’s original intention.)

If we say many images are sexually suggestive, we don’t need to find too precise analogies. The soon-pierced clingfilm lid of the jam jar could represent a hymen, for example. But the drawing pin then found in the jam just conveys the general sense that sex is ‘dangerous’. After all, you suggest to get away from saying. (Needless to say, when the actor is a child this skirts dodgy territory. But overall it stays the right side of the line.)

Perhaps as one way of reconciling these themes, the size-shifting makes Alice seem almost three different characters – Regular Alice, Big Alice and Little Alice. This last one is (in another Svankmajer invention) represented by a doll and is most integrated into Wonderland, obeying the White Rabbit which Regular Alice chases. Unlike Little Alice, the existence of Regular Alice is forever contingent, yet in this strange world has nothing to pin that contingency on.

Big Alice is stuck in a room (see up top), but in a narrative flip then defends it against a siege by the White Rabbit and assorted creatures of Wonderland. It’s as if it’s become her body, which she safeguards against violation. When she’s attacked the imagery strongly suggests sexual assault, skull teeth tugging at her skirt.

”Say What You’re Supposed To Say” 

Carroll refers to his lead’s “good-natured anxiety”. And accounts of the film often refer to Alice’s passivity, how she wanders a world she finds no way to engage with. Yet this disregards Big Alice, and the final trial scene where Regular Alice effectively transforms into Big Alice. While other scenes see bigger changes, the changes made here seem most significant.

In the book it’s the Knave who’s placed on trial. But the focus is more on the absurd and chaotic nature of the proceedings. It’s a trial run by those with no notion of how a trial runs, and no intention of admitting it, so such details become ambiguous. Alice starts growing inadvertently, which gives her the gumption to challenge proceedings.

In the film it’s her who’s the accused, with the whole trial based around nailing her, the jury essentially a jeering mob. Literally given a script to read (an admission and plea for mercy) and told “say what you’re supposed to say” she refuses, and mocks the court by eating one of the tarts, the very thing she’s accused of. She adopts a cheeky grim, as familiar on a child’s face as the deadpan curiosity, yet the first time we see it. She shakes her head and in that motion briefly becomes the creatures of Wonderland, as if she’s come to realise where they’re from.

In this scene everything is brought to a head, which turns out to be her head. She overcomes Wonderland by realising, at the very same time it’s been a strange and foreign world, it has been part of her all along. Her very last line, about cutting the White Rabbit’s head off next time, suggests the old Alice who hopelessly followed him is gone, that her adventures have crowned her the Queen of her own imagination. That’s Surreal, that is.

Much of Svankmajer’s appeal is that he isn’t a modern film-maker who’s been influenced by Surrealism, he’s simply a Surrealist artist. And if he could make a film as fully Surrealist as this in the Eighties, surely someone could make one now. (Okay the accursed marketisation of film funding works against this. But that’s an external constraint, not a creative one. It’s not impossible for an artist today to think as a Surrealist, the way it would be with say a Constructivist.)

And Surrealist versions of Alice always work best when transforming the original explicitly. There’s a reason, after all, adaptations are called adaptations, not transpositions. If we wanted to get back to the book we could just read the book. The original Czech title was ’Something From Alice’, stating quite explicitly it was never intended as a straightforward adaptation from page to screen. 

But the last thing it does is take an innocent Victorian children's tale and messes with its skirts. It would be truer to say it takes a dark Absurdist drama and finds it a happy ending.

MONO/ KING OF GHOSTS/ GLASS'S BOWIE SYMPHONIES (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

MONO
The Haunt, Brighton, Sat 4th April

Mono’s monicker may be intended ironically, as they go in for expansive instrumentals ofter described as “post-rock”. (Though the band themselves have responded “music is communicating the incommunicable; that means a term like post-rock doesn't mean much to us”.) Based in Japan, they’re now celebrating their twentieth anniversary and tenth album. Wikipedia notes “the band's live performances are noted for their intensity” (without anyone adding ‘citation required’).

They’re as uninterested in rock’n’roll theatrics as Godspeed You! Black Emperor, playing backlit so as to be become virtual silhouettes, heads bowed in classic shoegaze pose. There’s precisely one track with vocals, possibly the only one of their career, which is sung (I kid not) from behind a pillar. And they speak precisely once, on coming back for the encore to remind us of that twentieth anniversary. Maybe they won’t speak again till the next one.

There may be musical similarities to Godspeed, such as the shimmering guitar sound. But they’re probably best described by Mark Radcliffe’s classic comment about Television, “the nearest rock record to a string quartet”. Though they’re more like this description than they are like Television. In fact they may be more like the description than Television are! Perhaps notably, tracks on the most recent release feature both strings and wind players.

There is perhaps a formula of sorts. Several tracks start off with a slow, measured melody line. Counter-melodies them get added gradually, until the whole thing hits a crescendo. (Often underlined by an abrupt change in lighting.) It’s like watching an abstract painting being composed, first a coloured line being drawn across the canvas, then different shapes forming, before the colours all finally run together.

But if it’s a formula it’s a good formula! Each section seems the thing when you’re inside it, the melody lines involving in their own right, nothing just a bridge to move the track along. In fact it was the track least bound to this, the one with the vocals (‘Breathe’) which seemed the weakest. Mono’s life performances are, it seems, to be noted for their intensity.

From Belgrade…



'KING OF GHOSTS' (SOUMIK DATTA + THE CITY OF LONDON SINFONIETTA)
The Dome, Brighton, Wed 8th May
Part of the Brighton Festival

In which Soumik Datta provided live soundtracks to two Indian films on the sarod, a kind of cousin to the sitar which I am now going to pretend I previously knew existed.

For the first half he played in a trio to ’Around India With a Movie Camera’, an assemblage of imperial-era footage. The film provoked some titters at the crassness of Raj attitudes, not least a speech where the King harped on the virtues of being in a “free Empire”. (Yo wot, your majesty?) Alas the music wasn’t particularly effective, with the East-meets-West combination of instruments serving up a very mild curry indeed.

The problem may have been that the source material was by its nature snippets, like flipping through a book of postcards. And the music seemed to need longer stretches to work up a head of steam, so was always stalling.

Things picked up for the second half with ’King Of Ghosts’. This was a “reimagined” version of Satajit Ray’s ’Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne’ (1968) which, like no other Ray film I’ve ever seen, was a fantastical adventure featuring magic shoes, dancing demons, wizards in sunglasses and the King of the Ghosts. It seemed more ’Monkey’ than ’The Chess Players’. (And yes, I do know ’Monkey’ wasn’t Indian.)

For this Datta got his longer breaks to stretch out into. Plus he was joined by the City of London Sinfonia. Their contribution was often to create a musical mood for the scene, a task they took to with some alacrity and little regard for the conventions of musicality. For example, in an early scene the title character wanders into a wood. To which their rustling and whispering straight away evoked the sense this was something supernatural we were going into. In short, they made the film more like it was than it had been already.

From London...



PHILP GLASS: THE BOWIE SYMPHONIES
Royal Festival Hall, London, Thurs 9th May

The occasion was the European premiere of ’Lodger’, the final album of David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy and last to be made a symphony by Philip Glass. (Though nigh-on a quarter-century after its predecessor.) Tonight all three were performed in succession.

In a pre-concert talk Glass said that he’d gone furthest from the original in content as well as chronology, and in fact had only used Bowie’s words. Which was slightly strange to hear, for no-one has ever suggested the Berlin trilogy was primarily about the words. In fact Bowie may well have written them in rebellion against the notion of ‘meaningful’ lyrics.

Then again, the decision arguably exposes the essential arbitrariness of the “Berlin trilogy” concept, for ’Lodger’ has as much in common with the album after it as the album before. With ’Low’ Glass used the second all-instrumental side. (In the programme he mentally reversed the sides, imagining that came first.) And ’Heroes’,though it departs further from its source, only incorporates two vocal numbers. Whereas Lodger’ has not a single instrumental.

’Low’ is known as Bowie’s “blue’ album, and if it had a colour scheme it would be nocturnal blues, greys and blacks. While in Glass’s hands those colours become oranges and yellows. The programme compares it to Debussy and Raphael.

Only the final movement, ’Warzawa’, has anything that might conceivably be called low, and even there the deep, mournful notes yield to something bright. Driving through the winter to hear it in Bexhill seemed appropriate, like walking through the dark evenings to hit Christmas. As said at the time, the result is “pretty much win-win-win… as tuneful as pop music, as hypnotic as minimalism and as dynamic as classical music.”

If the talk had focused on ’Lodger’s vocals, what hit immediately was another new element - the organ. The venue’s recently refurbished organ, with prodigious pipes, was played by James McVinnie. (Last seen playing solo Glass pieces in Falmer.) This quite literally added a new dynamic, making the music much more propulsive, turning like an elegant machine. The programme points out “here the orchestra is enormous and lush.”

Unfortunately, a few seconds into the first vocal starting your reaction was “uh-oh”. They seemed performed as if singer Angelique Kidjo had just been handed the lyrics, with no indication of style or melody, and so was just proclaiming them. Rather than sparking any kind of creative dissonance they just sounded double-booked with the music. In a completely inverse effect to the organ, they acted as a drag on everything. I found myself trying to tune them out, like a loud audience member who for some reason couldn’t be shushed.

The one time, the solo time, they seemed to work was at the end of ’African Night Flight’. A section which I’ve no idea is in a foreign language or simply scatting, but comes to the same thing - there the vocals weren’t about the words.

It seems clear enough that Glass wrote a symphony but then decided to shoehorn in his vaguely made promise to complete this trilogy. (Though, and before anyone asks, he had started composing before Bowie’s death.) I foresee much future debate, between purists of authorial intent who insist it must be played as written and the rest of us.

‘TOVE JANSSON (1914-2001)’

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Munch-like Melancholia

Tove Jansson is of course known to one and all as the writer and illustrator of the Moomin books. But this show tells us something previously unknown, at least to me, she “always considered herself primarily as a painter”. And, though her illustrations form part of the show, it has enough courage in this conviction not just to start off with her paintings but run them for the first few rooms.

Two paintings might map the course of this double career. In ’Self-Portrait’, (1937, above) she sits bold upright and alert, her angular features akin to her work, every inch an ambitious young artist. Completed still lives and portraits sit behind her, another still-life to her side ready to be painted and added to the oeuvre.

’The Graphic Artist’ (1975, above) continues the conceit of an artist who resembles their own work. But in every other way it’s entirely different. She’s hunched not over an easel but a drawing board, pen in hand. This time she doesn’t look up at us, not the assertive genius but the commercial artist always working, with no time for visitors. There’s less space given over to the room, with no window at all. The colours are more dark and deep than bright, while the works we see are dominated by black and white. The figure is largely defined by a bold black outline.

Jansson was Finnish (though Swedish-speaking), and in contravention to her work for children your first response is to indulge in Nordic stereotypes about Munch-like melancholia. In for example ‘After Party’ (1941, above) any actual party probably happened weeks ago. Most of the figures are arranged in couples, though one only has a dog. But rather than see them as dancing or snogging, they seem to facelessly cling together in empty space. One just gazes listlessly out the window. 

The colour scheme, dominated by deep reds and sickly greens, certainly recalls Munch. And, though the colours are more muted it also seems reminiscent of Van Gogh’s ‘The Night Cafe’ (1888). Both seem to depict the spaces between things more than the things themselves.

As is well known, the Moomins were based on Jansson’s own family. Yet, though she was only shortly to begin the books, there’s little sign of that in ‘Family’ (1942, above). The figures are bunched closer together than in ‘After Party’, but no-one is dressed in a similar manner or even meets each others’ gaze. (Though she and her mother cast glances at each other.) Even the chairs the two brothers sit on differ, as if everyone’s in their own space despite the proximity to each other. Jansson depicts herself in funereal black.

’Mysterious Landscape’(1930) may be more presaging. In the words of Rebecca Sykes of the Arts Desk it “reveals an appetite for the fantastical that would come to fruition in the artist’s illustration work.” Admittedly it’s more interesting than successful. It’s evocative but, an early work, unaccomplished - even awkward. What might be most interesting about it is that the environment is liminal rather than outright fantastical. Despite the anti-naturalist colour scheme, with blood red trees and plants seemingly the size of trees, it borders a recognisably modern town.

The Graphic Artist

Erodingany easy distinctions between ‘grown up’ painting and ‘juvenile’ illustration Jansson’searly illustrations were political cartoons for the adult market. She drew for the satirical magazine ’Garm’ from 1929 (when she was still fifteen) to 1953. But it’s the war years which inevitably grab at the attention. As Finland was caught in an increasingly tightening pincer gripped jointly by Hitler and Stalin, Jansson somewhat fearlessly mocked them both. 

Two things are noticeable. There’s the degree to which political leaders were portrayed as tantrummy man-babies demanding more cake. (Good job things have progressed since then.) And her penchant for contrasting the base and worldly with the mythical and celestial. See the angel of peace in the searchlight, in the cover to the September 1943 cover (below.) In others, Father Christmas can merrily show up.

”Wild Things Threaten To Pounce”

Though of course I’m a fan of Jansson’s illustrations for her own Moomin series, ironically my favourite works were for other and even-better-known books. Beyond both being popular children’s books, ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘Alice’, might seem to have one thing in common - and it’s not promising for a budding illustrator. They’re both strong associated with illustrators already, in Tolkien’s case his own.

True, Tolkien always regarded himself as an amateur artist. And his own illustrations are surprisingly uninterested in delineating his characters, as if he doesn’t want to completely give them away. In fact his drawings don’t even look that much like environments, they’re more like stage sets. While in Carrol’s case John Tenniel’s illustrations accompanied the first edition (in 1865), and are so considered part of the book it’s virtually a graphic novel. For example Carroll doesn’t describe the Hatter, or even call him Mad. But our memories inevitably fuse together his words and Tenniel’s art.

But there’s a more important point of comparison between the two books. Both ‘Alice’ and ‘The Hobbit’ pass, they look reassuringly twee and so can appear as child-appropriate when once-overed by concerned adults. And then when they reach children’s hands they’re seen more for the uncanny artefacts they are. Perhaps they needed that disguise element in order to become so disseminated. But they managed to put the folk tales back into reassuring children’s stories. Significantly Jansson zeroes straight in on this uncanniness, in fact more so than when illustrating her own work. See for her example her depiction of Bilbo encountering Gollum (1962, below).

Fans of the film may well be perplexed at this. The ring-obsessed, treacherous, spiteful creature we now think of was a retcon to match the plot lines Tolkien was developing in ‘Lord of the Rings’.His being a ‘fallen Hobbit’, the sort of twist everyone know knows too well, isn’t revealed until the later book. The original was something of a threshold guardian, even his size originally going unspecified until he became a “small slimy creature”.

Jansson’s illustrations date from 1962, well after ‘Lord of the Rings’ was published. But she was most likely working from the original version of ‘The Hobbit’, as the powerful elemental creature she depicts is much more the original. However it arose, it’s this Gollum which best suits her art style. The impassive, mask-like face is archetypical of her work.

Further, with his pointed head and gradated figure, Gollum looks remarkably like one of the stalagmites behind him has come to life. And, in another illustration from the same book (below), the explorers again stand dwarfed in the lower right corner. And again the landscape itself seems alive, with plumes of smoke and fire issuing from the raised cave mouth.

With Tolkien there’s no obvious authorial voice, which would intrude between the reader and what he’s describing. (In contrast to Lewis, however often the two are compared.) Which makes his writing immersive. It becomes a kind of prose equivalent to landscape painting, which suggests grand immensity partly by suggesting those mountains and forests extend off past the edges of the known story. Jansson’s eerie illustrations capture this expansiveness, but at the same time have something claustrophobic about them. The figures aren’t just diminished, they seem reduced to ciphers.

’Comet in Moominland’ (1946, above), from one of her own books, pushes things along from fantastical into fully fledged Surreal. A ship seems to have been wrecked among mountains, while the stilt-walking figures recall Dali. The heavy stippling and dense blacks makes the whites, including the blaze of the comet, vivid. But they also make her landscapes look contoured and ‘real’, undeniably present even as the imagery is so hallucinogenic.

On one level this would seem a bizarre thing to give a child for bedtime reading. On another, its evocation of figures adrift in overwhelming strangeness captures the way a child can feel about the existing world. You’re alternately a small thing, lost in the seemingly incomprehensible, and an intrepid explorer. 

A description of ’The Dangerous Journey’ (1977) captures this: “A little girl is transported… from the tedium of a summer afternoon into an exciting world of mangrove swamps, spluttering volcanoes and sea, where birds fly upside down and wild things threaten to pounce.” And see the poster image (up top), of a Moomin on the threshold of a dark doorway and another adventure.

Comics, Posters, Paintings

It’s often unappreciated how illustrations and comic strips are two different media. Comic strips, in the main, stand or fall on their ability to create narrative flow. The images pull the eye along, just as a good piece of writing does to the brain. Marry good comic art to an involving storyline, and you get a double whammy. Whereas Jansson’s illustrations tend to be tableaus, which hold the eye in place. Her landscapes look, if anything, untraversable.

So I remain unsmitten by her Moomin newspaper strips. It’s true they were wildly popular in their day. But with the figures filling frames with bold clear outlines, with their sense of motion rather than monumentality, they seem not to be playing to Jansson’s strengths. (See ’Moomin on the Riviera’, above.) Indeed, though she continued the strips for six years (1954 to 59) she passed them on to her brother Lars, suggesting for her they weren’t a priority.

The show’s defence of them is the general one for newspaper strips, that the platform allowed them to be written for both a child and adult audience. It mentions “a satirical streak”. And, true enough in one example, Moomintroll asks innocently “who owns everything here?” to be told “people with money, of course”.

Yet Jansson also excelled at bold, graphic images with vivid blocks of colour. The covers to the Moomin books are all memorable, and see below her striking Seventies poster ’Keep Sweden Clean’.

She continued to paint through all this, though her style could be quite different to earlier. The show suggests that her later work was a response to the criticism they were too illustrational, and so became more (in it’s words) “painterly”. ’Abstract Sea’ (1963, below), for example is quite well served by its title. It is what it’s of, never quite seeming to settle before your eyes. The ever-shifting sea may well be, in that sense of the term, the most “painterly” subject of all. And if you’re going to paint a painting, why not do something which could only be a painting?

It may be that her success in illustration allowed her to channel her different creative energies. If ’Mysterious Landscape’ was midway between painting and drawing, now she could achieve both separately. Which makes perfect sense. The painting and poster above differ wildly, but have one thing in common – they gain their effect through being true to their own form.

If Jansson had been granted her wish to become a full-time painter she’d have become an accomplished artist, but there wouldn’t be solo exhibitions of her today. It was in the illustrations where she excelled. Yet critics often indulge in an unspoken hierarchy of the arts. Painting is held to be innately superior to illustration, which itself gets to look down on comic art.

Though they never say so, and most likely never think it, their precious rarified values are actually driven by brute commerce. If art is not made for reproduction that throws a higher value on the original, which raises its preciousness. The point is to expose these loaded assumptions. Whereas the temptation, easier but mistaken, is to simply reverse them.

Jansson may well have genuinely preferred her painting to her other work, not just sought the greater cultural approval they might have brought. After all, accounts suggest she was a strong-willed individual. But even if she did that, it doesn’t mean we have to go along with her.

Though the twist in that tale is that her paintings occupy a separate category to her illustration work, and when she tries to blend the two the result is often something of a mish-mash. This would of course have fuelled the prejudices of critics, who could portray her painting as infected by her more vulgar illustrations. But that view works only from taking a very selective sample.

MARK FISHER’S ‘THE WEIRD & THE EERIE’

The latest in a series of not-a-proper-review-at-all

Beyond beyond

Some seven years after I last looked into a Mark Fisher book, and two years after he actually wrote ’The Weird and the Eerie’, I am yet again confirming my status as the internet's latecomer. But it’s okay because I am, I confess upfront, using Fisher’s book as a jumping-off point rather than offering a ‘proper’ review.

Fisher’s method is to explore the distinctions between the Weird and the Eerie through a series of examples. For convenience’s sake, let’s assume they’re both subsections (or, in Fisher’s terminology, ‘modes’) of the Uncanny.

If I were to reduce the Weird to a phrase it would the one used in the invocation of a genie in ’The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad’ (1958) - “from the land beyond beyond”. Or if an image, there’s a Doctor Strange panel I remember as a child, where the dread Dormammu was literally tearing his way into our reality. It wasn’t the sky which he ripped apart, which wouldn’t be so different to an arriving alien fleet, it was everything - air, earth, matter, the entire scene. He had been outside of our reality, and now here he was stepping inside it.

Except there’s two problems here. First, I… sotto voice… completely failed to find that image anywhere. (There’s a vaguely similar one above.) Second, there’s a central element to the Weird it leaves implicit. If there’s always the rip, the threshold torn open between dimensions, it has a paradoxical purpose. It disrupts out reality, but it exposes us to a higher reality. It’s impossible but also inevitable.

Imagine a child at night, sensing some monstrous creature in his room and pulling the covers over his head. A sheet will be no protection from such a beast, but in that moment the gesture makes him feel better. Now imagine a bigger sheet, a shared one we have wrapped right round ourselves, one generation after generation have lived their lives under. We’ve even written reassuring-sounding explanations upon it that there can be no such thing as monsters, not in this world. And we have explored from one end of that sheet to the other. It’s worked quite well, we’ve become our own reassuring parent to our own troubled child, singing ourselves to sleep.

But it’s never really worked. When we encounter the Weird we’re struck by dread. But also resignation. Like the child, in our hearts we knew… we always knew that sheet was only there to make us temporarily feel better. As Fisher says: “The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.”

And it’s this combination that counts - the threshold, and the sense that the Weird however arresting or unexpected is not wrong. Fisher starts his book with Lovecraft, clearly the exemplifier of the Weird par excellence, but then moves onto something which looks and feels very different - the HG Wells story ’The Door in the Wall.’

This door leads to quite a different world to Lovecraft’s dark and destructive forces. This time there’s an idyllic garden making up an idealised world, where pictures in a book are not of things but the things themselves. (A language where, in Semiotic terms, the signifier is not separate from the signified, is often used as a metaphor for the absence of alienation. Language simply connects us to things, rather than abstracting them from us.) It’s the difference between the mundane and the experiential, between being alive and living.

But can these two really be filed together, Lovecraft’s malevolent nether worlds and Wells’ bucolic paradise? Or is Fisher simply shoving together anything outside the narrow norms of social realism? (The widespread assumption there’s Proper Writing and That Other Thing.) The short answer is yes they can, and Fisher is smartly using his first two examples to mark out the parameters of the Weird.

But for the story to have any impact we need to feel two things - that this strange world is the world, that it’s us who have somehow stumbled into the wrong place, and now our task is to get back. And readers must recognise the place, not just as a literary trope, but (perhaps in a less literal sense) in themselves. They must feel the protagonist’s sense (“this place is inexplicably strange to me, and yet I know I belong here”), while knowing from the outset they’re only ever going to get glimpses of that world.

In fact it’s quite similar to Van Morrison’s song ’Madame George’, the only significant difference being Morrison reflects on an Arcadian time rather than a place. If Wells’ tale is summed up by the door that sometimes opens, with Morrison it’s one that definitely closes. Morrison needs no Weird motifs because his song is about memory, his place is somewhere he can see but not access.

It’s We Who Are Outside

And if the Weird is dependent on a juxtaposition, with the Eerie it’s a disjunction. (Fisher describes it as “constituted by a failure of absence or a failure of presence”.) So with our default Eerie example, Paul Nash’s ‘The Shore’ (1923, above), this time its effect is drawn precisely from its depiction being so consistent. 

There’s nothing you could point out as unfamiliar. Yet this isn’t the charming English seaside we feel we could step into, warm sand between our toes. In fact, if there is a thing that doesn’t fit here, it’s us. There’s the sense that even if this wasn’t a painting, even if the scene was really there in front of us, we’d be just as distanced from it. If conveys a feeling of alienation close to exile.

Except, again, there’s a deficiency in using this as our identifying image. With the Weird’s insistence on an incongruous presence, there’s a natural tendency to focus on one half of the Eerie, to see it as all about haunting absence, the withholding of something. (Fisher uses the metaphor of the curtain you can’t pull back.) But that would be too limited. The Eerie’s not the opposite of the Weird, their relationship is more like siblings. Nash himself often painted Eerie presence he found in his home landscape. This is what I said after his recent Tate Britain retrospective:

“When you come across a megalith or longbarrow on the landscape it just calmly sits there, seeing no reason to explain itself. It can even seem as though it's you who is the interloper. And it's mystery seems magnified by it's misshapenness. Classical columns seem to manifest the universal rules of geometry, just as they're connected to a language we can decipher. And so their strangeness becomes in itself strange to us. This should be our home turf, the most recognisable thing, and yet it’s impervious to our understanding.

”Inevitably we come to see these things as outside ourselves, a puzzle to be solved with measuring tape and aerial photographs. Yet there's the nagging sense the answer is within us, one of those things we seem to know but cannot quite recall.”

"The Thing Overwhelms"

Fisher refers to dictionary definitions of both words but only in passing, seeing them as perfunctory and inadequate. His insistence on the term ‘modes’ may be because he’s keen on opening up broad categories, rather than proscribing rigid systems. (He specifically rejects ‘genres’.) And it would be strange in itself to build rigid parameters around such a term, when even the casual use of “weird” has connotations of inexplicability.

And his counsel is wise because this reductive reaction is retained in us, the fans of these genres. Even as we reach towards the Uncanny we’re predisposed to try and explain it away. Fisher is always cautioning us against rushing to explanations, but he’s at his most pointed over Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’:

“…we are compelled to treat it as a solvable enigma, to overlook its ‘wrongness’, its intractability, in the same way that, in Club Silencio, we are compelled to overlook the illusory nature of the performances.”

Or, as he says elsewhere over Lovecraft:

“The Thing overwhelms, it cannot be contained, but its fascinates.”

All those YouTube videos which glibly promise some film or other will be ‘explained’ in less than ten minutes… They’re presumably made by fans of the Uncanny, or at the very least by people who paid for their own cinema tickets. But ironically they become the equivalent to that stock film character who insists there must be a ”rational” (ie banal) explanation. The one whose killjoy insistence usually gets him killed.

We go to see a film like ‘Mulholland Drive’ precisely because we want to experience the Uncanny, but once that’s taste’s on our tongue we immediately try to counteract it with something more bland. We’re like the fool who goes looking for a fight, but as soon as it starts shies away. We don’t want to get what we want, we just want to want it. Worse, sometimes the work itself comes audience-ready, created just to be “explained”, in which case there was never anything Uncanny there to be begin with. (I’ve not seen the film Jack Graham reviews here, but his comments ring true in general.)

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with theorising from films. Fisher himself does this continually. And, for example, his reading of the ending of ‘Under The Skin’, with it’s reflection on varying notions of the self, is compelling. But theorising is a different creature to explaining, just as to explore is not to delineate. We have the phrase “explain away”. No-one has ever theorised anything away.

New Times, New Monsters

But the real problem with dictionary definitions is that they’re concerned with etymology. They don’t necessarily find the meaning of a word in it’s origins, but they assume there’s some core concept which has been retained over time, even if it’s outer form has changed.

The Weird’s original definition (usually, if inadequately, reduced to fate) implied not a thing outside our world but a thread that ran through all worlds. (Ironically, Alan Garner, who Fisher files with the Eerie, exemplifies this original conception of the term quite closely.) Whereas in the sense Fisher uses them, they’re not even recent concepts so much as modern, even if they appropriate old words. All his examples are Twentieth century or later.

All the time people believed in the literal existence of Heaven and Hell (themselves adaptations of the original Upperworld and Underworld visited by shamans) any conception of the Weird as we use it now was held at bay. Both places might be fantastical in nature but they were places, connected to our world. They could be visited, and they were, by Dante and others. (‘The Divine Comedy’ is not intended to be taken as a true account, but it is structured as a travelogue.)

In short, we need the explored world in order to have the beyond. It’s the sheet we hold up before us. The Weird is dependent upon the supposition that all is delineated, in order to violate it. The Eerie is dependent upon the supposition that all is known, in order to upend it. The “eerie cry” of the bird (a common dictionary example picked up by Fisher) works because we have ornithology, our studies should by now have given us an understanding of birds’ actions.

But space counts as much as time. In my examples above, the first my mind went to, the Weird is American and the Eerie British. And of Fisher’s seven weird examples, four are from America. Whereas of his twelve examples of the Eerie, nine are European. And he stresses how Daphne du Maurier’s original novel ‘The Birds’ differed from the later film. (“Instead of a sunlit Californian setting, we find ourselves in a grey and tempestuous Cornwall”.) And, anecdotal evidence only, but I think my own preference is for the Eerie.

(The tricky cases are the Canadian Margaret Atwood and the Australian Joan Lindsay. The latter’s ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ has Australian characters but what the story is about is displaced Europeans, clinging to old customs in the new and unfamiliar landscape.)

ST Joshi suggests that the greater dominance of Puritanism in American culture led to social realism becoming the primary literary mode. It’s not just that fantastical literature is seen as silly or juvenile, social realism is held to be morally instructive – the stuff that’s good for you. So in America fantastical fiction in general was most marginalised - into pulp magazines. But, at least in part, Weird fiction needs that repression and marginalisation. Fisher recounts how Lovecraft and Lindsay don’t reject social realism so much as utilise it in order to subvert it. But there’s a wider point. There’s no return of the repressed without the repression.

Fisher refers to the human-as-scale device: ”Lovecraft needs the human world, for much the same reason that a painter of a vast edifice might insert a standard human figure standing before it: to provide a sense of scale.” And of course that’s a common Romantic motif, used to convey the Sublime. And if the Uncanny is modern, then the art movement Modernism drew a surprising amount from Romanticism.

Formally, the distinction is clear cut. The Romantic concerns itself with the natural world, whereas the Weird is always about the outside and beyond. But in practice things are slipperier. In Romanticism nature very often is depicted as outside - the forest outside the village, the mountain beyond the town and so on. Moreover, its depiction of nature often borders on the animist, nature is seen as having a presence. More importantly, as mentioned earlier, the arrival of the Weird is seen as inexorable - we always knew it would end like this. And this is the real connection. Like Nature in the Sublime, it’s where we really belong, even if it destroys us.

Hence, while Nash was a Modernist artist, associating with Surrealism, he also had a post-Romantic fascination for the English landscape. And the animism of objects, in both Kneale and Garner, is clearly indebted to the Romantic.

And (to use another of Fisher’s examples) Tarkovsky’s ’Solaris’ is virtually pantheistic. The titular planet isn’t just sentient but inscrutable, as much so as any God. It’s there to tell humans things about themselves, even if they have trouble deciphering it’s mysterious ways. Perhaps, symbolically speaking, it is the Earth. The humans observe it from their satellite, through their instruments and devices, having (as one character puts it) “lost our sense of the cosmic. The ancients understood it perfectly.”

So the Weird is in many ways an upping of the ante on the Sublime. But that upping is important. Fisher describes the Weird as “exorbitant,” which seems a stronger word than “more”. Sometimes a difference can becomes so quantitive that it tips over into qualitative. Turner’s sea storms look like they could smash you to pieces, even if you think you’re clever. But Cthulhu can obliterate your mind simply by showing up.

Are Alternative Facts Uncanny?

And if the Uncanny is associated with the modern, Fisher’s book may even be timely for its importance may be increasing. The dystopia of a film like ‘THX 1138’, - where everything is in order and that’s precisely the problem, all so right it’s wrong - now seems like yesterday’s problem.

And the face of the resurgent far right, somewhat less aesthetic than Dr. Strange or Paul Nash, is of course Donald Trump. Of course the Orange Aboherrence himself is not even a boorish Cthulhu, his bozo inarticulacy and tiny grasping hands are merely a synecdoche of the banality of evil. (And we should never forget his victory was brought about through the American political system, rather than the American electorate.) But he still spearheads something.

And that something isn’t dystopian, at least not in the strict sense of an anti-utopia. Trump and his “good people” seem to have no plan beyond sewing disorder that will hopefully hit their enemies harder than them. That’s why Mark Hamill reading Trump’s tweets in his Joker voice worked so well, he’s more devil clown than despot.

In my recent piece on the Tate’s exhibition of Russian Revolutionary prints, to describe the first failed Revolution of 1905 I used Gramsci’s quote “now is the time of monsters”. And it often feels like we are living through another time of monsters. Though our times would better be described by Goya’s “the sleep of reason produces monsters”. The unnatural (zombie outbreaks and other apocalyptic events) seems the natural way for us to describe our era to ourselves. We distract ourselves from our impending destruction by watching big, spectacular movies which show us our destruction, and we even comment on it to ourselves as we do it.

That old internet quandary, of how to debate against weaponised stupidity, now seems all-prevalent. In fact reason can seem to be the wrong implement in analysing what’s going on in the world today, which is so manifestly devoid of reason. It would be like trying to analyse water by pinning it down. You literally can’t make sense of the far right because it doesn’t, it’s incoherent to it’s core. Whereas to see it through the prism of the Uncanny, that might prove more helpful.

Let’s try to find an example. In an earlier piece on the history of Science Fiction I focused on the image of the skeleton in the space suit, which in retrospect I interpreted too narrowly. I was thinking of some cross between Cronos devouring his own offspring and a parasite hollowing out its host from within - so what we end up with is a skeleton where there should be an adventurous astronaut.

And what we see may well be the Gothic wearing the skin of Science Fiction. But that skin is still important! Even in that image, the space suit is still integral. On the outside is not the same as marginal.

The far right, will often straight-out mock rationalism in it’s foes. Smart people, they’re not real people. (As in Michael Gove’s infamous phrase “people have had enough of experts.”) And the basis of its appeal of course lies in offering an ersatz sense of belonging, which is at the very least orthogonal to an appeal to reason. 

But, despite its frequent appeals to history (of course nothing more than hanging up fake heraldry), it’s a modern phenomenon. So, while always feeling free to contradict itself, it will often affect rationalism. It’s fundamentally irrational, but not formally anti-rational. Just as the far right venerates order while practising disorder, it venerates rationalism while speaking in gibberish.

This allows its adherents the luxury of succumbing to their basest instincts while maintaining a veneer of reason. You can indulge your heart (or perhaps more accurately your spleen), while pretending to keep your head. This is why we have ”alternative facts’”, which are in essence facts still clung to even after they’ve been proven false, because they only ever had to look like facts. (It’s not a coincidence that alt.right leaders are almost entirely very stupid people very convinced they’re very smart.)

And if I say there’s some parallel between the skeleton in a spacesuit and the alt.right’s pseudo-rationalism, I’m not claiming the image to be far right in itself, nor it to be a critique of the far right. It’s highly unlikely any of this entered the head of its creator. I’m just saying it’s zeitgeisty, a cultural barometer, and it had to be because it composed itself out of ingredients it found around itself. Consequently, it can be made into a way of framing something which might be useful to us.