Turbulent Ironies: (Writing on [Womack Writing) on Womack Writing] by Darren Wershler-Henry (source: _Virus 23_ #$ [Spring 1992], 45-49) "Sex. Drugs. Violence. Rock and roll," said the Old Man, raising his glass. "Something for everyone." -Jack Womack, Ambient (96) In Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and The Science of Wholeness, John Briggs and F. David Peat describe what they refer to as "the irony of turbulence": Turbulence [originally thought to be merely "mindless jiggling"[1]] arises because all the pieces of a movement are connected to each other, any piece of the action depending on the other pieces, and the feedback between the pieces producing still more pieces. Is the breakup of order into turbulence--that strange attractor--a sign of the system's infinitely deep interconnectedness? In fact, of its wholeness? Strange as it may seem, there is evidence that points in this direction. (52) Reading the fiction of Jack Womack involves coming to terms with textual equivalent of the irony of turbulence. In his three SF novels to date (Ambient, Terraplane, and Heathern), Bizarre characters speaking strange argots move through a labyrinthical series of interrelations with such rapidity that it would be easy to dismiss his work as so much sound and fury. Involving, as it does, gnostic mutants, a parallel world, Messiahs true and false, an almost omniscient AI named Alice, the birth of a postliterate nation, a filing cabinet that contains the traces of a mindbogglingly huge conspiracy to hide the truth about everything (who really shot JFK, who paid Christ's salary, what happened to Amelia Earhart and Judge Crater, the only complete copy of Greed--on videocassette, no less), the rise of lowlife drug smugglers to the world of high finance--and I could, of course, go on--his fictional world can appear as hostile ansd purposeless to a potential reader as it does to the characters on the pages. However, Womack (if you ask him) will be the first to assert that he knows exactly what he's doing. His work appears chaotic because it is structured to appear that way; all the seemingly disparate pieces of his textual web are fundamentally interconnected. Further, that chaotic structure (in the world of turbulebnt ironies, oxymoron is unavoidable) serves a definite purpose. The prose of Ambient et. al. is less akin to sound and fury than The Sound and The Fury, a novel (by another Southerner, perhaps not incidentally) which uses unconventional language and plot structures for the same purpose: to message, not massage, the reader. "A massaging or readerly text will affirm values we already have and thus leave us undisturbed, while a writerly and messaging text will in some way disrupt our settled expectations" (Hughes 59). Like the cyberpunk writers with whom he is so often compared, Womack is a bricoleur. He turns goods stolen from the shelves of what Tom Maddox calls the "semiotic supermarket" of 20th century cultural symbols into the stuff of his art[2]. However, it is important to note that the use of bricolage does not preclude care in the construction of the text on the part of the writer; this is evident from the subtle and intricate internal structures that Womack's individual books possess (if you're not a fan of subtle and intricate internal structures, there's always lots of killing and hitting people to keep you occupied. I've always wanted to do a body count in Ambient, but haven't worked up the nerve yet). This careful structuring is especially evident in Heathern, his latest novel (which actually precedes Ambient and Terraplane in the chronology of the overall story). It opens with a savagely ironic parody of the descent of a Messiah into the world, a descent that results immediately in one (and almost two) deaths, instead of the promise of eternal life: A baby almost killed me as I walked to work one morning. By passing beneath a bus shelter's roof at the ordained moment I lived to tell my tale. With strangers surrounding me I looked at what remained. Laughter from heaven made us lift our eyes skyward. The baby's mother lowered her arms and leaned out the window. Without applause her audience drifted off, seeking crumbs in the gutters of this city of God. Xerox shingles covered the shelter's the shelter's remaining glass pane, and the largest read: Want to be crucified. Have own nails. Leave message on machine. The fringe of numbers along the ad's hem had been stripped away. (Heathern 1) A similar passage at the end of the book brings the narrative full circle. Joanna, the narrator, attempts to take a dry dive from an office tower only to realize that, ironically, she is the Messiah[3]. The language of other passages in the text points relentlessly toward this final moment: "Soon enough, I believed--wanted to believe--I would fly away from it all, not knowing how, not knowing when" (Heathern 11); "as if, having been pitched from heaven into space's floorless pit, I realized too late that not even the stars would keep me company" (Heathern 122); "I recalled coming across a paragraph concerning Waldo Frank as I idly flipped pages. . . . Frank believed that when the messiah came the messiah would come as a woman" (Heathern 71). I don't want to convey the notion that Womack leaves everything tied up neatly; as the chaos of his texts is ordered, the order of his texts is chaotic, i.e. the overall pattern of the series remains, for me at least, opaque. More than anything else, this is due to a lack of information (turbulence was written off as "mere" chaos until the advent of supercomputers and graphic modelling allowed scientists to examine different aspects of the whole [4] (maybe what I need to get the Big Picture is better hardware... would a computerized textual analysis help? Just wondering/wandering... sorry.) Waiting for the answer (which may never come) to this textual puzzle is entirely fitting, though: Womack is (as another aspect of his chaotic, ironic turbulence) fractal, self-similar; a writer of infinite deferral. There are, evidently, systems and/or gods that run his fictional world, but their methods and goals remain, for the time being, inscrutable. Both his readers and characters are left waiting for the messiah, who is invariably false (at worst) or flawed (at best). Yet they (the representatives of hope) keep coming, warts and all, the products of an infinite assembly line staffed by blind idiot gods. Hope is one of the strongest attractor points [5] in Womack's turbulent texts, because it is essential for the characters to have some reason to continue in a fragmented postmodern world that makes no sense. Every major Womack character has to find some way of continuing after becoming aware of some massive internal schism; to fail to do so is to die spiritually (if not physically). Surviving and continuing to hope is the only viable option. Sort of like the real world. The title of his forthcoming book, Elvissey, would suggest an odyssey in search of yet another potential messiah (guess who) in the turbulent mirror- world that lies beyond the Flushing Window (hints of Alice in Wonderland here --remember the name of the AI mentioned earlier). Godness only knows what repercussions that will bring about; when Stalin's double crosses between worlds in Terraplane, he brings with him an unknown viral epedemic that takes countless lives; "Even in Russia it was a matter of greatest humor that only the Big Boy could have killed millions of his countryfolk during two different centuries" (225). Again, like the characters in the book, we can hardly/only wait. I met Womack at the Word on the Street festival in Toronto back in the fall, and, happily, he agreed to answer some of my questions about his work. In a letter dated 1/21/91, he writes, "I am very glad to be offered the chance to clear some of these matters up, as there appears to be (certainly among traditional literary/science fiction critics) some misunderstanding as to what I'm doing." You've read my ideas about his writing; what follows are (unexpurgated) his own words. Enjoyment's mandatoried. * * * * * Darren Wershler-Henry: The titles of your books--Ambient, Terraplane, and the forthcoming Elvissey--all have their referents in the domain of pop music. Do you listen to music when you write as a kind of "atmospheric aid?" Aagin, from your choice of titles, it's probably safe to assume that you listen to Robert Johnson, Elvis, Fripp and Eno, but do your tastes extend into punk, hardcore, thrash, industrial or cold wave? The reason I ask is that so many of the writers whose work directly inspires contemporary musicians are not interested in this type of music at all [6].... Jack Womack: I do listen to music while I write, often; as often I'll have music playing and the television turned on with the volume mercifully lowered, to see what sort of blend emerges. As to what I listen to depends on what sort of mood I wish to be carried over into the book. During the writing of Heathern I listened predominantly to a number of women vocalists and choral recordings of Thomas Tallis; while working on Terraplane I listened to Robert Johnson, certainly, but as well to vaughan Williams, Elgar, the Benny Goodman band performance of "Sing, Sing, Sing" at Carnegie Hall in 1938, and Charles Ives. During the time I worked on Ambient I kept a number of things playing-- Sex Pistols (my model for the Ambient band seen playing early on; the tune in question being "Holidays in the Sun"), MTV (which, in 1983, we'd just gotten here in New York, or at least I'd just gotten, and which at the time seemed both more promising and more ominous than it has hence proved to be), Elvis and, certainly to run as a rhythm track for the first chapter, a piece from Robert Fripp/Andy Summers' album I Advance Naked (title cut)--that piece's beat was exactly the one I aimed to match in the text. I have always liked much punk, hardcore, etc., though I don't go to clubs much and of course the most interesting things I hear I never hear on radio. There is an industrial/thrash/art band here in New York called Black Rain to whom I serve ass one of several literary mentors, so to speak, and I enjoy their music--they're rather intense. DWH: What about rap, which is, in a lot of ways, the real music of postmodernism? JW: As to rap, I certainly agree as to its importance though of course, now that it's being looked upon as socially acceptable the quality is rapidly going downhill. Two sidebars of possible interest: in the scene in Ambient where O'Malley and Avalon are on the subway I toyed with the idea of the motorman making all announcements in rap (but didn't--though what had put the idea in my head was hearing an actual NYC subway motorman actually doing it about a year earlier); in Terraplane I make Luther remember how his fellow caucasian students were forever attempting to remind him of his heritage by playing rap records--my editor at the time at Weidenfield changed this to blues against my wished, without my awareness, apparently in the beleif that white college students living in the late 80's-early 90's would not possibly be interested in rap. DWH: In case I've missed them completely, what are your major influences (literary, film, musical)? What are you currently listening to/reading/watching? JW: I've had a number of major influences I suppose, though most have long settled into their own special blend, coming from a variety of sources: Shirley Jackson, Flannery O'Connor, Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, The Great Gatsby, Nathanael West, Gogol, Kafka, Joyce, Sylvia Plath, Nabokov, Borges, Charles Fort, fringe literature of all sorts (cryptology, teratology, true- crime accounts, literature of the insane, flying saucer books of the 50's, etc.), comic strips, especially Krazy Kat, Pogo, and Dick Tracy; films of Bunuel, Citizen Kane, Ed Wood, sci-fi of the 50's, A Clockwork Orange (the movie, not the book), The Company of Wolves, King Kong, Freaks, films of Von Sternberg and Lang, Jules et Jim; Mad magazine, EC comics, certain Marvel titles of the 60s; Goya, Cornell, Max Ernst, the Dadaists, Bosch, Brueghel, Rodin, Turner, Beardsley, Pollock; Mahler, Vaughan Williams, Scrialin, John Lennon, Robert Johnson, Elvis, Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols, David Bowie between 1971 and 1978; my dreaded hometown of Lexington, New York City; numerous girlfriends. Television. DWH: Okay, here it is--The Obligatory Cyberpunk Question: in reviews of your books, the press (both SF and popular) tends to associate your fiction closely with that of the canonized cyberpunk writers; William Gibson and Bruce Sterling have both made favorable comments about your work that feature prominently on the covers of your books. Do you consider yourself to be part of the cyberpunk school (which the original members seem to have abandoned)? JW: I don't believe I ever was a cyberpunk. As I'd not read any science fiction (as opposed to movies) until the last year and a half I was utterly unfamiliar with their work until I'd done Ambient and Terraplane; had not even heard of Ballard, in truth, until Ambient was done. Since then I've gotten to be a fairly constant correspondent with Gibson, and have talked to Sterling. As all former participants seem now to be ex-cyberpunks I believe it's all rather a moot point, except of course at the New York Times, which has just discovered it and therefore made it acceptable. DWH: I think that any discussion of your writing without reference to the influence of gnosticism would be incomplete; the notion of "God and Godness" which is central to the Ambient religion is definitely a gnostic concept. Does this come by way of the SF of K. W. Jeter and/or Philip K. Dick? Your presentation of gnosticism is essentially a positive (i.e. subversive) one. Do you see a darker, possibly fascist, side to gnosticism as well [7]? JW: I've not read Jeter and only read Valis last year at some point--I thought it interesting but rather different than the sort of thing I'm doing; I wouldn't call it gnostic, really. The notion of God and Godness in my books, especially as evidenced in Heathern, is an explicitly gnostic concept, though my take on the messianic principle I derived more directly from Judaic concepts. Gnosticism, like Christianity, I look upon as an essentially reasonable gathering of beliefs so overlain with reinterpretation as to nullify the original thought; there has of course been an enormous difference in the degree of overlay between Christianity and Gnosticism, but I think the basic concepts of Gnosticism have been even more twisted round--deliberately, perhaps. The Ambients, of course, took over the Maccaffreyan version once they grasped it as being a religion for outsiders--for those forced to remain in this world amid the demiurges, as it were, and attempting to make the best of it. That Bernard and Macaffrey in a sense proffer similar advice to Joanna along this line is certainly deliberate; Bernard is more the fascist version-- not so much a difference in statement as in mindset behind the statement; that what seems reasonable can yet be expressed by one mad. DWH: Do you think that the infusion of cyberpunk with mysticism or gnosticism will form the core of the next wave of SF ("transcybergnosticism")? JW: The thought of gnosticism becoming a recurrent theme in science fiction is a troubling one, for both can't help but suffer for it. DWH: Last year, NME released a double album of covers of songs from Elvis movies entitled The Last Temptation of Elvis. In "Elvis is Everywhere," Mojo Nixon says "Man oh man what I want you to see/Is that the Big E's inside of you and me." The Church of E is one of your most interesting and humorous creations, parodying as it does our collective preoccupation with the life and death of Elvis Aaron Presley. Why has our society deified him, and what particular relevance does his apotheosis have for your fiction? Can you tell us anything about your next book, Elvissey (and possibly provide a brief excerpt)? JW: Only part of our society has deified Elvis [8], and herein lies an aspect of class thus far only hinted at in my works--the C[hurch] of E[lvis]'s believers, including the nouveau riche Drydens, essentially come drom the lower socio-economic white orders, with all the cultural baggage that entails --the Macaffreyan church (Joanna's) is one much more accepting of a wider number of people, which is why at the end of Ambient the allusion is made to all people being, in some way, Ambient--that is, different or unique, dependant on perspective. The C. of E. is of a much more fundamentalist nature, and therefore more dangerous. In Elvissey, set about fifteen years after Terraplane, I take this all a bit further, while expanding the viewpoint concerning purely false messiahs, the nature of belief, and how reality is co- opted in pursuit of that belief (the following paragraph is an excerpt from chapter 2 of Elvissey, to be published by Tor books): And the Prearmyite denomination was but one: among the Elvii were the Hosts of Memphis, the Shaken, Rattled and Rolled, the River Jordannaires; the Gracelandians, the Vegassenes, the Gladyseans; the C of E Now Or Never, the Redeemed Believers in Our Master's Voice, the Church of the True Assumption of His Burning Love and a hundred dozen more. Each schismatrix knew their king true, and saw their road as sole and only; their only given was that, for whatever reason and--they supposed--at no one's command, the King would return. DWH: "Modern times. . . . Postmodern reaction," says Jake (after rapidly cutting a man in half with his collapsible chainsaw) in my favorite line from Terraplane (167). Jake seems to be, in many ways, the logical (post-literate, extremely violent, yet strangely compassionate) product of our current society, an idea which you present in all of your books, but discuss at length in Heathern. Would you care to expand on this point? JW: I think Jake exemplifies a number of aspects of, at least, this particular future, containing within himself traits evidenced in many of the other characters but taken to their ultimate degree. Jake is both an Everyman character and the central figure of the six book series, for in his greatest flaws are his deepest strengths. Jake thinks of himself as an artist, which distinguished him from O'Malley, for example: O'Malley has kept his work separate from his life but feels, resultingly, as if his work has taken over his life. Jake sees what he does as his raison d'etre: he believes he knows what the world is, and how best to respond to it, and therefore not only accepts but embraces his lot, taking into account the pluses and minuses to be gained from such a worldview. He can accept, which Joanna cannot; he is content, which Avalon is not; he holds fast to rules, which the Drydens do not; he can shut himself off, which O'Malley and Luther will not, no matter how much they want to shut off. What destroys Jake while simultaneously saving him is the love he feels for Oktobriana, and the love he stirs up in her--that by admitting his humanity it cannot help but destroy him, or at least--in truth--remake him to such a degree that he is no longer recognizable to himself--a personal messiahdom, as it were. DWH: While we're dealing with "postmodern reactions," to what extent (if any) has postmodern critical theory been an influence on your work? JW: Postmodern critical theory has not influenced my work, as I've only become familiar with it since undertaking my own theories. DWH: The culture of the Ambients, longing as it does for a mythical utopian past, and attempting to reach that past through ritual and body modification, seems to be inspired partly by the Modern Primitive movement [9], partly by punk. Is this an accurate statement? Is the vision of an Ambient society a call for radical (because still glaringly absent in our world) equality between people? JW: On one level the aspect of Ambient culture which involves self-mutilation was an extension of punk, taken to a logical extreme; as a metaphor the flaws within their beings illuminate not only their genuine personality flaws, but how they can have a happy life all the same. The vision of this society is certainly a call for equality between people in the sense of being treated as people; and that those better off should help those worse off. I see nothing so radical in this. DWH: I'd like to talk about the ubiquitous episodes of graphic violence in your fiction. Do you side with J.G. Ballard, seeing representations of graphic violence as a necessary vehicle for social change, or are you attempting to write a kind of ironic moral satire that reveals society's shortcomings through hyperbole, or is it simply gratuitous? Or what? JW: Oh yes, violence. No, it's not gratuitous; you'll notice in Heathern that when violence occurs it occurs off-screen, as it were, or described in such a manner as to bring out emotions other than those normally expected. In Terraplane and in Ambient the violence most pervasive and most gratuitous is that performed by the societies upon their members. The individual acts of violence are to be expected from those trained to respond in such manner, and observed by those overfamiliar to such scenes. If there is a coldness in my characters toward human life, or seeming coldness in certain characters, it results from self-protection--they can't bear to see any more than they allow themselves to see, and all is such daily fare that violent acts carry little more weight than TV commercials--they can't distinguish between the two, sometimes. DWH: Have you had any run-ins with the growing numbers of right-wing fundamentalist censors in the U.S.A.? Or, conversely, has anyone offered to make Ambient into the next Schwarzenegger vehicle? JW: I've had no run-ins with American guardians of morality. I've had some run-ins with American and british guardians of literature, and of the purity of science fiction in particular. In theory, from what my agents tell me, Bruce Willis's people looked at Ambient at least three times. I leave you to draw your own conclusions. DWH: The alarming growth rate of multinational corporations like Dryco is a central concern of your fiction, and of much other contemporary SF. In Canada, many of us saw the Canada-U.S.A. (and soon Mexico) Free Trade Act as a blatant instance of big business and government frog-marching us down the path toward Canada as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the U.S.A., Inc., yet the deal was apparently of little concern to most U.S. Americans. What are your thoughts on what the bulk of U.S. Americans know and/or care about (a) the mix of megabusiness and politics and (b) Canada? JW: The bulk of Americans know nothing and care less about the mix of megabusiness and politics; that's actually unfair--they do know, but such has been going on for so long that all is accepted, that every business has a little bit of Dryco in it. I should think they know less about Canada. I very much enjoyed Toronto when I was there visiting last September. DWH: Is there anything you'd like to add that I've left out? JW: The only things I'd like to add are: 1) All of my books do have a structure, both in and of themselves and within the broader context of the series. If you see none, you've missed something, and should reread it. 2) If I hadn't wanted the last paragraph of Heathern to go exactly as it is written, I wouldn't have written it. 3) If there are any doubts, I know exactly what I'm doing. * * * * * Conclusion: Bookstore yourself ASAP; Womack's essentialled. * * * * * Notes 1 in Briggs and Peat, p. 45. 2 Maddox's "Cobra, She Said: An Interim Report on the Fiction of William Gibson," although published almost five years ago, is still one of the best general introductions to Gibson's fiction (see list of Works Cited for particulars). 3 At first, I resisted reading this passage literally, because Womack's books are full of failed Messiahs, but then I rediscovered the following passage from Ambient: "Macaffrey, the story went, came as Messiah just before the Ebb and proceeded to suffer the traditional fate of messiahs. Joanna spread the word he brought. It remained a common, if generally unspoken, belief that she yet lived, hiding away somewhere in the wilds of Long Island" (158). It would have been easier to see Joanna's moment of revelation as a pantheistic- humanist thing (i.e. something to the effect of "there's a little bit of the Messiah in us all"), but the textual evidence indicates otherwise. Presumably she'll re-emerge later in the series as Womack works his way up to some sort of unimaginable gotterdammerung (we can only hope). 4 in Briggs and Peat 47. 5 "An attractor is a region of phase space which exerts a 'magnetic' appeal for a system, seemingly pulling the system toward it" (Briggs and Peat 36). The proliferation of attractors is the cause of turbulence; Womack's texts are turbulent because of the many "attractor points" that plot the plot in the "phase space" of his fictional world. 6 Tom Maddox, in "Maddox On Gibson" (Virus 23 #0), says the following: Not long ago, we [he and William Gibson] were talking on the phone, and Bill had Emmylou Harris's new album playing in the background. . . . We talked about other music we'd heard and liked lately: Lou Reed's New York album. . . the Cowboy Junkies. . . Leonard Cohen. (25) Bruce Sterling, in Mondo 2000 #1, tells a similar story: I always thought my tastes were idiosyncratic until I talked to a friend who works for A&M records. She said, "Oh, yeah. Alternative College Circuit." (100) John Shirley (who no longer has green hair) may be the exception to this rule. 7 This is too big a topic to go into here; interested parties are directed to Gnosis 14 (Winter 1990), which focuses on "The Dark Side" of gnosticism. 8 As Chuck D of Public Enemy says, "Elvis/Was a hero to most/But he never meant shit to me." Living Color has also pointed out that "Elvis is Dead." It's a racial as well as a class thing. 9 Those unfamiliar with this term (if you're reading this magazine, that's highly unlikely) are directed to Re/Search #12, Body Art, Tattootime or Piercing Fans International Quarterly magazines. * * * * * Works Cited Briggs, John, and David F. Peat. Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Hughes, Kenneth James. Signs of Literature: Language, Ideology and the Literary Text. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1986. Maddox, Tom. "Cobra, She Said: An Interim Report on the Fiction of William Gibson." Fantasy Review 9:4 (90) (April 1986), 46-48. ---. "Maddox On Gibson." Virus 23 0 (Fall 1989), 24-25. Milhon, Jude. "Coming In Under the Radar: Bruce Sterling Interviewed." Mondo 2000 1 (Fall #7), 98-101. Womack, Jack. Ambient. New York: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1987. ---. Terraplane. New York: Tom Doherty Associates (TOR), 1988. ---. Heathern. New York: Tom Doherty Associates (TOR), 1990. * * * * * This Shareware meme is brought to you courtesy of the ADoSA in conjunction with _Virus 23_. If you plan on reprinting or reposting it, (or are just curious about what else we do) please let us know: VIRUS 23 c/0 Box 46 Red Deer, Alberta Canada T4N 5E7 Copies of _Virus23_ #$ (memes, real-life vampires, the Twentysomethings, Guy Maddin, Dario Argento, Jack Womack, prairie depressionist film, concrete fractal poetry, IAO Core, Rose McDowall, The Brotherhood of Baldur, The Loved One, art by Don David, and much much more) are available from the above address for $7.00 ppd. ADoSA: Because there's No Reason Not To Gnow.