Hello.

I don't know why I expect to be so productive in spring. For a variety of reasons, it's the worst season to require things of myself beyond work and family life and taking care of myself.

I also ended up in a standoff with my mind in April where it refused to write the essay on the Cemeteries of Amalo trilogy I had planned to write even though I really want to and mostly know what I'm going to discuss.

What solved this standoff was spending the second weekend of May revising 11 bookmarks, the novella I wrote at the end of 2025. It went quickly and well, and I can now say for certain that I will be publishing it. It needs another couple of revision passes then proofreading and a cover and more proofreading, but the changes I made in the first revision successfully resolved what about it I thought was not quite right/there.

All this means that even though I'm not as far along here at the end of May as I thought I should be back at the end of March, I have made progress, including writing more on the Cemeteries of Amalo essay.

If there's a lesson in all this, and maybe it only applies to me, it's that it's okay to switch projects so long as what I'm switching among have a real chance to be completed in the near(ish) future.

Before I move on to the actual topics of this newsletter, I should mention that I will be attending 4th Street Fantasy, which takes place in a hotel just west of Minneapolis June 19-21. If you're going to be there, please drop me a line whm@wmhenrymorris.com or come up and say hello at the con. Please also understand that while I have a good memory for faces, I'm terrible at remembering the names that go with those faces, so if you notice me glancing at your con badge, it's not that I don't know who you are and never think about you, it's that my memory refuses to surface your name.

Now on to the main show!

On Narratology and SF&F

I'm halfway through Mieke Bal's Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. I've had a fascination with narrative theory ever since I took a comp lit seminar on it that applied the study of various theories to feminist SF and experimental fiction. That seminar, and especially reading The Left Hand of Darkness for it, is also how I got back into reading SF&F after mostly reading lit fic during my college years.

Sadly, Narratology wasn't on our syllabus. I can kind of see why: its structuralist approach was already out-of-date when it was published in 1985 (and Bal acknowledges this), and its difficulty would have eaten up several weeks worth of class sessions. But hey, it's never too late to fill in gaps, right?

I don't have anything substantial to say about it just yet: the vocabulary it introduces requires some precise definitions that would make it difficult to explain in brief to those who aren't familiar with narrative studies (and Bal's work specifically), and so far it seems like it's one of those books I'm going to need to read through once and then go back through one more time for anything to really stick.

But I will tease you all with one passage I found interesting.

In her preliminary remarks to the first chapter "Fabula: Elements," Bal discusses the structuralist work on trying to find universal models of narrative and specifically the idea that there's a "structural correspondence" between what characters experience in storytelling and what people experience in real life, and that there would have to be such correspondence for people to find any sort of meaning in narratives.

She notes two arguments made against that type of "homology" (and specifically Claude Bremond's work on it) and dismisses them as misunderstanding the limits placed on such homology by those advocating for studying the structural correspondence between narratives and reality. Put simply: no one, and especially not Bremond, is arguing that they're exactly the same—only that there are similarities.

More specifically, she writes:

"Another objection to postulating the above homology is that, in certain types of narrative texts — for example, fantastic, absurd, or experimental — such a homology is absent; in fact, these texts are characterized by their denial or distortion of the logic of reality. Apart from the (quantitatively) marginal position of such texts, this objection can be countered with the argument that readers, intentionally or not, search for a logical line in such a text. They spend a great amount of energy in this search, and, if necessary, they introduce such a line themselves. No matter how absurd, tangled, or unreal a text may be, readers will tend to regard what they consider 'normal' as a criterion by which they can give meaning to the text" (12).

I think Bal is correct in that the existence of the fantastic isn't an objection to homology and that readers of such texts will search for a "logical line."

However, I don't think you can now call such texts marginal (if you ever could). And I think that what I see as the search for "a logical line" in the texts of the fantastic likely doesn't proceed as precisely as Bal would see it as proceeding with those readers who have developed certain protocols for reading SF&F. There can be different, varying logics and lines when you read the fantastic.

One of the things I often find frustrating with some of the television and film critics whose reviews I read and podcasts I listen to is that they often have limited story protocols when it comes to SF&F. Elements they don't understand or find weird or obtuse or far-fetched would all be quite clear and much more interesting if they had stronger protocols for approaching the fantastic.

The reverse is also true: other cultural commentators are too heavily invested in considering SF&F television and film through the lens of franchise and (a limited sense of) genre. They confine works to the grounds of their perception of the ideal expression of the genre franchise rather than being willing for the works to gesture at correspondences with reality or to meld in approaches from other genres and modes of storytelling/filmmaking.

This happens with written SF&F work as well, but there I more often am frustrated that literary realism and genre are positioned against each other, as if one form was superior to the other in terms of what fiction is capable of (and what it should be attempting). At the same time, the ecumenical approach doesn't quite satisfy either. While I believe that, yes, all literature is to some extent metaphor and thus of the fantastic (and about the human experience) and that all fantastical worldbuilding is about the present (rather than the future or the past), acknowledging that accomplishes nothing without examining how specific works, authors, genres enter the field of narrative. That's like pointing out that literary realism is trying to be mimetic but will always fail because true mimesis isn't possible. Okay, sure, yes, of course, but then what?

To put it another way — and here is where I think it could be interesting to dig deeper into the structuralist terms and approach Bal lays out in the rest of the book and apply it to SF&F — if we grant that the readers of SF&F and experimental fiction still attempt to find a logical line in the works they approach (and I do), why do they do so (expend such "a great amount of energy"); how do they go about doing so; how is that different from readers who are reading only for realism; and what do they do when their attempts fail (and, boy, has it become abundantly clear that there are failures, both of the texts and some readers [mis]readings)?

And beyond those larger questions: do genres differ in the way they emphasize/work with the narratological elements (events, actors, time, location) that Bal lays out in the rest of her book?

Certainly, all of the classic texts attempting to define SF&F as a genre (your Wolfes, Atteberys, and Mendlesohns) look to do some of this work. But I'm intrigued by the idea of specifically and granularly colliding genre with narrative theory, and especially Narratology.

As always, your thoughts and recommendations on further reading are quite welcome!

On some recent reading and chasing a specific reading experience

I'm probably getting to the point where I am ready to (and should) stop chasing the feeling I get from reading the work of Han Kang and Renee Gladman, which I have now realized I've been doing since towards the end of last year. That has meant from early March until now reading:

• The Disappearing Act by Maria Stepanova (the key with this short novel is to view all the strands of it as part of one knotted thing, to not pull out the threads that are clearly about Russia or about being a novelist or the childhood memories and tales and also to not read it as allegory)
• The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen (brutal, precise, horrible [in a Gatsbyesque the rich are different way] but also sort of refreshing in comparison to modern fiction in the sentences Bowen is willing to try in order to express something)
• The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza (cryptic, troubling, mesmerizing, the outbursts of odd, grotesque sexuality shouldn't have been surprising due to the earlier invocations of Little Red Riding Hood even though the forms they take are deeply strange)
• Lilli is Crying by Hélène Bessette (wrenching but poetic [in several ways], both predictable and weird and doing interesting things with narrative voice and time)
• Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns (grim yet hilarious and oddly touching with some of the best nature writing I've read in awhile)

I found every work on the list above to be very good to excellent, and yet I can't really recommend them unless you personally find their descriptions super interesting: they're all difficult reads even if their short lengths and compelling voices/tones make them easy to keep reading.

It is precisely that intensity, the emotional jaggedness, that made them valuable reads for me even if none quite hit like the work of Han Kang and Renee Gladman did for me last year. But that's also why it's probably time to put the chase on pause. The single-minded pursuit of a feeling is narrowing and a steady stream of exquisite, odd dishes may blow out your taste buds. So it's time for less chasing and more exploring and a more varied diet of fiction.

That doesn't mean I won't stay on the look out for these kind of works. In fact, if you have recommendations, please send them to me!

More on Jameson's seminar on Aesthetic Theory

After a bit of a pause, I've made more progress with my slow wade through Frederic Jameson's Seminar on Aesthetic Theory: Mimesis, Expression, Construction.

I don't have a lot to say about Lectures 9, 10, and 11, but I do have a passage to share. This is from Lecture 10. Jameson has been discussing how Adorno says the main aesthetic categories (specifically, construction and expression) aren't sufficient to talk about a work of art, but that you also can't just ignore them. He says:

"So, the categories survive... [Chair-back creaks] but what's underscored by the movement of these categories is their radical insufficiency. Mm-hmm. And so, where the movement seems to aim towards the elimination of these categories, in fact they have to be preserved in order for the ideas to have some content. And this is exactly what he says about the work of art. The good work of art can too successfully overcome all of these oppositions — because if it doesn't, it is just mush. It has to keep the traces of these categories; it has to keep what he calls their articulation and... [Mumbles indistinctly]" (316).

I wish the end of that sentence had been preserved. And I should provide the context that this part of the lecture is about how Adorno's thinking is often fragmentary and made up of contradictions, but that also, for Adorno, the engagement of such antinomies is the only way you can do real thinking.

But why I quote this passage here is less to reproduce Jameson's articulation of Adorno's mode of thinking about aesthetics, and more to point at this word "mush" and the idea of art working to not be mush, of being able to incorporate a variety of oppositional categories, leaving traces of them, but becoming something more than rather than collapsing into them or just pointing them out and saying "see! contradiction!", which also gets at what I wrote about Narratology and SF&F above, I suppose, and leads me to posit this:

1. No individual work can fully transcend or break genre
2. No individual work that isn't attempting to transcend or break or at least push at genre can escape being mush (even if it's good mush)
3. Mashing genres together leads to mush unless there are enough traces of their antinomies, the ways in which they are in opposition to each other, to create enough tension to keep their collision from deflating or flying apart
4. Mashing literary realism and the fantastic together requires a paradoxical belief that both modes hold real artistic and explanatory power and aiming for that contradiction rather than using one as seasoning for the other

I don't know if this set of maxims fully holds up, but it does begin to articulate why I find much of the language used around ambitious works of genre fiction frustrating, even, and especially, when applied to those I find interesting.

I guess, once again, there's no denying that this is my great theme: it really does all go back to wanting to paint genre (and sometimes lit fic) into a corner.

See you in July!