moorcock's brook & a pinch, a toke, a rose, and a Little Dorrit

[tess marek]

>From his beginnings as a writer of science fiction and
heroic fantasy in the early 1960s through his long,
idiosyncratic, unclassifiable novels of the 1980s and
1990s, Michael Moorcock has been compared, variously
but rarely adversely, with Charles Dickens, William S.
Burroughs, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and Jorge
Luis Borges. As editor of the British
speculative-fiction magazine New Worlds
from 1966 to 1971, Moorcock was perhaps the dominant
force for change in New Wave science fiction, the
attempt to introduce experimental modernist and
postmodernist techniques into what Moorcock and his
associates viewed as an ossified genre. Since the
1980s he has moved away from the realm of overt
fantasy
to become an acclaimed novelist of urban life with his
Dickensian novel of the London Blitz and its
survivors, Mother London (1988), and his Between the
Wars
tetralogy (1981-). 


Early in 1978, the British Fantasy Society published
Epic Pooh, a short extract from an unpublished
critical monograph on the nature of fantasy. In this
booklet
Moorcock reacted against the avoidance of
psychological mimesis in what he calls "consolatory"
fantasy, fantasy that avoids political and
psychological engagement on
any sophisticated metaphorical level, settling instead
for a simplistic good/evil moral world with no shades
of gray, a world without ambiguities in which good,
despite terrible hardships, must eventually triumph.
J. R. R. Tolkien and his imitators are Moorcock's
chief targets. He describes their moral world as no
more complex than that of A. A. Milne, creator of
-the-Pooh. 


Brooke-Rose's best-known critical study, A Rhetoric of
the Unreal, is a collection of related essays on
fantastic and other antirealist elements in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century narratives and on
critical theories of the unreal in fiction. Early in
the book, she offers an important critique and
revision of Todorov's influential theory of the
fantastic. Todorov defines the fantastic as a
sustained irresolution between an uncanny but natural
explanation for a happening and a supernatural
explanation for it. He insists that this irresolution
must remain at the end of the story, rather than tip
over into one or the other. Yet Todorov can find few
examples of the purely fantastic, while many important
texts, including those of
Franz Kafka and Gogol, resist categorization along the
lines Todorov develops. Brooke-Rose, however, sees the
essential element in Todorov's theory of the fantastic
as ambiguity and suggests extending the concept to
non-fantastic, but ambiguous, texts, which could be
thought of as displaced versions of the fantastic. She
goes on to suggest that the multileveled meanings
found in medieval allegory bear a close relation to
the fantastic, arguing that the fantastic should be
conceived within a broader historical perspective than
Todorov's largely nineteenth-century focus. The middle
section of her book has a four-chapter tour-de-force
reading of that text-book case of Todorov's pure
fantastic, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. After
a devastating  exposition of the follies, fabulations,
and out-and-out falsities critics have produced in the
face of James's duplicitous novella, Brooke-Rose
provides two closely argued chapters exposing the
structures that suspend James's unhappy tale between
two mutually exclusive explanations. She devotes the
latter part of the book to different facets of
post-modernist antirealism. These chapters include an
astringent criticism of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of
the Rings, an appreciative discussion of the "new
science fiction" of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph McElroy,
an analysis of Robbe-Grillet's In the Labyrinth, and
three concluding chapters on other aspects of
postmodernist fiction. Perhaps most striking here is
her tart dismissal of most of Thomas Pynchon's work,
including the much-revered Gravity's Rainbow. Both V.
and Gravity's Rainbow, in her view, fail in their
satirical aim, for their satire too often collapses
back into realistic depiction of the ostensive object
of its satire. Their failure is at once thematic and
formal-stylistic.

'From the unhappy suppression of my youngest days,
through the rigid and unloving home that followed
them, through my departure, my long exile, my return,
my mother's welcome, my intercourse with her since,
down to the afternoon of this day with poor Flora,'
said Arthur Clennam, 'what have I found!'

His door was softly opened, and these spoken words
startled him, and came as if they were an answer:


'Little Dorrit.'


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