Invited to review it for the estimable ‘Tears in the
Fence’ magazine, I have recently finished reading M. John Harrison’s collection
of stories and short pieces titled: ‘You Should Come With Me Now’. Though aware of MJH and having read some of
his stories but none of his books over the years, I had mixed feelings about
what I’d read. However, you can read
about those as and when the review gets published – hopefully later this year.
But it did get me thinking about some aspects of writing
and why, in my own, I make certain choices and not others.
M. John Harrison
has embraced the word ‘hauntology’ to describe some aspects of his work. I first came across this term in the early
2000s in association with arty music ventures by the bands Broadcast and The
Focus Group. It seemed to relate to
their interest in 1970s visions of the future in TV drama series such as ‘The
Survivors’ and the later ‘Quatermass’ productions, with musical reference to
the BBC Radiophonic workshop and it productions. The word now has a fairly sophisticated
definition in Wikipedia: ‘The term
refers to the situation of temporal, historical, and ontological disjunction in
which the apparent presence of being is replaced by a deferred non-origin,
represented by "the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present,
nor absent, neither dead nor alive.".’
How you get from the first reference to the latter, I leave with you –
but Harrison I think is talking about the latter. Many of his stories play on a sense of
liminal presence that is never quite clearly defined.
The ones I felt were most
successful were not easy or comfortable reading. Nor I suppose are conventional horror
stories, but they tend to be a form of entertainment on the whole - the
cerebral equivalent of a roller coaster ride, you might say. The stories that affected me in Harrison’s
book lacked that sense of visceral satisfaction (if that’s what you get). Instead, I felt, they delved into all the
layers of human corruption – in the broadest possible sense of the word. Physical and mental illness, obsessive thoughts
and behaviour, alienation, disjunction, etc.
They left me with a queasy feeling, which – on the positive side –
disrupted my complacency, but at the same time made me uncomfortable with the
very state of being human.
Clearly something of an
acquired taste! Another writer whose
work frequently delves into this mire is Alan Moore, but I have the advantage
of knowing Alan well enough to know that his moral compass can be trusted. His horrors have a purpose and are often
balanced by the beatific. Harrison I
can’t be so sure about – especially where his stories lose me, as a good few
did.
Okay, so the question is –
this is interesting material, why don’t I explore it more myself in my stories? I don’t completely shy away from it, as there
are certainly a few of the stories in ‘Wilful Misunderstandings’ which touch on
this territory. But my tendency is to
add other elements, humour being a primary one.
(I should add that there is humour in Harrison’s book but it is very
dark and dry.) So my story ‘Marinating
Jeff’ could conceivably be a Harrison scenario, but my choice of storytelling
mode was curiously lighthearted.
Why? I’m not sure – maybe it was
the only way I could handle the material.
But the majority of the
stories take in a more positive approach to human nature. It’s not that I feel some kind of fuzzy,
new-agey view of my fellow human beings – far from it. I think we have let ourselves become well and
truly fucked by corporate capitalism and by far the majority of us have our
heads buried in the sand about it. What
we think of as ‘civilisation’ has proved entirely dysfunctional. Nevertheless, on an individual level and
often at a local community level, I find I can’t help liking and loving my
fellow human beings.
There is a saying: ‘the
road to hell is paved with good intentions’ and I don’t doubt there is truth in
it. But without good intentions, I think
we’d have arrived in hell already. So
let’s not under-value them. I can’t put
a figure on it, but I suspect that most of us try to live good lives. Our understanding of the situation may be too
poor to be in any way effective, but we try to do right by our fellow human
beings and the planet on which we depend.
There’s a lot of self-delusion in this of course and I include myself
amongst the deluded. With a more
enlightened system of education, and relieved from ever-insidious corporate
propaganda designed to keep us consuming, we could conceivably do better. So I don’t want to lose myself in cynicism
and negativity. I want to celebrate
people, as well as explore their failings.
Looking into the dark side
has its values – our perspective is skewed if we ignore it or try to hide away
from it. I’ll confront it in my writing
when it seems appropriate (certainly the novel I’m working on has some very
dark aspects). But I’ll leave it as much
as I can to those who probably do it better than me.
Tough job. Someone’s got to do it. Thank-you Alan, thank-you MJ, and also
William Burroughs, Albert Camus, Jean Genet, Jim Thompson, Samuel Beckett – to name but a few
predecessors - for going there, finding something worth saying and bringing it
to the attention of at least some of the reading world. I’ll continue to follow my own intuitions, in
somewhat more well-lit land.
M John Harrison
