In the Pickle Jar: Appleseed or Mimesis

pp197-204

first published in Polder: A Festschrift for John Clute and Judith Clute edited by Farah Mendlesohn, Baltimore, Old Earth Books, 2006

Only their story-nodes remained, fragmentary partials, digital echoes of long-dead flesh sapients pacing up and down the prison yards of AI pickle jars.

(Appleseed, p. 1)

It was John Clute’s colleague, Peter Nicholls, who spelt out in the entry on mainstream writers of sf in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2^nd edition, 1995) that ‘Sf … lies at the heart of the realist mode’ (p. 770). However, though he hasn’t stated it so baldly, this is a position with which Clute clearly concurs; it lies unstated behind most of his critical writing. It is a position, therefore, that one would justifiably expect to find dramatised in Clute’s first science fiction novel, Appleseed (2001), particularly as that novel takes as its basis one of the most central forms of science fiction: space opera. Certainly those commentators whose laudatory remarks have been chosen to decorate the cover of the Tor edition of the novel identify it time and again as space opera: Thomas M. Disch talks of Clute ‘returning SF to its origins in space opera’; Neil Gaiman calls it ‘a compulsively readable space opera’; a reviewer in Locus describes Clute as ‘bursting through the confines of space opera’; while another reviewer, in SF Weekly, says that ‘the book sits at the top of the mountain of achievement in postmodern space opera’. If we take these commentators at their word (and certainly they should know the genre well enough for us to do so), then in Appleseed we have a novel that sits at the heart of science fiction, which itself is at the heart of the realist mode. What a surprise, therefore, to discover that the novel can be most clearly read and understood as a prime example of the fantastic.

Nicholls backs up his identification of science fiction with realism by claiming: ‘its whole creative effort is bent on making its imaginary worlds, its imaginary futures, as real as possible’ (p. 770). But this seems an inadequate account of realism or mimesis. Tolkien, for example, with his careful creation of myth and geography and language, was engaged in exactly the same enterprise for his fantastic world. Indeed, one of the things often said in praise of The Lord of the Rings is how real it seems; but this sense of the real is not enough to count it realist. Realism, it seems, involves more than simply making it seem real. Mimesis, with its suggestions of imitation, implies that we should see the real, the world through which we or our fellows move every day, reflected in the pages of the fiction. This was the enterprise that early realist writers such as Balzac and Zola saw themselves as engaged in. If science fiction is mimetic, then it is in the same way that J.G. Ballard claims that writing about the future is the best way of writing about the present. Science fiction may hold a mirror up to our world, but it is at best a distorted mirror, what Farah Mendlesohn, in a slightly different context, has termed ‘ironic mimesis’, just as utopian fictions distort the view to show what ought to be or might be, or could be or should not be.

Peter Ackroyd, in a lecture on ‘The Englishness of English Literature’, identifies realist fiction, as promoted by academic champions such as F.R. Leavis and Raymond Williams, with what he calls ‘secular Protestantism’:

They praised the communication of lived experience, the concrete expression of moral truths, the subtleties and complexities of the individual consciousness – individuals who were of course necessarily part of a larger moral community. And they explored these concerns with a vocabulary and emphasis which effortlessly recalled the values of a Protestant hermeneutics. It is as if they were looking for confirmation of their erstwhile religious values within a context other than that of religion. For a certain kind of romantic or melodramatic vision, for high-spirited heterogeneity, for theatricality, for spectacle, for pantomimic humour, they had little if any time. (p. 335)

Ackroyd does not use the terms, but the communication of lived experience, the expression of moral truths, the subtleties and complexities of individual consciousness are all readily identifiable characteristics of what we recognise as realist, mimetic fiction. The romance, the melodrama, the high spirits, the heterogeneity, the theatricality, the spectacle, the pantomime are characteristics we readily identify in non-realist fictions, especially in works of the fantastic. What’s more, this list reads like a checklist of characteristics in Appleseed; while the last things that could be said about the novel are that it represents in any way lived experience, that it is placed within a moral community, and while it is overwhelmingly a work of hermeneutics its values are not those of traditional Protestantism.

Above all, what makes Appleseed a part of the fantastic is its concern with Story. The idea of Story has become a central part in Clute’s developing aesthetic of science fiction; flick through the pages of Scores: Reviews 1993-2003 (2003), for instance, and you will find the word cropping up time and again. It is so integral a part of the novel that if the idea of Story were removed from Appleseed there would be nothing remaining. Story itself does not indelibly mark a work as fantastic, but its use can. When, for example, Siri Hustvedt talks (in What I Loved, 2003) of letters that ‘had the uncanny weight of things enchanted by stories that are told and retold and then told again’ (p. 3) the use of words like ‘uncanny’ and ‘enchanted’ gives a sense of the fantastic, but underneath this she has the realist sense that story is a way through the mystery of the world. When John Clute speaks of Story, it is the world. There is no world out there upon which we can temporarily impose the understandable pattern of story; rather there are stories, any number of them, and the way they overlap and intersect and feed off each other is all the world can be. This is the basic idiom of at least one form of the fantastic, and it is the modus vivendi of science fiction, or at least of the science fiction Clute presents in Appleseed.

Therefore, in attempting to explore the fantastic as refracted through Appleseed, I may be drawing attention to its high spirits, its pantomimic qualities, its hermeneutics, but always these will be addressed through Story, through the various myths and tales that Clute has embraced and adapted to construct the intricate theatre of the novel.

One of the myriad ways we use Story is through symbols, representations that tell us ‘X’ means more than it says on the surface, that buried below one tale is another that is richer or more important or possibly truer. Appleseed is a novel replete with symbols. The very first sentence – ‘There had always been something about a planet of cities that made Freer long for the sky’ (p. 1) – tells us more than the simple statement that we are in the habitual realm of the space opera, a realm that allows us to move between planets. Our protagonist’s name, Freer, is emphatically symbolic in the context of a sentence about craving greater freedom; and the last word is either a sign of unusual linguistic carelessness on the part of the author or a denial that this is a mimetic quest. ‘Sky’ tells us that this is a work written for and about those of us who inhabit worlds and who look up and out at the sky; it is not a novel realistically inhabiting the perceptions of a character such as Freer is supposed to be, one who looks down on planets from the immensity of space, who would not therefore ever see the sky. There is heavy symbolism also in the use of ‘azulejaria’, so carefully chosen as a representative device that Clute feels the need to explain the word before the novel even begins and which gives the name of Freer’s ship, ‘Tile Dance’. These dancing tiles, each one bearing scenes from a story – ‘like the vertebrae of a neverending story, long figurative dramas in azulejaria porcelain’ (p. 87) – as well as containing the appearance of the AIs who people this novel more plentifully than any humans, suggest the comic strip, the pantomime; not the copying of reality but its exaggeration, its abstraction, its being made fantastic. So thoroughly are picture and story identified that characters within the story become pictures: the face of Johnny Appleseed drawn upon the planet Klavier when seen from the Harpe ship; the press on Trencher who are referred to as ‘toons’ (p. 6), an abbreviation of cartoon that became popular through the overtly fantastic film Who Killed Roger Rabbit? Such  creatures are just one variety of the fleshless inhabitants of this world: the ‘Unfleshed [are] sigilla and eidolons and toons ... freelance lifestory avatars’ (p. 18); in other words some of the inhabitants of this universe are signs and symbols and images, they are written, their artificiality emphasised by the fact that they ‘floated everywhere ... some (being immaterial) by the power of thought’ (p. 18). Clute is brazen in laying on the unreal, in spelling out that these creatures belong in Story, not in life; that this whole book is made up of symbols to be read, not realities to be experienced.

The very language of the book therefore, clotted as it is with Clute’s typically profuse vocabulary, constantly throws us out of the surface story and makes us look for the threads of other stories that loop and tangle just below the surface. On the surface this is a trader game adventure filled with hair’s-breadth escapes, secret identities, larger-than-life villains and epic battles. It is, as space opera so often is, a grandiose melodrama that mimics not the reality we know but the thrills and spills of popular fiction. But there is more going on than this would suggest, a notion that Clute himself persistently nudges us towards. The ship ‘Tile Dance’ is ‘bigger inside than out’ (p. 81); lenses, the cure-all for the universal plague, are ‘in a very real sense ... bigger inside than out’ (p. 100); and when Mamselle is identified as the Predecessor Queen: ‘Within the proscenium arch of her ribs, she was larger than her outside’ (p. 308). This repeated image might be a knowing reference to Dr Who’s TARDIS, or, as Clute might prefer, to John Crowley’s Little, Big, but it is also hammering home the point that this novel itself is bigger inside, in the reading of its symbols, than it is outside, on the surface.

The overarching story pattern for the novel is very familiar to anyone who knows Clute’s work on fantasy, for it follows the ‘grammar’, as he calls it, of wrongness, thinning and healing first laid out in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997). Wrongness, ‘the apprehension of some profound change in the essence of things’ (wrongness, p. 1038), is here represented by plaque. A disease sweeping across the inhabited universe, plaque is described as ‘a sclerosis, a starvation. It was shutdown’ (p. 50) and its effect is to seal a world ‘into an unending cramp of darkness’ (p. 53); it is, in other words, death. Thinning, ‘a reduction of the healthy land to a parody of itself [whose agent is] ultimately in most cases the Dark Lord’ (thinning, p. 942), is here seen as the work of the Harpe, monstrous self-eating beings (their symbol is a form of the worm ouroburos). The Harpe, eventually identified with God, run immense arks whose human inhabitants spend the final moments of their lives as living chips in a vast computer, which means that the Harpe can literally be seen as the Dark Lord, Death. Healing, ‘what the story of fantasy “wishes” to tell,’ is ‘the greening of the waste land’ (healing, p. 458) or, in the context of Appleseed, the quest for the lenses that can cure the plaque. The lenses, significantly, are to be found on the mysterious planet Eolhxir: Freer is seeking the elixir that will heal the world.

Having identified how neatly Appleseed fits within the shape of fantasy as laid out by Clute, it is worth briefly asking whether that necessarily makes the novel fantasy. The terms coined by Clute serve to provide a critical language for patterns readily identifiable within works of generic fantasy. They are not defining terms; it is not necessary for a fantasy to follow this pattern, nor is it sufficient that a work does follow the pattern for it to be classified as fantasy. Nevertheless, it is interesting that Clute, who coined the terms and remains their most committed user, should have employed precisely this pattern in one of the most self-consciously ‘made’ works of fiction to have appeared in recent years.

It is also instructive to note how many of the stories used to make the story of Appleseed are themselves fantastic. Clute is open about his appropriations. ‘No science fiction novel published at the end of a century of science fiction could stand alone, and Appleseed is full to the core with borrowings’ (p. 336) he acknowledges, and it is impossible to read the book without picking up countless resonances. An overt mention of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple at one point will be followed a few pages later by a passing reference to ‘Little Nemo in Slumberland’. Later still, one of the faces that appear at Klavier is ‘wreathed in holly, [and] began to laugh. Vast oaten chins dangled rune-rich beards of tile-bright yew’ (p. 127). Surely this is Charles Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Present, or perhaps an incarnation of Father Christmas? And when Freer and Appleseed fall towards Klavier they pass a gondola held up by ‘a chevron of long-necked birds’ (p. 206) specifically identified as gansas. This is an overt reference to Francis Godwin’s ur-science fiction novel, The Man in the Moone (1638), in which the narrator Gonsales is carried to the moon by a flock of gansas. Of the stories fundamental to the iconography of the novel, however, one of the most persistent is The Wizard of Oz. We see this most clearly on Klavier:

Then the toon caduceus in Freer’s hand took flight – spinning like a small tornado, as though it were mimicking Tile Dance – and descended upon the writhing necklace in the form of a small house made of wood. It landed on the necklace. From beneath the house protruded a pair of red shoes. (p. 226)

The betraying AI Vipassana, in the temporary form of the necklace, here meets the fate of the Wicked Witch of the West. Clute rubs it in a few pages later when, having made his speech, Appleseed ‘led the way down the yellow brick road’ (p. 240).

The Wizard of Oz has now achieved the status of a modern myth, a set of images (owing far more to the Judy Garland film than the original L. Frank Baum novel) that are called upon consistently by contemporary writers because they can effectively evoke feelings without the need for too much explanation. But there is no need for Clute to introduce the small tornado, the wooden house, the red shoe; they are here not to evoke feeling but to remind us that what is happening here is fiction, that it belongs within the realm of Story.

But if The Wizard of Oz has become a potent modern myth, an older and far more potent myth forms a much greater part of Appleseed: the Matter of Britain, the Arthurian Cycle. There is a hint of this once Freer escapes from Trencher, when he discovers that Tile Dance also bears the name Ynis Gutrin – Glass Island. More commonly spelt ‘Ynys-witrin’, the Isle of Glass is one of the names traditionally associated with Glastonbury, and is also associated with Avalon, the magic place of death and eternal rebirth in Arthurian lore. Thereafter, references to Arthur, the suggestion that Freer is once more playing out one of contemporary fantasy’s most important myths of origin, come thick and fast. When we learn of data being ‘washed in the chalice of the lens’ (p. 101) then the object of this quest becomes a grail. And in the Predecessor throne room on Klavier ‘a throne in the shape of a rune, and by the throne a stone, and in the stone a sword’ (p. 130) adds another powerful symbol from the cycle. Later ‘A mappemonde mask of Vipassana’s mien unfolded into the Matter of Britain’ (p. 137) and Vipassana wore a ‘Sangreal mask’ (p. 138). Mamselle’s son takes the name Arturus Quondam Captain Future which, while incorporating a nod towards the pulp space opera hero Captain Future, is clearly a reference to Arthur’s supposed grave at Glastonbury. When unearthed by monks in 1190, this grave was said to bear an inscription to Arturius rex quondam rexque futurus, Arthur the once and future king. As Freer is borne away by Vipassana’s golem an unidentified voice (the teller of the tale?) says: ‘And ever, says Malory, Sir Lancelot wept, as he had been a child that had been beaten’ (p. 252). Finally there comes a point when Appleseed turns his tin hat into a dish and says to Freer: ‘Think of me as Grail, sonny. Think of yourself as Knight’ (p. 255), a playful misidentification since Appleseed more nearly fills the role of Merlin than he is the object of the quest (which is more correctly the lens, already identified as a grail), though it is important that at this point Freer becomes the knightly FreeLance.

Each major character in Appleseed, therefore – Freer, Appleseed, Mamselle, Vipassana, Tile Dance (which can be said to incorporate the Made Mind, KathKirtt) – is assigned a role within the Arthurian cycle. Sometimes two or more will share the same role, or one character will at different times take on different roles; but that is typical of the book. Clute is prolific with his symbols, gleefully making each character struggle under the weight of a host of different iconic roles as the presiding imagery of the book varies. Appleseed, for instance, must be that archetypal American icon of the taming of the frontier, Johnny Appleseed, at the same time as he is Merlin and the Wizard of Oz. The characters change appearance at will, an easy enough task given that most if not all of them exist in digital form, and also bear a variety of names. They are not one, they contain multiples. Freer is familiarly known as ‘Stinky’, but since Clute goes to extraordinary lengths to tell us that humans are smelly, a point he makes every few pages, this is not a name to distinguish him from everyone else but rather identifies him as an Everyman.

Of course, if Freer is Everyman, it raises the question of what is man, and the novel suggests that Clute holds man in as much disdain as the soubriquet ‘Stinky’ might imply:

They were behaving as humans always behaved, individual males and females engaged relentlessly (though always as part of a conversation, via comm net, with invisible partners) in the unremittingly ingenious gestures of courtship normally found in any of the rare surviving species where reproduction and sexual intercourse might occur simultaneously. (p. 19)

Note the satirical swipe at our contemporary mobile phone habits even as Clute is saying how insignificant humans are in the scheme of this universe. Although not itself a satirical novel, Appleseed uses satire whenever it talks about the behaviour of human beings. They are smelly, they are shameless, they are driven by irrepressible sexual urges, they are violent. ‘No single homo sapiens spoke directly to any other ... It had all worked very well for three thousand years. Homo sapiens now rarely killed each other in public’ (p. 52). This makes no pretence of being a real portrait of humanity, we are not meant to see ourselves in what we are shown; it is an exaggeration, a pantomime, a satire. That our knowing author does not take it seriously is made evident throughout the story. For instance, one of the clichéd symbols of sex on pre-liberal television was a train speeding into a tunnel, so when Freer and Ferocity have sex Clute knowingly places it on an incongruous and old-fashioned train which ‘at one point ... entered yet another tunnel’ (p. 234). This is not mimetic writing, nor is it meant to be taken seriously by the reader.

What is taken seriously is the world of story, and particularly the story about God. In a review of Patricia Anthony’s novel God’s Fires, Clute has already lamented the growing importance of God in contemporary science fiction:

God, or golems, or vampires, or AIs, or UFOs, or virtual reality wombs, or the Big Book of End Times. Any Dad will do. Instead of our visiting ourselves upon the world, the world has begun to visit itself upon us. (Scores, p. 147)

Curiously, just about every one of those avatars of God appears in Appleseed, and the overwhelming story that draws together all the stories that make up this novel is about the war against God. Freer is not just a hero freeing the universe from plaque, he is freeing science fiction from the pernicious influence of God.

If humans do have a positive quality in this universe, it is ‘their deafness to God ... [and their consequent ability] ... to answer back when the time came’ (p. 238). This is a novel all about answering back to God. God is a presence in the book right from the moment we are told of the theophrasts who think that ‘plaque is a scar left by the departure of the gods from the universe …[but]… The theophrasts are wrong’ (p. 86). From that moment on it is impossible to deal with the immediate enemy, plaque, without confronting the ultimate enemy, God, and Clute loads the book up with a constant stream of religious imagery – from the Made Minds who, Christlike, ‘became mortal, died of progeria, were reborn into the flesh’ (p. 87) to Freer telling Appleseed ‘It was for this you descended into the flesh’ (p. 312) – to keep the issue clearly before us.

The Harpe is first identified with God when the Insort Geront logo is described as ‘a fiery three-bodied snake emblematic of the trinitarian God Quorum of Harpe’ (p. 159) so the ouroburos also becomes the trinity. Nevertheless, although they are setting out to battle God, it is Freer and his allies who are most identified with religious iconography. Freer, for instance, is not only a ‘Bit of a Lucifer’ (p. 255) – which, presumably, he has to be if he is battling God – but also ‘the saviour of the universe’ (p. 260). Meanwhile, Mamselle and Artor become ‘the Triple Goddess ... and the son’ (p. 328). Finally, Freer and Ferocity become Adam and Eve, their sex being the mechanism that guides them through the Tree of Life that is Klavier (always presented as a yew tree) and begins the war against God. Perhaps we should notice how the Harpe is portrayed, as Cronos eating his sons: this may not be the death of God, but merely the accession of a new generation of godhood.

The world of Story explored by Appleseed is a world of fantastical heroes, a world of Arthur and of Oz, a world ultimately of gods battling for control of the universe. It is not our world and makes no pretence to be. It is, perhaps, the world of science fiction (as Clute’s remark in the review of Patricia Anthony’s novel might suggest); in which case, it is a story about stories about Story. When Vipassana attacks, his scythe (symbol of time?) cuts through ‘another billion nerve endings come together to tell the story of another world. The skein of tiles writhed convulsively, crumbling cartoon-swift into rock dust which was not rock dust but innumerable severed haikus of memory and holy mime, the infinitely sweet attar of a thousand worlds’ (p. 248) – stressing again that story is central, that all in this universe is pantomime. When Freer launches his counter-attack it was ‘Time to end the story of Vipassana’ (p. 268). The book is not about the real world, wherever and whenever that might be, it is about the stories of the world. When Freer falls towards Trencher, ‘stories unfolded in the tile facings which lined the shaft’ (p. 25). It is a book that plunders stories for the sake of story, a book concerned not with the world but with how we imagine the world, a book in love with the richness of the word, that frees the word to evoke as much and as big and as strange as it can rather than slaving the word to the duties of what is. It is a book that celebrates being fantastic, that could not be mimetic.