autoroute 20; salt fish girl

On my way to my grandmother's funeral last Wednesday, somewhere between Montreal and Rimouski, I waded through Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl. Indeed, reading it reminded me in many ways of the Hass review excerpt in the header of this blog: the waters flowing through the text's (post)apocalypse, coupled with its faintly surreal temporal but recognizable social structures, made the experience of reading it through rather like stepping into a(n) (un)familiar element, teeming with bioengineered life.

In working on a response for a class, though, I found that the element was remarkably difficult to sublimate (or condense), to translate into any sort of consistent coherence. At first, I tried to read it in response to an epigraph pulled from Spider Robinson's Telempath, fixating as many of the book's reviewers have on its characterizations of and reliance on smell. Because the response was for a class framed by Greg Garrard's notion of apocalypse as an environmental trope, I was looking at each author's approach to smell as characteristic of either the comic or the tragic mode that Garrard describes. Robinson's text, for those of you who might be unfamiliar with it, describes a post-apocalyptic world whose crisis is entirely dependent on the human sense of smell:

It was early afternoon, and the same sunshine that was warming the forests and dorms and work-zones of Fresh Start, my home, seemed to chill the air here, accentuating the barren emptiness of the ruined city. Silence and desolation were all around me as I walked, bleached bones and crumbling brick. Carlson had been efficient, all right; nearly as efficient as the atomic bomb folks used to be so scared of once. It seemed as though I were in some immense devil's autoclave, that ignored filth and grime but grimly scrubbed out life of any kind….
Carlson had said one word to me that afternoon, and the word was "Hyperosmia."
Within forty-eight hours every man, woman and child left alive on earth possessed a sense of smell approximately a hundred times more efficient than that of any wolf that ever howled.
During those forty-eight hours, a little less than a fifth of the planet's population perished, by whatever means they could devise, and every city in the world spilled its remaining life into the surrounding countryside. The ancient smell-suppressing system of the human brain collapsed under unbearable demand, overloaded and burned out in an instant.
The great complex behemoth called Modern Civilization ground to a halt in a little less than two days.

Until the very end of the novel, it tends toward a tragic conception of good and evil, and Robinson's protagonist follows a familiar heroic narrative arc. But I was primarily interested in how Lai's text, also fixated on genetically modified human smell—in more than one sense—and with a similar geographic garrison structure (though Robinson's is set against the ruins of NYC and Lai's is primarily the Canadian Pacific Northwest), uses both smell and apocalypse in ways more suited to the comic mode.

Durian is one of the more obvious connections to make to smell, as it in many ways characterizes the novel's future protagonist, Miranda. Its redolence of cat piss and pepper, described as such throughout the novel, clings to this girl from birth, and, in ways that I will leave to Lai to describe, ultimately leads to her initial conception through complicated intersections of culture, gender, interspeciality, and sexuality. But it is her bearing of this symptom that makes Miranda a particularly apt protagonist, as her peculiar relationship with it helps to frame the novel itself as a sort of "dreaming disease," which refers to one of the post-apocalypse effects of genetic modification that insinuate themselves into the lives and landscapes of the human communities, a disease, in many senses, of history and cultural memory that is intimately bound up in the (supposedly contracted) particular scents of those afflicted.

This experience of the novel as dream-disease is heightened by its fluidity (and sometimes alien and seemingly deliberately alienating) in chronology and geography, especially as its protagonists are careful to leave questions throughout, especially as to origins and conclusions, weaving a sort of indeterminate cyclicality whose preoccupation is with fragmentation and rebirth, a rebirth which is itself fractional and dynamic. Its unapologetic celebration of the abject, and perhaps also implied criticism of the adherence to a Romantic individual, allows the novel to complicate readers' sympathy with both characters and corporations, landscapes and waterways, and deliberately shifts the naturalization of beauty and the sublime through subtle critiques of cultural assimilation and heteronormativity.

And now, I think I've chattered long enough, so I'll leave you with a taste of Lai's fluid prose that perhaps makes this novel's juxtaposition with Moreau more apt than anticipated:

The sound of footsteps came from around a bend in the corridor. Ian pulled me into a side hallway. Pressed against the wall, I watched another group of Janitors pass, their tired feet scuffing against the floor. In horror I watched their backs as they moved away from us. There were rectangular holes in their uniforms that ran from the tailbone to the base of the neck. The muscle and skin of their backs had been replaced with some kind of transparent silicone composite so that you could see their spines and behind them, their hearts pounding, their livers and kidneys swimming in oceans of blood and gristle. We had studied anatomy at school. I could see that the organs had been shifted, had been carefully arranged like stones in a formal garden, mimicking the asymmetrical aesthetics of nature, but with human intention. (76-77)

yyz, yyc, yyj; melancholy elephants

En route back home from a lightning trip to Toronto, I read bits of several books, but finished first Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants, short (primarily) speculative fiction. I can't promote the title short story enough, but I'm not entirely sure why. There's something about the resolution, perhaps, both of the scene and its players, determination in the face of silent desperation, of probable failure leading to sociocultural death, that appeals to me. It insists earnestly that small victories are essential. That changing huge sweeping behaviours happens not once, but continually, gradually. And that, try as you might (and likely should, since people tend not to learn best second-hand), you can't do much of anything entirely alone. (Here, I would like to offer my condolences to Spider and his family for the passing of his beautiful wife, Jeanne, inspiration for The Stardance Project, and offer this gem rather than my own clumsy, awkward words.)

The second story in the anthology, "Antinomy," claims for its title "the word for the sharpest tragedy a human can feel" (45), aligning urgent contradictions with dramatic suffering and remarking on the strangeness of the word's disuse. It seems, though, to modify the anthology's title, describing the melancholy of the elephants—people of the future, caught by the efficacy of their own record-keeping and resource-devouring in an eminently unsustainable downward spiral of literal and figurative consumption.

"No Renewal," originally published even earlier than the collection's 1984 release (ominous?), is rife with tubercular spasms. I read this one in the Calgary airport, sipping on a gin and tonic as I waited for my transfer, and its fixation on "lasts" was troubling. Conforming to Fredric Jameson's description of the role of SF, the story projects itself into a consequential future where the protagonist owns "for all he knows, the last small farm in Nova Scotia" (126). This farm is conceptually isolated, "bordered on three side by vast mined-out clay pits, gaping concentric cavities whose insides were scraped out and eaten long ago, their husk thrown away to rot." In place of the neighbouring farms of his childhood, Douglas has for neighbours the oddly mixed metaphor of "an apartment hive, packed with antlike swarms of people." The story idolizes rural pastorality, yearning for the "sawmill, rushing streams, hundreds of thousands of trees, and acre after acre of pasture and hay and rich farmland" of yore that perished in the fiction when "the petrochemical industry died of thirst" (126–27). Though Robinson often tackles heavy themes, he rarely leaves the reader in despair, preferring generally to somehow turn his stories hopeful. But the hope in this particular excerpt is a bleak one, and the "birthday present" cantankerous aged Douglas can expect is reminiscent in its blessing of young Smeagol's ill-gotten gift; his expiration date's shadow looms ominously with the end of even artificially subsistence agriculture and, particularly in juxtaposition with the next story, "In The Olden Days," cultural heritages.

The interplay of antinomy and the "Melancholy Elephants" fixation on infinity is the key to uniting the stories, I think: "I think it comes down to a kind of innate failure of mathematical intuition, common to most humans. We tend to confuse any sufficiently high number with infinity" (12), and act accordingly:

Well, it takes a lot less than [ten to the eighty-fifth, "the current best-guess for the number of atoms in the universe"] to equal "infinity" in most minds. For millions of years we looked at the ocean and said, "That is infinite. It will accept our garbage and waste forever." We looked at the sky and said, "That is infinite: it will hold an infinite amount of smoke." We like the idea of infinity. A problem with infinity in it is easily solved. How long can you pollute a planet infinitely large? Easy: forever. Stop thinking. (12)

So now what? 25 years later, we're still fixated on the infinite, even though we're running out of all sorts of things, including the hydrogen mined for the kids' balloons at Victoria's World Partnership Walk (and, according to one earnest ten-year-old, the turtles who will eat said balloons if released by his younger brother). While some of the individual stories in this collection refute Robinson's tendency toward hope, the tales fit, one way or another, into an arching narrative of extinctions, of creativity, of ways and forms of life, and to the hopefulness of enlightened sharing. His characters mature through the textual bildungsroman to marital, sexual maturity. By honing and focusing his earlier characters, many of whom have to forced from their self-absorption by the epiphanies in their mini-narratives, to the eminently adult "High Infidelity" and finally the phoenix of "Rubber Soul" as a cultural maturing and rebirth. It is important to the growth of the elephants that they strive for dynamism; even the progressive tendency of the bildungsroman is challenged by the non-sequiturs, stories like "The Chronic Offender" that resist a simplicity of development and the framing narratives of "Melancholy Elephants" and "Antinomy" with their profound anxieties. Extinctions, the stories earnestly confide, are complicated—and unbelievably important.

Today's focus on extinctions inadvertently but quite conveniently segues with the topics of my next posts, Terry Glavin's Waiting for the Macaws and other stories from the age of extinctions and Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Reading these three texts concurrently, especially coming out of Don Gayton, certainly informed my reception of each. Now, how to reconcile these looming extinctions with drinking imported gin suspended in an airport, waiting for my next flight?

Stay tuned.