The lost ones

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By reading other pieces, we can clarify the thrust of Harrison’s comments. What he intended to criticize wasn’t the creation of imaginary worlds—the practice that makes the more philistine among mainstream readers roll their eyes. Rather, his target was “immersive fiction, in any medium, in which an attempt is made to rationalise the fiction by exhaustive grounding.” In such writing, “[r]epresentational techniques are used to validate the invention, with the idea of providing a secondary creation for the reader to ‘inhabit’; but also, in a sense, as an excuse or alibi for the act of making things up, as if to legitimise an otherwise questionable activity.” The worldbuilding writer becomes a kind of ‘human demiurge’ crafted in the image of the God purported to have written the Bible through prophetic inspiration. They attempt, that is, to create a world in its totality with total mastery, and deliver it up to readers as if to faithful acolytes, who can then fancy themselves as aspirants to being masters of its cosmology themselves. Yes, that’s Life, stripped of our endless media feed; Life that has a simple moral, as Freud had also found at the end: Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2014-07-28 18:05:27.590174 Bookplateleaf 0010 Boxid IA1137422 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Containerid S0022 Donor The cylinder has three separate, informal bands of activity. Around the periphery are the climbers waiting for their turns on the ladders. The periphery is also where the sedentary and vanquished lost ones prefer to lean against the wall, uninterested in searching or climbing anymore. As they are underfoot of the climbers, they are viewed as an annoyance. Just in from the outer band is a single-file line of lost ones who are weary of searching in the center of the sphere, where most of the lost ones reside. The ladders. These are the only objects. They are single without exception and vary greatly in size. The shortest measure not less than six metres. Some are fitted with a sliding extension. They are propped against the wall without regard to harmony. Bolt upright on the top rung of the tallest the tallest climbers can touch the ceiling with their fingertips.”

The talk was given in November 2022 during the centre’s 50 th anniversary celebrations (delayed by a year due to the pandemic) in the Minghella Studios on campus. After the talk and subsequent discussions with Conor and Matt, my attempt to locate The Lost Ones within the archive became even more pressing.

The upper and lower sections of the sixteen metre high and nearly sixteen metre wide cylinder containing the lost ones is linked by a series of ladders that ‘vary greatly in size’, the shortest measuring ‘not less than six metres’, the longest enabling ‘the tallest climbers [to] touch the ceiling with their fingertips’. The ladders, whose rungs are intermittently and unpredictably absent, are used to convey ‘the searchers’ – each of the cylinder’s two hundred lost bodies still searching for its lost one – to the niches or alcoves, some of which are connected by tunnels, that are located in the upper reaches. No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead good, imagination dead imagine. Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done. To escape the world quietly and without fanfare - as in John of the Cross’ The Dark Night of the Soul, in which we ultimately see that the key thing is meeting God face to face during that dark night when “our house (our soul) is all at rest.” It was almost a decade before any more significant short prose emerged, but when it did another shift had taken place. The terrifying closed spaces were collapsed and gone, replaced by the twilit grasslands of Stirrings Still (1988), or the isolated cabin, “zone of stones” and ring of mysterious sentinels in Ill Seen Ill Said (1981). Language remains problematic, but a level of acceptance has been reached. The phrase “what is the wrong word?” recurs in Ill Seen Ill Said, as if to say: “Of course language is insufficient, but approximation is better than nothing”:

Au cœur des ténèbres by Joël Jouanneau, adaptation of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Théâtre de l'Athénée-Louis-Jouvet The narrator is scatter-minded – he chews his words, relishing the strange and new and intriguing. “One body per square meter, or two hundred bodies in all” he breathes tenderly as he roams through this story, his feet padding across the length and width of the floor. He’s spread out a painter’s cloth, stained with color and grime, which ripples and bunches at the edges. It is this bleak, almost lunar landscape which the tiny figures call home, and it creates a deeply unsettling apprehension, as if you were out at a restaurant and had a waiter standing next to you at all times, one hand on the tablecloth, ready to yank it all away. How suddenly mortal we all are, indeed, if our universe can so easily be scooped up and rolled aside! It’s not uncommon to feel some instinctive concern for an actor’s health and safety, whether they’re brandishing swords or simply stepping too close to the edge of the stage. But The Lost Ones may be the first show in which I’ve feared that the characters are going to be stepped on and crushed. urn:oclc:644832617 Republisher_date 20151016025520 Republisher_operator [email protected] Scandate 20151015024604 Scanner scribe11.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Source

THE LOST ONES

Book Genre: Cultural, Fiction, France, Ireland, Literature, Novels, Philosophy, Plays, Short Stories, Theatre ABODE WHERE LOST bodies roam each searching for its lost one. Vast enough for search to be in vain. Narrow enough for flight to be in vain. Inside a flattened cylinder fifty metres round and sixteen high for the sake of harmony." The two zones form a roughly circular whole. As though outlined by a trembling hand. Diameter. Careful. Say one furlong. His] way of advancing due east […] was to turn his bust as far as possible towards the north and at the same time to fling out his right leg as far as possible towards the south, and then to turn his bust as far as possible towards the south and at the same time to fling out his left leg as far as possible towards the north…

From here, the narrator describes the norms and social groupings that structure the lives of these figures. Some are 'searchers' who wander the interior, constantly examining one another in search of their 'lost one'. Some are 'climbers', who use the fifteen ladders available to climb and descend from the niches in the wall. And, since the possibility of actually finding their 'lost one' isn't so much as broached, some are 'vanquished' - those who have simply given up their search to sit on the ground with their heads bowed. The actions and interactions of these various groups are shaped by unwritten and unstated rules that are nevertheless studiously obeyed. However, we are told, everything they do is headed toward one inevitable end: eventually all these bodies will become vanquished. When the very last wanderer sits down and bows their head for good, the light will dim for the last time, the air will freeze, and all will remain forever more in a state of total entropy. Among the tasks that fiction writers usually set for themselves is to craft some depiction of place. There are, for example, the settings for stories: along with character, theme, and plot, one among the standard list of particulars that readers expect writers to provide. However, a fictional place need not be a setting. That is, a setting is always a setting for. It’s made up of the location or locations where the story takes place. As such, it’s given the lower billing. It functions as the stage on which the main attraction—usually some drama of human affairs—unfolds. Of course, writers often take great care constructing their settings. However, the same is true of set designers for films and plays. Such efforts, magnificent as their fruits might be, don’t detract from the point. Fictional places, when they take the form of settings, are containers: vessels for delivering the heart of the fiction to the reader. Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid. “Very afraid,” by M. John HarrisonPeople: it's clearly a documentary/ cinema de Mornay of life in a cylindrical hellgatory in which blind, violent, naked people into 'no-strings' screwing just rawk when the annual semihard strikes the distaff. Yeah, and a bunch of ladders and shit. Quit trying to hang your paper on another fella's wall, guys. M. John Harrison, in a now infamous 2007 blog post, criticized the impulse toward the kind of encyclopedic worldbuilding that has gripped science fiction and fantasy ever since Tolkien: For in The Lost Ones there is compassion for our human condition - real, hard-won, heartfelt compassion. Die Frage nach der Individuation scheint sich unter den Gegebenheiten des Zylinders nicht einmal mehr zu stellen. Analog zu Endspiel, wo Hamm das Diktum der überflüssigen Schwachen/Alten buchstäblich nimmt und seine Eltern in Mülleimern entsorgt - während er und sein Diener ebenfalls keine richtig funktionierenden Körper mehr besitzen - gilt auch in The Lost Ones der Einzelne als ‚expendabel‘ und ist dem Apparatus der Gesellschaft/des Zylinders untergeordnet.