Olivia Laing is a writer and critic. She is the author of six books, including Everybody: A Book About Freedom. Laing’s new book is an exploration of gardens and utopia. The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise will be published in spring 2024.
M. John Harrison is the author of the Viriconium stories, The Centauri Device, Climbers, The Course of the Heart, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, Signs of Life, Light and Nova Swing. He has won the Boardman Tasker Prize, the James Tiptree Jr Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. His latest book is Wish I was Here.
They spoke to one another about escapism, fantasy and the commodification of the imagination.
Olivia Laing:
I want to start by talking about the state of ‘not being there’. For a long time, Mike, I’ve been fascinated by the way that, whatever your writing is describing on the surface, something else is continually bubbling up: a state of loss, dissociation, confusion, guilt, a desire to escape.
M. John Harrison:
For me, it goes back to being a child, to feeling dissociated, and not being massively connected to the things that were happening around me, especially in my relations with adults. Adults talk and you don’t understand. You have to make some kind of epistemology that enables you to decode what they’re saying. I think writing began there, for me.
Laing:
The adult doing up the buttons on your coat while you’re staring at a puddle?
John Harrison:
It’s the feeling I had, even at four or five years old, that I would much rather be staring at the puddle than learning how to do up buttons. And that intensified over the next ten or fifteen years. The sense that if one more person told me not to stare out of the window, well then I would stare out of the window! And furthermore, I would go off and make some windows to stare through, and they wouldn’t be able to stop me!
Laing:
Was it the feeling that reality was elsewhere, that you were right and they were wrong? Or was it, ‘I don’t like their reality and I’m deliberately choosing fantasy worlds?’
John Harrison:
I stared out of the window because I wasn’t interested in what I was being told. I just really didn’t want to be bothered. What I wanted was to be on my own, preferably in a field somewhere on a sunny day, looking at things. The payback was greater. Whereas the payback you received from any organised interaction with adults was, to my mind, even at the age of eight, pretty poor.
But, yes, as soon as I began to read fantasy and science fiction in their commercial and standardised forms then that became my preferred escape route.
Laing:
With the same payoffs as staring at an icicle or a blade of grass?
John Harrison:
No. Violently exciting.
Laing:
So not disassociation, excitement?
John Harrison:
Well, even by then I had become expert at inducing dissociative states and especially the depressive dissociative states from which I found it easier to write. But I cannot believe the violence of my excitement the first time I read a story by J.G. Ballard.
Laing:
Which was linguistic as well as plot-based?
John Harrison:
Yes. His work between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s had that perfect, primal combination of language, images and ideas – the best thing about science fiction. For me, that’s what it must be about. It doesn’t matter what else your work does: it must generate that frisson. Commercial sci-fi has coined all sorts of phrases to describe it. ‘A sense of wonder’ is the most common. But I’m not sure that’s it: I want something that is as savage as riding a motorbike.
Laing:
In your new book, Wish I Was Here (2023), you consider the various fantasies encoded in children’s novels, such as passing through a magical door and vanishing into another world. You have a brilliantly sceptical phrase to describe the process by which writers profit from or harvest their own very personal fantasies of escape: ‘the dream estates sold on piecemeal’. How does that ‘unconscious yet professionalised psychic process’ work? And how dangerous is it?
John Harrison:
With a book such as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, you’re being offered – it seems to me – the product of that very human ability to devise a world which is completely nostalgic. This enables the reader to feel that thing children feel so strongly, nostalgia for places you’ve never been. To me that’s like going back to staring out of the window.
This vast need to rewrite the world according to your own recipe. I think the danger for the writer lies there. Many of the Victorian and Edwardian writers ended up, as I say in the book, locked inside their dream estate somewhere in the south of England, a space in which they were very clearly trying to bring their fantasies into the real world.
Laing:
Leaving more or less horrific collateral damage behind them.
John Harrison:
Yes. They cause chaos in the real world as they try to leave it. But I also think it’s dangerous for the reader, because readers not only buy into the fantasy but also the ideology that lies behind it. By the 1970s, fantasy, in all its forms, had become an ideology in itself.
Laing:
There’s another interesting staging post on the relationship between reality and writing when you discuss Roger Deakin. He wrote Waterlog in 1999, in which he positions wild swimming as a sort of antidote to the commercialised world. He didn’t realise that the minute you write about something, you’ve handed it over to the operations of capital. I wondered what you thought about that. Are there ways of resisting it, or is it inevitable?
John Harrison:
That’s going to depend on your optimism about changing the relationship between capital and the commodifiable. If you’re pessimistic about it, you think that probably it can’t be. You think that capital will always grasp that which is commodifiable, as soon as it possibly can.
I saw this happen with rock climbing. I saw rock climbing change itself from an outdoor to an indoor sport because that would enable it to be more commodified.
Laing:
Climbing at the leisure centre.
John Harrison:
Exactly. Leisure centre, dedicated clothing, new costly fabrics, new opportunities for middlemen. Pretty soon an anarchic activity is standardised and everyone’s tying on with the approved knot. Some of us tried to warn people about this, but the beginning of commodification is such an adventure. Everybody’s having a great time. Suddenly everybody wants to know about rock climbing. Or cycling or wild swimming. And everybody who is involved with those activities is suddenly elated, and everything seems to be full of possibility. And before you know it, with the magic of capital, suddenly you’re paying through the nose for what you used to get for free. Climbing, walking and swimming have been a tragedy of the commons. But more to the point, from my position, you’re also losing the activity to a standardising discourse – that for me is the worst thing, having watched it happen not just to climbing but also to imaginative fiction across the 1970s.
Laing:
There’s a fantastic section about the future that you’ve smuggled into the middle of the book. It’s about what we’re doing with future-based writing. I was very happy to read it because I feel like for the last couple of years I’ve regularly been talking about how pointless I think dystopias are now. This sort of creeping sense that we’re doing their imagining for them. We’re just feeding them – the right – with more and more possibilities for how bad things could get. Our imaginations are in service to the wrong ends. I want to share two more quotes. ‘The last artefact you need during a disaster is a disaster story that metaphorises it – what use is that?’ And, elsewhere: ‘Did the fiction that proposed it turned from a warning to a to-do list? Whose fault was that?’ So let’s start with The Road. What’s wrong with it?
John Harrison:
As a literary artefact, it’s great. But I think the disaster that it represents, the viewpoint on the disaster, is old-fashioned. It’s out of date. It’s a typical 1950s disaster story, in which the disaster is limited. The fiction caps it at both ends. The characters are left with the consequences, and the consequences can be solved by doing the kinds of things that human beings do – make a community, make an allotment, begin the long road back to the world as it was before. My feeling is that this kind of fictional disaster was over once The Day of the Triffids had been written.
Laing:
So do you think they’re oddly reassuring? Conservative, even?
John Harrison:
I think they’re reassuring. Brian Aldiss called them ‘cosy catastrophes’. They limit the way we can think about our own disaster. Because what’s happening to us now is clearly not a limited disaster. We live in a state where the disaster doesn’t have a clear beginning and it certainly doesn’t have a clear end.
Laing:
Well, it’s continually blooming open.
John Harrison:
Yes, exactly.
Laing:
But the centre and the edge are ambiguous.
John Harrison:
Yes. You have to be very careful about the words you use here. Managed populations must never know a disaster is taking place around them. Instead we’re offered the idea of the ‘temporary glitch’. There’s a bit of a problem with microplastics, there’s a bit of a problem with the temperature; but, you know, it’s just a glitch, it’s not the end of the world. The disaster used to be the end of the world. It used to be conceivable as the end of the world. What we need now is writers who confront the fact that probably everything is going to be a disaster from now on for quite some time, if not forever.
It seems to me to be a problem of how we see. What is a post-disaster story for? What is it there to do? We have to ask ourselves – what do we want that kind of fiction to do for us?
Laing:
And people are writing them, very consciously, as ‘this is a warning of how much worse it could be’, but then that scenario comes true.
And I don’t know how much of that is the Cassandra effect – as in, the sense, looking back, that an unheeded prophecy was accurate, if not inevitable – or if it’s more a case of, ‘Well, great, you just gave them the idea! You’ve just provided a full roadmap of how it could work.’
John Harrison:
I find this with a lot of science fiction.
Laing:
It’s not like these stories offer a manual, exactly, but, they do seem to continually shift the Overton window by building possibilities and none of those new possibilities are looking that great. So why not propose other kinds of possibilities?
John Harrison:
I think to a degree it does become a manual.
Laing:
I’m not sure that The Handmaid’s Tale wasn’t a manual in the end. And I’m not sure, but perhaps everyone dressing up like characters from the book ended up making it feel like it’s an inevitable thing that’s going to happen. If people are turning up at the Supreme Court looking like handmaidens . . . They cosplay it, and the next minute they’re living it.
John Harrison:
The problem with all escapist fiction, which includes all standardised generic fiction, is that, actually, there is always part of the audience which secretly enjoys the imagery.
Laing:
I think it’s actually quite a big part of the audience.
John Harrison:
And as a result, you have to be careful what you offer them. That said, I think that when the disaster story hit its peak in the fiction of the 1950s and early 1960s, most of those writers were still trying to do right by the idea. They were trying to make warnings about the near future in the light of a visible present moment.
Laing;
Do you think they were caught up in – this has just struck me now – the reconstruction promise of the post-war settlement? And so what they offer is a take on inventing the NHS, but whatever the new version will be, post-nuclear apocalypse. That their horizon of dreaming was based on what was happening immediately after the war?
John Harrison:
Yes. Those disasters were pure post-Second World War politics. As such, in Britain, they dealt with issues . . . mostly middle-class issues of the time. That model has now run out of steam. Seventy, eighty years on, there are different things to convince people of. We need new forms and structures, points of view. You could say a new ideology of disaster, one which suits the disaster we’ve actually got.
Laing:
You say this great thing: we’re not in the Anthropocene, we’re in the age of fantasy. The idea that we’re in a moment that is hallmarked by the endless multiplication of false stories and a disenchantment with the real. Part of the disaster we’re in is that we’ve abandoned reality. But not in one large way, in multiple very small ways.
John Harrison:
It’s so difficult not to sound crazy around this. But around the mid-1970s, fantasy became not just an offer made to the consumer, it became a way through which the consumer could get information about the world, and manage the world.
Laing:
And it presented political possibilities, and it certainly presented multiple possibilities for getting rich.
John Harrison:
And since that point we’ve watched it just rage through the culture.
Laing:
Not just through the culture, through the planet.
You know, you look at a field full of crops and it looks like it’s all fine out there in nature, but the soil is completely dead, and the crops are being fed by fertiliser, and the soil is basically just a growing medium that’s keeping the plants upright. It’s an illusion you’re looking at – that everything is OK, when it’s not.
John Harrison:
I don’t know what to do about it, except get in a rage. If I see one more advertisement in which what is effectively a telephone causes a portal to open, or every wall to fall down, between the subject and their desired object, I’ll go mad. In the early 2000s people like myself were often approached via our agents by quite large corporations. For instance, soft drink corporations. Would we like to be paid decent sums of money, to spend a long weekend talking to their brand managers about how fantasy could help them with their branding. And all I know is that Iain Banks and I were two of the authors who said no.
Laing:
Interesting. And lots of people presumably said yes.
John Harrison:
Some did, yes. And sometimes I look at the advertisements and I think I can recognise who would have recommended this or that use of imagery.
Laing:
That’s the problem, it’s all kind of crummy, the metaverse. And driven by such sort of cheap impulses: I don’t want to die, I want infinite wealth. It’s like the Greekest of Greek myths.
You don’t have housing, you don’t have healthcare, but here, move to the metaverse, and you can have a house that’s, I don’t know, got a little golf course and a wardrobe full of imaginary clothes. It’s pathetic. It’s so paltry. All of that dream power, and that’s all it offers.
