I think we can all pretty much agree that one thing fantasy does extremely well is make metaphors literal. It presents knotty problems in ways we don’t usually consider, de-politicizes and de-contextualizes hot-button issues and asks us to look at the issue itself, minus our own emotional baggage and all the preconceptions we bring to it.
I want to noodle around on this idea tonight. A couple of things have been banging around in my head of late, so I’m going to try to put them into an order resembling coherence.
I went to New Orleans for Netroots this year. Amazing conference; amazing city; amazing energy; amazing people. I will never forget the trip and I’m hungry to go back. I made new friends, and met a lot of old ones in person for the first time. But what’s on my mind now is not the conference; it’s what most of us there didn’t see, what we train ourselves not to see, not ever.
For reasons passing understanding, I found myself repeatedly crossing Bourbon Street around 8:00 on Saturday morning, which was an amazing thing in its own right. [Sidebar: A friend and I are historic architecture fans, and we were walking the French Quarter.] Beyond the bars and the clubs, the beautiful old buildings and the faux-voodoo Marie Leveau museum, I found myself looking at people — not the pretty folks who wait tables and drive carriages and take reservations, but the tired-looking business owners out at 7:30 hosing down the buildings and the sidewalks; the street sweepers and trash collectors trying to get done early and be out of the way before the tourists arrive; the homeless sleeping in doorways and against light poles. The people you’re not supposed to see. It crystallized into one memory: in a tight alley between two old blackened-brick buildings there stood a metal barrel on a crude stand over a wood-fire, the kind of contraption I grew up with and still see employed at butcherings. The barrel was brim-full of boiling water and bright red crawfish, and stirring it with a long wooden ladle, a slender, bald, youngish dark black man, graceful as a ballet dancer, wearing only distressed jeans and stained tennis shoes. Our eyes met but, unlike most of the folks I met in New Orleans, he didn’t smile; he gave me a look of wounded dignity and turned back to his work.
I was not supposed to notice him, just like I wasn’t supposed to notice the bar owners, the hotel maids who excelled at being invisible, the people who staffed the food booths. If you’re a visitor, you’re not supposed to notice the locals who do the work. No one cooks crawfish on Bourbon Street over an open fire at 8:00 a.m. in August, not unless there is no easier work to be had. No one would do that by choice.
That beautiful young man haunts me.
What, you might wonder, does this have to do with fantasy? It’s convoluted, but there’s a connection.
On the way home, I started reading China Miéville’s The City and the City, and that sense of seeing connections under the surface strengthened.
Science fiction calls dibs on Miéville, but the claim is tenuous at best; Miéville himself calls his fiction “weird.” The City and the City is at heart a detective/police investigative mystery with a casual nod toward string theory in the posited notion that two things can occupy the same space at once. But it’s fantasy. The conceit is fantasy. It gives us grounds to allow for one city to have split, at some point in the remote past, into two dimensions: two cities in one location, much of the geography belonging in either run-down Beszel or the far more prosperous Ul Qoma, while a small percentage of both cities is “cross-hatched,” existing in both places at once.
The citizens of Beszel and Ul Qoma are aware of each other; they see each other’s buildings, each other’s people, each other’s cars and trains, but are trained from childhood to “unsee.” This is more than ignoring each other — it’s a conscious banishment from the mind.
An elderly woman was walking slowly away from me in a shambling sway. She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion, and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.
With a hard start, I realised that she was not on GunterStrász at all, and that I should not have seen her.
Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent. When after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away, I looked carefully instead of at her in her foreign street at the facades of the nearby and local GunterStrász, that depressed zone. (1)
Civil authority in both cities depends on unseeing, the act of conscious displacement, the trained disregard each of the other, and infractions yield harsh penalties.
There is much more to The City and the City, of course. It’s a murder mystery with a political subplot and a light touch of social satire. But this one detail sticks with me most, the way metaphor is made concrete in Miéville’s novel, yes, but also in real life, the way we unsee the homeless who stand in the medians begging for cash, the construction day laborers in early-model sedans with mismatched doors, the people who live behind the back streets and clean the hotels and restaurants and cook the food and pick up the trash and boil the crawfish.
Then last week a comment from the redoubtable sagesource about Richard Mahew being a callow white boy brought Neverwhere back to mind. The entire novel Neverwhere is a meditation about homelessness, and how easy it is to fall through the cracks. Richard Mahew is nobody special — in fact, he’s rather milquetoast and can easily be pushed around. He’s a young man with a good heart and no other discernible qualities. Except that he sees; he pays attention.
Jessica sighed again. She continued to drag him along, as a door opened in the wall, a little way ahead of them, and someone stepped out and stood swaying for one long terrible moment, and then collapsed to the concrete. Richard shivered and stopped in his tracks. Jessica tugged him into motion.
“Now, when you’re talking to Mr. Stockton, you must make sure you don’t interrupt him. Or disagree with him — he doesn’t like to be disagreed with. When he makes a joke, laugh. If you’re in any doubt as to whether or not he’s made a joke, look at me. I’ll...mm..tap my forefinger.”
They had reached the person on the pavement. Jessica stepped over the crumpled form. Richard hesitated. “Jessica?”
“You’re right. He might think I’m bored,” she mused. “”I know,” she said brightly, “if he makes a joke, I’ll rub my earlobe.”
“Jessica?” He could not believe she was simply ignoring the figure at their feet.
“What?” She was not pleased to be jerked out of her reverie.
“Look.”
He pointed to the pavement. The person was face down, and enveloped in bulky clothes; Jessica took his arm, and tugged him towards her. “Oh. I see. If you pay them any attention, Richard, they’ll walk all over you. They all have homes, really...” (2, p. 24)
Of course Richard doesn’t walk away. And that gets him into tremendous difficulties. Door has asked to go to “someone safe.” And in Richard she finds that someone.
In the prologue to the revised edition of Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman wrote, “I wanted to talk about the people who fall through the cracks: to talk about the dispossessed...” (2, iv). Richard’s act of charity, his refusal to unsee the figure on the street, drops him into a different world, and renders him unable to fit into his old life. The Marquis de Carabas explains:
There are two Londons. There’s London Above — that’s where you lived — and then there’s London Below — the Underside — inhabited by the people who fell through the cracks in the world. Now you’re one of them. (2, p. 132)
Now, Richard has no special abilities. He’s not Chosen or powerful; in fact, he’s so commonplace that you would overlook him in a crowd. He’s a dandelion in a wide meadow, common as dirt. His traveling companions consider him a burden. There’s something special about him, however: he has no illusions abut himself. He’s the one who can undergo the Ordeal of the Key and survive it, when no one else has.
The Ordeal itself is perhaps the finest ten page description of clinical depression that has ever been written, as everything of value in Richard’s former life is twisted into corrosive and malevolent parodies of themselves. But because he’s so ordinary and he doesn’t imagine himself as anyone special, there’s only so much that the stripping and twisting of illusions can do to him. He survives the ordeal, to the astonishment of the Blackfriars who keep the Shrine and the Key.
The key is the key to reality, and Richard has become its master. Because he can see he has the power to choose his life — London Above or London Below. And that makes him a hero, not his power or destiny, but his compassion. He doesn’t save the world, but he saves a small part of it, and it makes a tremendous difference.
The ability to see. The reflexive taught skill of unseeing. Moving through the world, it seems we’re tugged between the two poles. And that is one of the great powers of fantasy — it gives us the mental and verbal tools to look beyond illusion, beyond received wisdom and political framing, beyond rhetoric itself. In the case of seeing and unseeing, it gives us a way past the painfully blinkered vision that blinds us to the people who walk, literally walk, beside us every day. I’m hard pressed to find a better encomium for an art form than that it has the power to make the world new, to make us see this world in new ways.
Note
I may or may not be here next week, depending on what track Hurricane Florence takes. If we’re hit hard here at Castle Dracula, look for me after things dry out a bit. Meanwhile, stay safe and keep the books up high.
References
1. Miéville, China. The City and the City. NY: Del Ray, 2010. (this reference is to the Kindle edition, end of chapter 1.
2. Gaiman, Neil. Neverwhere: the Author’s Preferred Text. NY: William Morrow, 2016.