Harlan Ellison, thoughts?

[j d worthington]

This may be a fundamental difference in orientation, as I have no belief in an afterlife, the concept of sin (wrongdoing, yes; sin, with its implications, no), etc.... but, while I can appreciate what Dante was doing, and that he did it with great skill and artistry... to me it still showed an imagination which delighted in visions of horrific tortures and inhumanity toward one's fellow man. The fact that these torments were symbolically fitting for the particular transgression simply, to me, indicates how twisted and hateful the religious views behind them are. On top of which, there are a number of things which are punished eternally in such a view, which are, at most, actions with extremely limited amounts of harm attached to them; the only excuse for such torture is a particularly unconvincing one: that a particular deity has claimed them to be worthy of eternal punishment. Sorry, but that, to me, is a darned sight more evil than anything any of the sinners in Dante's vision could possibly have done.

On the other hand, in Ellison's story, what we have are both victims and perpetrators; as representatives of their societies, which created this monstrosity by their callousness and rejection of their humanity, they, too, bear responsibility for its existence and actions. Both Ted and AM say as much in different parts of the story, in different ways. In a very real sense, they constructed their own hell by rejecting their better natures (as did the rest of humanity, when it "spent [its] time badly", as the story has it, playing its genocidal games rather than cherishing and nurturing each other and attempting to make our noblest dreams come true.

So yes, while they are still alive, rather than spirits, they are not simply victims suffering needlessly. They are, in a very substantive sense, representative of us all, as a whole, and individually, when we too succumb to the easy out and practice our little (or sometimes big) inhumanities and injustices. The difference is that AM has been given the power to do things we have not yet gained the power to do, but is nonetheless the child of our own tendency to cruelty of invention. The sadism is no more than one sees with the biblical god; it is simply more modern in tone... and is the child of our own sadistic nature. Note that this does not mean our nature is entirely one way or the other, but that this is within us, just as the self-sacrifice Ted practices at the end is, as well.

It is a horrifying vision, it is intended to repulse, to be a thing we reject, because in moving back from that, we come a little closer to realize how easily we can construct such a hell, how damnably easy it is for us to do so, and how often we dance on that brink (as we are doing now with the increasingly inhumane approach we are seeing from the extreme right and left... which are, on the right, becoming, frighteningly, more and more centrist, it seems); by rejecting this option, we recover a little of our humanity, a smidgeon of our sanity, and make the possibility of this sort of hell just the tiniest bit more remote.

I'm afraid that I see this as a very moral story, in the end; the sensationalism, to me, by no means comes across as the sort of shallow thing which it seems to you; it has as much weight, in a secularist mode if you will, as Dante's vision does in a religious one. But whereas Dante, for all the dogma concerning "free will", ultimately gives none of his characters that benefit, Ellison uses a future vision to urge the use of a will to change for the better before we do make such a hell of this little plot of ground which is our home.

You tell of rereading "I Have No Mouth" and changing an initially negative assessment of it, and perhaps I will too. But let me address this Dantean point.

Dante and Ellison describe horrific scenes. However, an important difference is that, in the case of Dante, most, at least, of the torments of the damned are images of what a specific sin is. For example, Paolo and Francesca are endlessly whirled through space. But that is what their sin (lust) is like, namely a culpable yielding of oneself to swirling, whirling passion when one ought to have retained self-mastery and not submitted to the temptation. Ellison's humans are whirled along too, but there it's just something the sadistic computer does to them. It's almost like something you'd see in a movie with CGI effects and say "Cool!"

Another important difference is that in Ellison's stories we readers are being treated to several pages of inventive descriptions of victims being tortured.

But in Dante the sufferers are not victims. They are the shades of people who had exercised their free will, their moral responsibility, to choose evil. Having chosen evil, they have rejected the good. Now, in hell, they have, and basically are, what they chose. In our earthly lives we choose wrong things but often much of the world goes on working pretty well for us, mercifully. The sun still rises for Hitler, the rain still falls and makes the crops grow in Nazi Germany, here and there ordinary decencies survive, bread is still baked and tastes good when the Nazis are hungry, and so on. In hell the good things have fallen away and all that's left is what the sinner chose -- and this or that is what he chose.

And they are shades, not people. For them no further choices will ever be possible. Now here is where Ellison does make use of his characters, or one of them, as a moral agent at the end of the story.

At any rate, since I mentioned Dante in the first place, I thought it would be appropriate to refine the comment a little.

 

[Extollager]

JD, it's been my privilege to teach some of the greatest literary works of all time. But I've never taught the Divine Comedy. I thank you for helping me to see how it would likely strike some of my students, if I ever did. I understand the poem differently, as do writers I have read who wrote about it (Singleton, Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, Auerbach, &c), so it would be easy for me to underestimate the moral repugnance some student readers might feel based on their reading and what they brought to it.

I'm reading "Jeffty Is Five" this evening, by the way.

 

[Extollager]

I wrote "it would be easy for me to underestimate the moral repugnance some student readers might feel based on their reading and what they brought to it."

JD, if that sounded condescending, I apologize; I just meant my remark at face value, that I could have students (if I ever taught Inferno) -- who could be good readers -- whom the book would strike as morally repugnant.

Incidentally I don't like the very common practice of college teachers who teach Inferno and not the rest. I think offhand that the whole Comedy should be taught or else an abridgement, perhaps, of the whole work. Inferno can be read as a stand-alone work, but that is not what Dante intended and I think one must misinterpret it somewhat without the other two.

 

[Extollager]

The ending of "Jeffty" wasn't clear to me. Did the radio fall into the bathtub?

 

[j d worthington]

Short answer: I would say yes. The question is: How, and why? That, I think, is the crux of the matter.

And no, it wasn't condescending; at least, I don't take it as such. I think, however, I should clarify a few things. My objections to the horrors of The Inferno are on an ethical basis, not an artistis one. I would argue that it (and the Divine Comedy as a whole) is among the greatest poems ever written. It expresses, with consummate artistry, a very real aspect of the human condition. That this aspect is repulsive and horrendous to many with a secular approach is another matter altogether. As art, it is a magnificent work. As a moral or ethical statement, it is barbaric and vile, and can only be excused if one views it through a specific set of religious glasses -- not religious in the general sense, but a very narrow and definite set of axioms which themselves are distinctly open to question. In any other context, what the Inferno (and, to a lesser extent, Purgatorio) presents as morality or justice would simply be inexcusable, just as the idea of infinite punishment for a finite crime (or a crime with finite repercussions) would, taken out of the context of religious apologetics, be seen as an obscene abuse of authority.

So, yes, you likely would have trouble selling it to many of your students. This is not to say that I think it shouldn't be taught, and taught as one of the supreme achievements of human art... simply that there are going to be some serious questions raised which will need careful discussion. (And yes, I agree with you -- it should be taught in context as part of the whole. Though I find the Paradiso a bit numbing after a while -- not enough contrast for my taste -- it is nonetheless an exceptional work, and much of it is simply exquisite. I highly recommend Dante's great work to anyone who cares about literature. I suppose the problem is that, in order to do something like this justice, one would need to teach an entire course on it alone....)

 

[J-Sun]

Incidentally I don't like the very common practice of college teachers who teach Inferno and not the rest. I think offhand that the whole Comedy should be taught or else an abridgement, perhaps, of the whole work. Inferno can be read as a stand-alone work, but that is not what Dante intended and I think one must misinterpret it somewhat without the other two.

Absolutely agreed. I kind of have a similar reaction to j.d. regarding some of the torments inflicted in the first couple of books (even Purgatorio's no walk in the park) but the work is a poetic cathedral. The numerologically-based architecture of the whole (and the idea that it's not just torture and agony but that there's a vast set of circles/spheres covering a spectrum of dark and light, cold and warm, hate and love, is amazing. The theology of the trinity is one thing, but the poetic representation from the terza rima to the three books and so on, is brilliant. The idea of reading just the one book is appalling. Like going into a third of a cathedral and having it collapse on you. Lots of blood and agony and senseless, shapeless rubble.

That's how I'd "sell it" to students, I think - as an architectural expression - regardless of the world-view, the way it virtually encapsulates the middle ages in 100 cantos is almost - heh - miraculous. The internals have intrinsic historical interest but I don't think you could sell those as anything else.

For some reason, I always think of Dante and Spinoza together in that Spinoza takes geometry and philosophy while Dante takes numerology and poetry but both create something sort of structurally amazing to read regardless of axioms or actual content.

Anyway - back on topic, I'd agree that, while Ellison often brings a nuclear missile to a knife fight, he isn't about gratuitous relish but has a moral purpose - arguably too much of one in cases.

(But all this is with the caveat that, excepting a stray story, I haven't read Dantellison - or Spinoza - in a long long time.)

 

[Extollager]

Short answer: I would say yes. The question is: How, and why? That, I think, is the crux of the matter.

I'm not often puzzled by the end of a story, but I was with this one.

Everything seemed to work, in the sense that I felt I understood what Ellison meant as well as understood the story he was telling, till the part in which Jeffty is severely beaten. At first this seemed an intrusion of (that word again) gratuitous nastiness -- so extreme as to jolt one into suspending attention to the story, and return one to thinking about Harlan Ellison's problem of being so Harlan. However it might be defensible artistically. I proceeded with the story and then there's that puzzle at the end. I understand that authors may legitimately, for artistic purposes of one sort or another, leave something unclear, but I didn't understand what those purposes would be. Presumably it's an accident; Jeffty did not reason: "The joy has gone out of my life, so I am going to kill myself by dropping an electric device into the bathwater with me"; that would not be plausible for any five-year-old and certainly not for this one. OK, so why the accident? It doesn't seem to be needed as a way to resolve the plot, since we already understand that the original Jeffty-world is lost -- the description of Jeffty at the hardware store is very good. So if the accident isn't justified for purpose of character or plot, is it a bit of gratuitous tragedy to underscore the idea that we live in an unfeeling universe? But how has that been a theme of the story so far? That Jeffty was always doomed to have to deal with the drab facts of a meaningless universe sooner or later and leave behind his happy childhood? But he was already bereft of that; he would have had to deal with a "new" world without such joys. So is the idea that the universe acted "mercifully" in taking his little life before he had to walk more than a few steps in the new drab existence before him?

I don't seem to get it.....

If this were just a mediocre bit of fantasy-sf, of course it wouldn't be worth thinking about. I'm taking it that in this one Ellison is legitimately aspiring to something more and so the story should reward our probing.

I do have a little bit of a question about whether he's one of those writers who oscillates between excessive nastiness and sentimentality. ("'Repent, Harlequin!'" could be criticized on the latter count, I think, like some Bradbury stories.) But let's defer discussion of that topic till we've thrashed out "Jeffty" more.

I'm enjoying these discussions for the most part.

 

[j d worthington]

Keep in mind two things: Jeffty's mother has put him in the bath, and the narrator's comment: "But she love him, still, a little bit, even after all those years. I can't hate them: they only wanted to live in the present world again. That isn't such a terrible thing."

Doesn't that sound, just a little, like excusing, even collusion after the fact? I don't think his death was an accident.....

 

[Extollager]

Brrr! I see what you mean, JD.

I read "One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty" -- this doesn't seem to be one of the Ellison stories that gets mentioned often (though I found it in a best-sf annual). It seemed a very fine story to me, quietly offering some possible disturbing ironies and inviting consideration of some perennial human situations (e.g. theme of self-love).

 

[j d worthington]

It is a very fine story, and there is an enormous amount of very personal stuff in that one, something which came out even more in the adaptation of the story for the Twilight Zone revival of the 1980s. Ellison tells a story about this in one of his speeches, included in a volume of On the Road with Harlan Ellison... and even in telling the story, he has to fight back the tears, as it put him right back to a very poignant moment with his father, who died of a heart attack when Ellison was still quite young. (And he is right; while by no means identical, there was a strong resemblance between Lois Laverne Ellison and Brian Donlevy.)

By the way, I think that is one of the things which makes "Jeffty" such a complex story emotionally: it raises some very difficult questions about how we view innocence, how we both idealize and demonize it; and the complex motivations for our actions. I would agree that, even with decades of being essentially trapped in that situation, not being able to live anything like a normal life, she did still love him, at least enough to know that Jeffty (who is, after all, the very essence of childhood innocence) couldn't survive the situation; there might be something or someone which did, but the person known as Jeffty simply couldn't. It would destroy him completely, and she couldn't allow that, either. At the same time, it released them from their own trap, too... making it a particularly uncomfortable resolution all around.

 

[Extollager]

It is a very fine story, and there is an enormous amount of very personal stuff in that one, something which came out even more in the adaptation of the story for the Twilight Zone revival of the 1980s. Ellison tells a story about this in one of his speeches, included in a volume of On the Road with Harlan Ellison... and even in telling the story, he has to fight back the tears, as it put him right back to a very poignant moment with his father, who died of a heart attack when Ellison was still quite young.

That's interesting. Of course it doesn't relate closely to the issue of the artistic value of the story in itself, any more than Alan Garner's interesting remarks, in his "Inner Time" speech, about his sudden instance of going ballistic during the filming of his Owl Service has to do with the value of the novel (an excellent one, btw, and perhaps his last excellent novel). (I'm sure you'd basically agree.) To me, the main point about the personal element in "One Life" would be that Ellison could handle personal material like that without it compromising the story as an independent literary work.

I'd never thought of Garner and Ellison together before, but there might well be some affinities worth pursuing as well as obvious and non-obvious differences.... Both worked in genres (magazine sf; YA lit) usually not thought of, at the time, as venues for major literary endeavor; both eventually engaged in literary experimentation that departed from genre conventions and that is still somewhat a matter of debate (I'm thinking, in Garner's case especially, of Red Shift); both have won a lot of acclaim (fortunately for me, I began to read Garner around 1969, when he was not a literary lion) awareness of which can be an issue for prospective readers ... and so on.

 

[Extollager]

My fifth Harlan story in this current round of readings was "The Deathbird." It seems there is too much going on in the story for me to process it all on one reading -- e.g. why the story is named for an orbiting space ship that has become a real bird (?) by the end. For now, I'll say that the story appears to be a working-out in the form of the sf/fantasy genre(s) of a variation on Gnosticism -- itself not a monolithic thing but a swarm of speculative religious ideas. Of course, Harlan goes the Gnostics one better; where some of them held that the quote Old Testament God unquote was an impostor and the quote New Testament God unquote was the real God, access to whom was possible for an elite possessing a divine spark, Ellison's take is apparently that any quote God unquote is an impostor and the messiah is the oft-reincarnated hero, "Adam," who defeats him. So my first take on the story is that it was interesting as an inventive re-purposing of Gnostic myth; don't know as I'd say it was a lot more than that.

 

[Extollager]

PS I seem to have just two Harlan Ellison stories left (have I mentioned it's a small library?): "The Beast That Shouted..." and "With Virgil Oddum at the East Pole." The stories I've been reading were taken from a thick book edited (with terrible introductions) by Asimov, The Hugo Winners, and several volumes of The 19-- Annual World's Best SF. If nothing else, you get an idea of what someone using just this library might be able to read by HE and what impressions such a reader might derive from this reading! I make it a total of seven stories. I might have missed a couple or so.

 

[j d worthington]

There were several volumes of the Hugo Winners series... five or so, if memory serves, before Asimov's death, after which someone else (Connie Willis?) took over editing them. Ike's intros were deliberately cornball, and can be very annoying to many; sort of a Bob Hope of sf speech, if you can imagine such a thing....

Other Ellison stories were included in later volumes (III and on), as he has won quite a few of the things, just as he won numerous Nebulas, etc.

 

[Fried Egg]

I must admit that my reaction to the stories I am reading is mixed. While "At the Mouse Circus" I found to cryptic, "Paingod" I felt way to obvious and far less profound that the author seemed to think it was. On the other hand, I thought "Ernest and the Machine God" and "Rock God" were both brilliant.

 

[Extollager]

Last night, as I finished the fine Ellison story "With Virgil Oddum at the East Pole," I thought it was remarkably akin to (of all things) J. R. R. Tolkien's "Leaf by Niggle." Both deal with two characters in a story with themes of penitence or purgation (not the same, but related) and art.

My impression is that many people who like Tolkien have never read "Leaf by Niggle," and some have never heard of it. It's tucked into The Tolkien Reader as a reprint of Tree and Leaf. It's sometimes assumed to be an exemplum of the theory of Faërie indicated by "On Fairy-Stories," but "Smith of Wootton Major" works better in that context.

Anyway, it would be interesting to see if anyone sees what I mean about the Ellison and Tolkien stories without my developing the point; and for that matter, it would be interesting to hear from people who have actually read "Leaf by Niggle"!

 

[j d worthington]

I must admit that my reaction to the stories I am reading is mixed. While "At the Mouse Circus" I found to cryptic, "Paingod" I felt way to obvious and far less profound that the author seemed to think it was. On the other hand, I thought "Ernest and the Machine God" and "Rock God" were both brilliant.

I would agree on "At the Mouse Circus", and it isn't surprising that it came at the height of the "New Wave" of experiment. An interesting, but rather obscure story, certainly for Ellison. "Paingod" was a rather earlier story, originally published (in slightly different form) in Fantastic in 1964. While I have a fondness for the story due to some of its descriptive elements and imagery, I would agree that it is, aesthetically speaking, rather too obvious. (I get the feeling, though he has never specifically said so, that Ellison has also felt that way about it in the years since. Certainly Moorcock, in his preface to The Fantasies of Harlan Ellison, lodges the same complaint against it.)

Interesting that you should say that about "Ernest and the Machine God". While both certainly have their merits, I find them both to be among his lesser works -- and "Rock God" was not, originally, intended as a prose story at all, but as material for a comic book of the period; when that did not occur, he then recast it as prose not (I think) entirely successfully. Still, again, there is some fine imagery and a lot of passion in the story, which continues to make it an interesting read.

Last night, as I finished the fine Ellison story "With Virgil Oddum at the East Pole," I thought it was remarkably akin to (of all things) J. R. R. Tolkien's "Leaf by Niggle." Both deal with two characters in a story with themes of penitence or purgation (not the same, but related) and art.

My impression is that many people who like Tolkien have never read "Leaf by Niggle," and some have never heard of it. It's tucked into The Tolkien Reader as a reprint of Tree and Leaf. It's sometimes assumed to be an exemplum of the theory of Faërie indicated by "On Fairy-Stories," but "Smith of Wootton Major" works better in that context.

Anyway, it would be interesting to see if anyone sees what I mean about the Ellison and Tolkien stories without my developing the point; and for that matter, it would be interesting to hear from people who have actually read "Leaf by Niggle"!

Well, I've read "Leaf by Niggle", more than once, and it is a piece which had to grow on me somewhat. It has been quite a long time since I read "Virgil Oddum"... not since I read the book in which it first appeared, Medea: Harlan's World, a rather odd piece which presents much of the material from a gathering of different writers contributing to the development of an alien planet about the process of creating such a fictional planet, as well as the stories which each writer contributed to the set. I would have to go back to it and reread it to do any comparison, but it is certainly an interesting thought to keep in mind.

On "The Deathbird"... while I would imagine that Ellison took some of his ideas from Gnosticism, many of the themes in that story are ones he has dealt with throughout much of his career, in one form or another, and the tribute to Twain also shows one of the major inspirations for the tale, the oft-repeated statement that if a god exists, and one looks around at the state of the universe, then one is led inescapably to the conclusion that god is a malign thug.

In "The Deathbird", there is a lot going on, an awful lot of questions being raised on various moral and ethical issues, not to mention questioning of any sort of dogmatic approach to issues of faith, and to view it as simply an adaptation of Gnosticism (or a variant of same) is to miss a great deal of what it addresses. And yes, it is a story which takes several readings to process it all.

I am curious, though... the idea that the Deathbird is an orbitins spaceship -- I don't recall that anywhere in the story; could you point out where that is? Granted it has been some time since I last read it, but that one escapes me entirely....

In connection with this story (and a few others on a rather similar set of themes), you might want to look up his very odd little novella, "The Region Between", originally published in The Five Fates; a book where a set of writers (Keith Laumer, Poul Anderson, Frank Herbert, Gordon R. Dickson, and Ellison) were given a brief opening for a story involving a person who goes to an euthanasia center, and what results from his death. (Ellison's contribution can also be found in his collection, Angry Candy.)

 

[Fried Egg]

Interesting that you should say that about "Ernest and the Machine God". While both certainly have their merits, I find them both to be among his lesser works -- and "Rock God" was not, originally, intended as a prose story at all, but as material for a comic book of the period; when that did not occur, he then recast it as prose not (I think) entirely successfully. Still, again, there is some fine imagery and a lot of passion in the story, which continues to make it an interesting read.

Out of curiosity, if you can remember, what do you regard as the best stories in the "Deathbird Stories" collection? Do you regard it as one of his best collections? What would you say are his best collections...or, to put it another way, where would you recommend I go next with Harlan after I finish this collection (bearing in mind that I've also read "I have no mouth but I must scream" already)?

 

[Extollager]

I am curious, though... the idea that the Deathbird is an orbitins spaceship -- I don't recall that anywhere in the story; could you point out where that is? Granted it has been some time since I last read it, but that one escapes me entirely....

In Section VIII:

"So Dira's people gave over jurisdiction to that certain world, and went away, leaving Dira with only the Deathbird, a special caretaker-ship the adjudicators had creatively woven into their judgment."

In Section VII:

"High in the bloody sky, the Deathbird circled."

So my recollection put those two things together to get an orbiting spaceship.

 

[j d worthington]

Dale: That explains it. I thought that might be the case. The hyphen there (if in the middle of a line) is accidental; it should simply be "caretakership".... The Deathbird, on the other hand, is more of a figure out of mythology, a symbol of death and release from suffering....

FE: As someone else has pointed out, it can sometimes be difficult to suggest collections, given that Ellison did (especially earlier in his career) often repeat stories both to keep with the theme of the collection and because the earlier collections in which they appeared were usually out of print -- they only began to come back into print when he became such an established figure. (The same thing happens a lot with Bradbury, for instance.)

However, given that caveat, I would suggest the following; which, if they repeat at all, do very little:

Shatterday
Strange Wine
Angry Candy

and, for a dose of his earlier, yet transitional work:

Paingod and Other Delusions
Ellison Wonderland (out of which I especially recommend "All the Sounds of Fear", "The Wind Beyond the Mountains", and (to a lesser degree) "The Sky is Burning".

Alternatively, you may look up a copy of Alone Against Tomorrow: Stories of Alienation in Speculative Fiction, which was a retrospective of his sff up to that time (by no means complete, but collecting together much of the best). It does have more repetition -- a lot of the stories from I Have No Mouth, etc. -- but also a good deal of other very good material, such as "Blind Lightning", "Try a Dull Knife", and "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes". (This does not contain the stories to be found in the first three collections I mentioned.)

I would also recommend Slippage, though to a somewhat more reserved degree... though "Mefisto in Onyx" is a very fine performance.

This is limited to his sff; other of his writings are also well worth looking up, such as Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled, Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation (the only paperback ever reviewed by Dorothy Parker), his screenplay for I, Robot (not anything resembling the film we actually have), and his essay collections Harlan Ellison's Watching (largely film reviews and commentary -- very insightful and fascinating), An Edge in My Voice (a rather peripatetic column which often shows Ellison the essayist at his sparkling, sometimes pyrotechnic, best), and the two books of observations on television, The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat, which are as much about the social scene of their time (and very interesting cultural items they are) as about their ostensible subject.

And, of course, there are the two landmark anthologies he edited (one of which he contributed a story to as well), Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions....