Reality by Other Means. James Morrow

their conflicting allegiances,” the narrator goes on to note, “the vigilantes stood united in their realization that André Pollifex, sane scientist, was about to unleash a reign of enlightenment on Greenbriar. They were having none of it.” The stereotypical mad scientist, in other words, is seen as mad simply by virtue of his being sane, and Morrow uses the familiar figure as a way of skewering no less than six different ideological positions in one sentence. As I mentioned earlier, uncritical dogma, no matter what its ideology, is like catnip to Morrow’s imagination.

      Playing with such clichés, conventions, and rhetorical reversals is one of the key techniques by which the author consistently reminds us that we are in a James Morrow tale, no matter how familiar its outward lineaments may at first appear. One of the most elegantly constructed stories here, “Arms and the Woman,” which revisits Helen of Troy, is packed with such techniques. Its very opening line is a reversed cliché: “What did you do in the war, Mommy?” “Mommy” is Helen herself, telling her children her own version of the Trojan War in a frame-tale (another technique that Morrow often uses). Appropriately enough, Morrow sprinkles the story with Homeric epithets — “horse-loving Thebaios,” “brainy Panthoos, mighty Paris, invincible Hector” — but soon the epithets themselves go wonky and anachronistic, as poor “slug-witted Ajax” becomes “slow-synapsed Ajax.” When we first meet Helen and Paris, they are a bickering middle-aged couple who might as well be in a Howard Hawks comedy. Helen, stuck at home, keeps trying to find out what the war is about, while Paris keeps telling her “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.” He complains about her weight and graying hair and suggests that, with a combination of ox blood and river silt, “You can dye your silver hairs back to auburn. A Grecian formula.” Then, before taking her to bed, he slips on “a sheep-gut condom, the brand with the plumed and helmeted soldier on the box.”

      Do such pointed and punning allusions to contemporary consumer products yank us out of the classical mise-en-scène in which we thought this story was located? Of course they do: they are reminders that we are in Morrow-space, as are such deliberately self-referential lines as Paris later saying “I’m sorry I’ve been so judgmental” or Helen herself, after figuring out a way to end the war, described as “a face to sheathe a thousand swords.” But the most important use of such self-referential anachronisms comes near the story’s moral center, after the “slow-synapsed Ajax” expresses doubt as to why the war should continue after Helen has volunteered to return to her husband. “Because we’re kicking off Western Civilization here, that’s why,” responds an outraged Panthoos. “The longer we can keep this affair going — the longer we can sustain such an ambiguous enterprise — the more valuable and significant it becomes.” “By rising to this rare and precious occasion,” adds Nestor, “we shall open the way for wars of religion, wars of manifest destiny — any equivocal cause you care to name.” The story, it turns out, recasts the most famous war of classical antiquity as a deliberate boondoggle born of masculinist fantasies of self-esteem — the invention of the idea of war itself — with Helen, taking charge of her own destiny, as the spoiler. It is arguably the most overtly feminist tale in this book, even without mentioning Helen’s confrontation with the automaton of her younger self, built to replace her on the parapets as motivation for the soldiers, or her retirement to Lesbos, whose economy involves trading olives in order to import “over a thousand liters of frozen semen annually” — thus accounting for the children who are listening to the story in the frame-tale. It’s an historical fantasia, but nearly becomes science fiction when it needs to. Genre, for Morrow, is at best a suggestion.

      Frame-tales, journal entries, and false documents are narrative techniques common both to Morrow and to earlier science fiction. In “Spinoza’s Golem,” for example, the fictional Spinoza’s own account of building a golem is framed by a contemporary museum curator’s efforts to rediscover it, while “Lady Witherspoon’s Solution,” set in a post-Darwinian Victorian England, is another frame-tale with a distinctly feminist undercurrent. A scientific expedition in the Indian Ocean comes across a remote island populated by what the captain concludes to be a race of peaceful Neanderthals, apparently spared the “normal pressures that, by the theories of Mr. Darwin, tend to drive a race towards either oblivion or adaptive transmutation.” But there are, curiously, no females among the tribe. Befriending one of its members, the captain is led to the grave of an Englishwoman, Kitty Glover, and shown her journal, which reveals a different sort of tale altogether. Kitty, well born but reduced to the workhouse, comes under the tutelage of the eponymous Lady Witherspoon, whose “Hampstead Ladies Croquet Club and Benevolent Society” disguises a far darker secret. In terms of literary dissonance, the story begins as a persuasive redaction of the lost-race tale, segues into a Dickensian fable of redemption and charity, and then turns — at least for a moment — into a bizarre Victorian rendition of something like Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, as Lady Witherspoon stages periodic fight-to-the-death battles between men — most richly deserving a stern comeuppance — who have been “devolved” through the mysterious counter-evolutionary serum “Infusion D.” These are the creatures who, when their usefulness to Witherspoon’s entertainments has been exhausted, are shipped off to the Indian Ocean to form what appeared to be the Neanderthal society in the framing story. When Lady Witherspoon asks her protégé if she would agree that “there is something profoundly unwell about the [male] gender as a whole, a demon impulse that inclines men to inflict physical harm on their fellow beings, women particularly,” Kitty responds, “I have suffered the slings of male entitlement,” among which, clearly, is sexual assault.

      Given stories like these, it should hardly be surprising that Morrow’s trenchant skewering of all forms of intolerant or merely muddled thinking — together with his erudition concerning philosophy, history, science, and even those bad movies — have made him a favorite among liberal intellectuals and academics. At the same time, however, he occasionally reminds us that he is hardly pandering to our comfort zones, and that herding behavior is not restricted to Victorian patriarchs, religious fundamentalists, or sensationalist media. “Fixing the Abyss,” perhaps the most wildly freewheeling tale here in terms of its plethora of satirical targets, begins with knowledgeable allusions to Martin Heidegger and Jean Baudrillard, then quickly focuses on the potentially dire consequences of academic groupthink. When a mysterious and growing chasm opens on the Penn State campus, threatening all of central Pennsylvania, the narrator suggests that the causes include a resurgence in fundamentalist thinking, a revived international arms race, “the institutionalization of clerical rape, and the aestheticization of suicide bombing” — but argues that the immediate trigger was a lecture by a comparative literature professor who believes that “morality, truth, beauty, and knowledge are illusory notions at best, overthrown in the previous century by perspectivism, relativism, hermeneutics, and France.” “It’s all very well for a scorched-earth, skepticism-squared ethos to enrapture Ivy League humanities departments,” the narrator (the horror-film director) muses, “but when épistémologie noire comes to America’s land-grant universities, we know we’re all in a lot of trouble.”

      Almost a commonplace in science fiction criticism is the idea of “literalization of metaphor,” probably first suggested by Samuel R. Delany and later adopted by such equally distinguished writers and critics as Ursula K. Le Guin, in which a figure of speech that would be read as metaphorical in normal discourse can be a statement of literal fact in a science fiction text (one of Le Guin’s examples is “I’m just not human until I’ve had my coffee”). In reality, it’s almost impossible to find examples of such sentences in science fiction narratives, and one could as easily argue that any form of fantastic literature does the same thing (“He’s a nice guy during the day, but a beast at night” could apply to any number of werewolf tales). In Morrow’s fiction, though, we can actually see something like this literalization happening. The epigraph for “Fixing the Abyss” is a quotation from Heidegger: “Language speaks. If we let ourselves fall into the abyss denoted by this sentence, we do not go tumbling into emptiness. We fall upward, to a height. Its loftiness opens up a depth.” In the world of the story, that abyss becomes quite literal, and the equally literal ways in which the world responds to it grow increasingly absurd. If the rift was caused by a kind of critical mass of nihilism, might it not be neutralized, as chemical compounds can neutralize each other, by inundating it with sentimentality? So the first strategy