The Uncertainty of Genre: Problems of Classifying Irish Speculative Dystopias within the National Narrative Part 2

Continued from Part 1

Sterling’s creation of the Slipstream genre illustrates the slippage categories undergo. The vision of the Slipstream genre as a separate classification to Fantasy Fiction and Science Fiction where the writing “simply makes you feel very strange” was not a primal manifestation Sterling’s. Instead he was relabelling of a selection of titles that already had existed prior to his attempt to categorise them, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He simply wanted to rebrand their genre classification as Slipstream genre titles…

The problem with Sterling’s attempt at re-categorising texts stemmed from capitalist culture not from the literary field. Bookstores engage in reducing categories not expanding them. In recent conversation between authors Neil Gaimen and Kazuo Ishiguro, it is revealed that the horror genre as a classification has slowly disappeared from bookstores due to the low sales associated with the sector:

A bookstore worker in America was telling me that he’d worked in Borders when they decided to get rid of their horror section, because people weren’t coming into it. So his job was to take the novels and decide which ones were going to go and live in Science Fiction and Fantasy and which ones were going to Thrillers.

What Sterling was attempting was a reconfiguring of our interpretation of genre, highlighting the hidden genres within an overarching consumer friendly categorisation and addressing how homogenisation is built on the instability of an abstract consumer categorisation system. Irish literature likewise acts as an overarching consumer friendly categorisation system for the capitalist system and if a reclassification of texts occurred away from this overarching national category it could offer the potential for us to see hidden genres within our own narrative. The stagnation of the Irish writer’s artistic potential caused by the success of the surrogate concepts, what Gough referred to as the McGahern style, resulting in a repetition or mimicking of narrative scenarios until they become tropes are a result of the commercial vibrancy of the original identity.

We must realise as Sterling makes us aware through his Slipstream genre that classification are human constructs, and can be redefined. The surrogate identity may act as the controlling presence but it is merely that central position. The fulcrum of the wheel. The spokes spinning out of this centre are the unstable satellite sub-genres that have staved off a homogenising influence. Mike McCormack’s Note’s from a Coma published originally in 2005 offers an example of how the categorisation of Irish Literature contains these sub genre’s as the text operates to subvert the McGahern surrogate figure by incorporating Science Fiction into its narrative:

The book is also a hybrid. It’s a hybrid of science fiction and Irish domestic realism. It’s John McGahern meets Philip K. Dick. Imagine they were commissioned to collaborate on an episode of The X-Files. (McCormack, Experiment or Die)

Works such as McCormack’s reveal that the Irish engage in the same amount of genre fiction as the rest of the world. The difference is that the external world is quicker to acknowledge the effects of our experimentation with genre than we are within our own national borders. We still engage with the conceit that it takes the external opinion in order to illuminate the work of those under the national domain. The result of this external praise has led the Irish writer to attempt to cater to these figures as they feel “burdened with telling his or her own story but also with telling everyone else’s story too” (Hand). While it may be easier to believe that Hand’s words signal the collapse of the Irish identity into a global consciousness and obscurity he fails to recognise that this international literary road goes both ways. The inclusion of international audiences has helped Irish literature to broaden the understanding of ourselves.

Margaret Atwood’s article “Of the Madness of Mad Scientists: Jonathan Swift’s Grand Academy” not only centralises the importance of writers such as Swift’s contribution to Science Fiction but helps to reframe one of the earliest modern Irish Narrative texts, Gulliver’s Travels as a cradle of the genre. Atwood’s article pinpoints a central Irish literary text found under the Irish genre category and explodes the previous interpretation. The post-colonial readings have now given way to genre readings:

Although they don’t display the full-blown madness of the truly mad fictional scientists of the mid-twentieth century, they’re a definitive step along the way: the Lagadan Grand Academy was the literary mutation that led to the crazed white-coats of the B-movie.

A further important fact is that our internal self is almost ashamed at our genre heritage. John Banville rather candidly described himself while writing his first Benjamin Black novel (his pseudonym for writing crime genre novels) as a “slut” as if by writing in the confines of a genre was the selling of the writer’s worth (Banville, The Paris Review). The literary pursuit was for lovers, the genre for whores. Banville misses the point though, since his Banville persona is trapped within the same classification system as his alter ego; one is just more open about it, the other calls himself artist. What Banville’s alter ego does allow is for the writer construct to exist outside national borders. As Benjamin Black’s recent publication of a Philip Marlowe novel infers, genres not defined by nationalist tendencies allow for the writer to approach differing avenues of creation. A consumer picks up a Benjamin Black novel expecting a crime narrative while another picks up a John Banville novel expecting a narrative about Ireland. Of course there are cases where authors tend to avoid these trappings such as Column McCann’s global novels, yet his texts still sit under the Irish categorisation and thus confer comparability.

Such a lack of openness about Irish genre work has resulted in an uncertainty over classification with literary critics such as Hand refusing to classify our writers beyond national divisions. While Jonathan Swift is considered a great satirist, we do not consider him a great Science Fiction writer in the national narrative. We are comfortable with his satire, it makes sense within the canon because it studies the duality between the national and colonial divisions of Ireland and England, a popular and reoccurring theme throughout the national narrative. He exists under the Irish genre banner in our communal literary hub called the bookshop. It seems to be beyond our conception of the man to consider him as anything but a satirist, yet international voices such as Margaret Atwood would think otherwise. The blindness with which we treat the genre nature of the text reverberates through Swifts infamous quote on satire, which he believes acts as a “sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own”. We are willing to view the works of George Orwell’s 1984 or Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep as Science Fiction not satire yet we do not view our own through the same lens.

The Science Fiction of the text falls primarily in the third book, based around Gulliver’s arrival in Laputa and Balnibarbi, an academy for scientists and scholars situated under a floating island. What can be considered the science part of this situation is the method by which the island remains in the sky, “By means of this Loadstone, the island is made to rise and fall, and move from one place to another…For in this Magnet the Forces always act in Lines parallel to its Direction”. The loadstone is central to the actions of the book, as it enables the island to sit in a position of power. Speculative Science Fiction aspects of the novel such as the loadstone are overlooked by the culture capital bookshops however by the satire of the writing which focuses on the connection between the land of Laputa and Lindalino who parallel the British Monarch and the second city of the British Empire, Dublin. Caught under this national categorisation the tropes that have become associated with the dichotomy between Ireland and British will become less aware or focused on the science fiction elements of the text such as the Laputa citizens have uncovered about space, about looking up to the stars. Once Gulliver descends into Lagado, he addresses the place as metropolis, and meets the projectors, or scientists, we are left with a foreshadowing of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, perhaps given enough time Lagado would become this metropolis. Such a reading depends whether we decide to allow our canon to enact slippages into another category beyond the idea of nationalist categorisation.

If we think of Lang’s film however as the logical conclusion of the world of Laputa and Balnibarbi we must recognise that this is a dystopian landscape. Atwood sees Swift’s projectors as well meaning, “…whose inventions are intended for the improvement of humankind” (Atwood, 199). However the landscape they exist in is dystopic; there exists a totalitarian government who rule there subjects through might, they crush rebellion through starvation or by crushing them. There are rebellions and conflicts, this is a kingdom built on tyranny. The dystopian novel relies on the same construct of Thomas More’s Utopia, it is ‘no place’, yet unlike the former work there is no paradise, instead a dystopia is the culmination of all potential negatives taken to a logical conclusion: “they are Great Bad Places rather than Great Good Places and are characterised by suffering, tyranny, and oppression of all kinds” (Atwood).

David W. Sisk offers a greater nuance in his interpretation of the genre however as he links the genre to the contextualised social historical moment and the concept of extrapolation of ideologies and operations that can give birth to a dystopian future:

Finally, even the bleakest dystopia offers advance warning of what could happen should present trends continue unchecked. A dystopian narrative tries to warn, didactically predicting a coming evil while there is still time to correct the situation. Though dystopian fictions paintgrim views, their political and moral missions are altruistic.

Science fiction and dystopian literature are linked through the latter’s reliance on the ever progressive nature of technology. In Gulliver’s Travels Laputa rules its subject through the advancement of technology that helped to create the floating island. It is the second city of this kingdom, Lindalino which helps to highlight the dystopian nature of the text, as they reflect the oppressed, disgruntled subject. As much as More’s traveller arrives at a utopian world, Swift’s traveller arrives in a dystopian one. Sisk writes that while there were many texts circulating in Swift’s era that can be referred to as anti-utopian, or satires of More’s Utopia, “only one–Swift’s–contains elements that qualify it as an early dystopia”.

Gulliver’s Travels is an early example of the dystopian sub-genre of Science Fiction buried in the Irish narrative. Recasting the narrative away from the satirical elements of the text has allowed us to objectively see the Science Fiction elements become foregrounded. The relationship between the floating island and the land of the Lindalino detached from grinning satire, reveals an all too real and all too dystopian landscape. Ireland and its relationship to the monarch becomes a dystopian landscape under the grip of totalitarianism. John Stuart Mills would coin the term Dystopian in his address to the British Parliament in eighteen sixty eight, one of the earliest recordings of its use. British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and his cabinet were pinned by Mills as Dystopian, and by their actions creating a dystopia of Ireland. Mills thus drags a physical manifestation of the hidden dystopian subtext found in Gulliver’s Travels into reality:

It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topians, or cacotopians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable.

Consequently, we must allow a slippage of category to occur in order for a reclassification of texts away from our current model of nationalist classification and recognise texts as engaging with the dystopian sub-genre of science fiction.

Part 3