The story’s title, “That in Aleppo Once,” is of course taken from Othello’s last speech, just before he commits suicide. At the very end, the narrator pleads with V. not to use these words as a title: “It may all end in Aleppo if I am not careful. Spare me, if you took that for your title.” This ending leaves it an open question whether the narrator, in fact, is about to commit suicide. As is almost always the case in fictions constructed on a central allusion to a previous literary text, there are both parallels to and marked differences from the work invoked. The narrator, like Othello, is considerably older than his beautiful young wife, whom he adores. Unlike Desdemona, she actually betrays him, or at least claims to have done so: she is an extravagant liar, even inventing a beloved dog left behind on the couple’s flight from Paris and later telling an older woman friend that her husband killed the dog, when they never had any pet.
The young wife, then, is her own Iago, perhaps inventing—simply in order to torment her husband—this “brute of a man,” a seller of hair lotions, with whom she spent several nights after she and her husband were temporarily separated, or perhaps actually indulging in some rough sex with the uncouth stranger. Although it is perfectly natural for a writer as steeped in literature as Nabokov to build his fiction on a literary allusion, the procedure has been adopted by many novelists and is hardly an indication that the focus on literature somehow carries the writer away from the world of experience outside literature. Fielding makes the Joseph story in Genesis central to Joseph Andrews; Joyce famously organizes the episodes of Ulysses as parallels to episodes in the Odyssey; Faulkner uses the biblical story of Absalom’s rebellion as a prism through which to see the catastrophic history of the American South.
Yet the framework of allusion in no way detracts from the aim of each of these novels to provide a compelling representation of a particular time and place in all its ramified network of social relations and historical contexts. Some might regard the deployment of allusion as an instance of Nabokov’s fondness for “codes,” but as I am suggesting, it is a characteristic move not only among novelists but in literature as such. The key to the sexual betrayal plot via Othello is probably in the tragic hero’s words in his last speech that he is “one who has loved not wisely but too well,” which is a perfect characterization of the hapless émigré of the story but scarcely a piece of arcane cryptography.
Posted 9 days ago.
Others of Robert E. Howard’s characters, like the medieval Irish warrior Turlogh Dubh, show similar influences, and Howard’s stories of the (entirely fictional) Pictish king Bran Mak Morn—whose patronymic derives from Conán Maol’s—showcase his interest in Irish and Scottish history as well as his familiarity with then-contemporary archaeological theories about the racial history of Scotland and Ireland. Howard’s interest was shared, though less effusively, by his contemporary H.P. Lovecraft, with whom Howard shared a lengthy correspondence that began, as Duncan Sneddon points out, when Howard noticed Lovecraft’s use of a Scottish Gælic phrase in his story “The Rats in the Walls.”
Tolkien, Howard, and Lovecraft are only three of many examples: ideas about Celticness have permeated the fantasy genre in all its forms, sometimes explicitly embraced and sometimes absorbed by osmosis as simply part of fantasy’s genre conventions. As Cox has observed, “Celticity holds an ever-present position in fantasy media, but in so doing it becomes effectively invisible because it becomes associated with the fantasy genre rather than any particular source culture.” This then drives writers and audiences to turn back to what they consider “authentic” sources—often wildly out of date or simply made up—of “Celtic” tradition in order to supplement what they perceive as the “generic” æsthetic resources of fantasy. Cox describes this as a “double exposure”:
By forgetting the already Celtic milieu of modern fantasy’s origins, as traced through Arthurian legends, popularly translated texts such as the Mabinogion, and Tolkien himself, modern fantasy continues to look to Irish and Welsh cultures for mysticism, exoticism and otherness, overlaying on top of that tradition another layer of perceptions of Celticity. And, because the fantasy genre’s values encourage research but little criticism of that research beyond seeking ‘originals,’ medieval, early modern and romantic interpretations of Irish, Welsh and other Celtic cultures become folded into the mix and further entrenched in popular imagination.
Against this backdrop, one might assume that writers in Celtic languages would have no interest in fantasy. Speakers of Scottish Gælic, Welsh, Irish, Manx, Cornish, and Breton are, turning again to Iain Crichton Smith, “real people in a real place,” with real and pressing political concerns and with their own literary and æsthetic traditions. As early as the 1910s, the Gælic scholar and writer Calum Mac Phàrlain categorically rejected “sgeul air ni nach gabhadh tachairt” (“a story about something that could not happen,” as the easiest kind of story to create but also as fundamentally worthless: “mur bi sgeul de ’n t-seòrsa sin fìor ealanta, cha’n fhiach e; a chionn, cha’n eil aobhar ann ach a thaisbeanadh ealain” (“if a story of this kind is not truly artful, it is worthless, because it has no purpose except to show off its art”). Mac Phàrlain goes on to dismiss the “seann sgeòil” (“old stories”) of Gælic tradition as falling into this category, lacking the artfulness to justify them; he urges writers and storytellers to focus their attention on “gnothuichean an latha ’n diugh” (“matters of today”) .
Posted 27 days ago.
Edwin Turner
There’s this line in “Jawbone” that I kept tripping over, rereading and rereading: “Like lucky thing for the local citizenry someone on your side was there in there on duty on the nightbeat last night in the crapper last night.” The line is simultaneously gorgeous and ugly, elegant and clunky—rapturous really.
Andrew Latimer
Rereading is the key here. We’re familiar with rereading whole stories that we like or ones with endings that puzzle us. But what Lish, and writers of this ilk, ask us to do is to reread sentences in the course of making our first reading. This assumes a reader, a listener even, with the patience to linger over the page, its construction. (Gary Lutz prefers a “page-hugging” to a page-turning reader.)
David Winters
“Gorgeous and ugly”—exactly, yes. Donald Barthelme once said, “every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentence that is also somehow beautiful.” Lish, when he was teaching, called this “burnt tongue”: “God only listens to those whose tongues are burnt, twisted, crippled.” Writers of fiction can achieve extraordinary power by attending to everything wrong, skewed, erratic in their natural speech—and, rather than being afraid of that wrongness, amplifying it on the page. But power of this kind needn’t be purely spontaneous; it can also be elicited by editing. The sentence you mention went through multiple revisions; Lish reworks his stories obsessively, right up to the final proof stage. When I edit fiction, in my lesser way, I often look out for those off-kilter sentences, isolate them, tweak them, try to increase their tension and pressure.
—an interview with the editors of Egress
Posted 33 days ago.
Cheryl Morgan
Every time I hear you talk about your writing you make reference to your admiration for Katherine Mansfield. What impresses you most about her work?
M. John Harrison
Oh God, what doesn’t? Mansfield went all the way underground in the text. She called it “muted direction.” She wouldn’t say, “Look here, this is the evil character; look here, this is the good character; look here at what the evil character does to the good character, isn’t that so evil? And look how good the good character has been about it!” Katherine just seemed to show you people doing their stuff. If, as the reader, you drew moral conclusions about them, if you drew conclusions of any sort, they were yours. Of course she was cheating. She wasn’t absent from the text. She had gone underground and you were hearing her voice speaking from every part of the fiction, even the furniture in the central character’s front room. Of course, she got pilloried for being “amoral” and “cold.” That was to miss the point—the reason you were horrified was she had done her work right!
—an interview with M. John Harrison
Posted 37 days ago.
Who built this great dyke? Dante says it was built by the builder—a tautological answer—although he also says, of the identity of this architect, this “engineer:” “qual che si fosse,” “whoever he was.” Who was he? Sayers, in her note to this passage, glosses the ‘maestro’ as God, which seems wrong:—why would Dante add qual che si fosse to God’s name? Which is to say, in the sense that God is behind all creation, in one sense He is of course the maestro, the builder. But the question is: who constructed this specific structure, this dyke? Why would God, having created the hellspace, come back to add to it, improve it? To what end? For the benefit of the devils and the damned? They’re not there to have their lot improved, after all. Do we imagine God creating this structure of eternal punishment, but also adding-in various items of beneficial civic architecture? Dykes and damns, sewage systems and recycling centres, amenities and social housing?
Posted 44 days ago.
Certainly this must be the most ridiculous appeal to authority that has ever appeared in these pages. Do you only write about these things if you have seen, in pure euphoria, cloves being driven into the apple of the Lord? For one who has experienced fortification spectra and rainbow auras, and seen souls rising from people’s heads, and fixed words begin to stream meaning, the uneasy question is this: what if it is merely neurological? What to make of the mystic loose from any system of thought or framework, who nevertheless has a seizure every time she passes through the same doorway? How easily it may be triggered, or even inherited. I cannot even look at a bevel, my mother has told me hauntedly. Lewis Carroll saw a pack of playing cards, but he might have seen the Supreme Face. What happens when the phenomenon has a name, an explanation? If the state can be entered through the physical: through repetition, the fondling of beads, looking at a bevel, what does that say for the revelations received there? What does that mean for the meaning?
Posted 51 days ago.
To me the act of reading is a dream that is already lucid. The reader’s state is hypnagogic, a threshold position to read the text and produce its commentaries. The body, the world, these are always present: the aches in the back, the heat of the sun, the position of the limbs, the time off work, the surveillabilities of the police state. The fictive dream is an image that has already been pierced by arrows, like a martyred saint: this is what we call allegory. The path of arrows is more parabolic than bullets. You cannot always pull on a string to trace their trajectory and figure out where they came from and where the sniper’s nest must have been. Allegory grows more powerful the hazier it is: you are not being handed a set of fixed, well-mapped correspondences, but being asked to engage in your own mappings, to consider the valences, to play and be played with. This is what I think is fun about fantastical literature and why it is a genre worth choosing to read and write in.
Posted 60 days ago.
There’s maybe some sawdust left to sweep up here and there, and I’ll probably be picking crumbs of masking tape from obscured corners of the trim for months, but we’re getting close to just about being done: the first major overhaul of this entire website since I, uh, launched it. In, ah, a whiles back. Goodness.
The underlying content management system, or CMS, has been upgraded, from Textpattern 4.5.7 (released back in 2014, on the tenth anniversary of Dean Allen’s very first release of the beast) to the current version, 4.8.8 (there’s a beta of 4.9 available, but we are not, as a rule, beta people; we shun the cutting edge in this regard). —The upgrade went so much more smoothly than I’d feared, which has left me resolved to keep up with further upgrades in the future, and not let things fall so far out of date; we’ll see how long that lasts.
With the engine in fine fettle, I decided to put it through its paces, with the first major redesign, as noted, since the original design, from back in 2006. There’s been any of a number of advances in CSS over the intervening years, as it turns out. The front page is a better landing page now, I think, and everything displays in the house font as intended, or should, and it all looks so sleek and modern on a mobile device, the list of chapbooks should be much easier to navigate, now, and as for the table of contents—
Well, yes. It’s kinda been stripped bare. But! Starting next week, installments will be (re-)published on a Monday–Wednesday–Friday schedule, with the newly edited text from the recently released ebooks, all properly typeset for the web: as close to a definitive edition as is possible, for the moment. —With forty-four novelettes, at two weeks per, this will take us to September of 2026—the twentieth anniversary, more or less, of the first post hereabouts.
Season Three won’t languish during the reruns, rest assured; the first draft of no. 45 has almost cracked 5,000 words. As novelettes are completed, they’ll be released as chapbooks, and Comrades and Patreons will be getting their copies as per usual; they just won’t appear publicly, here, for free, until the reruns have caught up, in September of 2026. Who knows? Maybe I’ll be five or six novelettes into the new season by then.
So that’s how we’re sliding into the new year, scrubbed clean and refreshed. In the meanwhile, if you find you’re missing the story (and don’t have copies of your own, yet), well: here’s an ebook collecting the first five installments available in a pay-what-you-want edition:
Posted 65 days ago.
Thirteen years after publication, but I’m not complaining.
Posted 91 days ago.
In the film, as Miles and Jack prepare to have dinner with Maya and Sandra Oh’s Stephanie, Miles famously says “If anyone orders Merlot, I’m leaving. We are not drinking any fucking Merlot.” And that was that; sales of Miles’ preferred Pinot Noir skyrocketed, Merlot sales tanked for about a decade. People who were just getting into wine in the mid-aughts put that much of their trust in the palate of a fictional character. A character who is wrong about pretty much everything else in the movie. A character who steals from his own mother. Such is our deference to the tastes and opinions of angry white guys. Plus, the movie elides the real reason for Miles’s stance, which is much clearer in the book: Merlot was his ex-wife’s drink.
Posted 106 days ago.
