Part 10 in the series, A Literary Search for Meaning by Dr Karen Hughes
As well as combining the mythic with the fantastic and drawing on the tropes of apocalyptic science fiction, I have used multiple literary methods and narrative techniques to make my new novel, Gaba Gali, rich and interesting and to convey an alternative worldview, based on emerging mythologies, that might contribute to the Western occulture. This variety seemed appropriate, given that I was exploring individualistic modern spirituality, a fluid concept that I had linked with the diversity of human perception and the creative imagination, and given that I was working within the broad umbrella of speculative fiction, a mode encompassing an eclectic range of genres that traditionally rely on wonder and surprise to communicate their themes. The following discussion demonstrates some of the techniques employed in my novel—and in many other works of speculative fiction—to create the impression of three essential subjects: unnatural perspectives, alien voices and non-linear time, which prove difficult to convey in ordinary mimetic terms.
Unnatural Perspectives
Ian Watt, writing during the 1950s “cognitive revolution” (Miller 144), observes that “many novelists, from Sterne to Proust, have made their subject the exploration of the personality as it is defined in the interpenetration of its past and present self-awareness” (Watt 21). Traditionally, science fiction and fantasy authors have employed flat third-person narrators, placing more emphasis on action, world building and external wonders than on the internal journey of their protagonists; see Forster’s comments (51) on H. G. Wells. Modern philosophical science fiction, however, with its exploration of consciousness and its reliance on the “soft” sciences to open new frontiers, has no choice but to delve more deeply into the minds of its characters. The most relevant theory of narratology through which to examine my creative project is therefore the emerging field of “cognitive narratology”, which David Herman describes as “more a set of loosely confederated heuristic schemes than a systematic framework for inquiry” (“Cognitive Narratology” 47).
In his 2014 article “Beyond Other Minds” Marco Caracciolo discusses aspects of this “new vocabulary and set of theories”, which he says arises out of “the recent wave of interest in cognitive approaches to literature” (30). He suggests that “some literary techniques—such as those that fall under the heading of ‘internal focalization’—ride piggyback on readers’ empathic skills” and “in some cases, they can take readers’ involvement with a fictional character to a higher level than would be likely in real life, resulting (somewhat paradoxically) in an imaginative undergoing of the experience attributed to the character” (32). To encourage this, I employed narrators with distinctive personality styles to create a sense of familiarity and empathy in the reader. As Caracciolo notes, with reference to Suzanne Keen’s work on reader empathy: “In general internally focalized texts make available all the relevant information regarding a character’s conscious states. This can produce a peculiar feeling of ‘closeness’ between readers and characters” (42).
After trialling both third- and second-person voices, it became apparent that the most effective approach for this project was to present the bulk of the narration in the first person or, to use Gérard Genette’s formulation, through the device of the homodiegetic and intradiegetic narrator (248). My three protagonists, Kayla, Jordy and Tess, take turns telling the stories of their lives as components of the larger frame narrative, providing simultaneous accounts of the action interspersed with flashbacks to their shared childhood and alternative versions of that childhood. This process is relatively straightforward when each character relays chronological events in their ordinary world, but not so simple when they transition to alternative timeless realities. By creating three protagonists with seemingly natural viewpoints, I relied on reader empathy to foster a sense of authenticity and comfort, before dipping into more unnatural perspectives.
My aim was to take the reader inside the mind of each narrator so they could share that character’s personal journey from avidyā, fundamental ignorance about the nature of reality, through jñānabodhnī, the awakening of knowledge, and finally to a tantalising glimpse of prajña, spiritual wisdom and the multidimensional possibilities of human evolution. The process of ego-personality dissolution and self-realisation, a concept explored in many spiritual traditions and noted by Jung when forming his individuation process (Walker 86), was the basis for the character arcs of all three narrators. I named the three parts of the creative project “avidyā”, “jñānabodhnī” and “prajña”, using the Sanskrit words to reflect the spiritual journey of the characters, and I connected the sacred language to the narrative by incorporating various Vedic references, including Kayla’s “past-life” experiences in Varanasi, Anjali’s commitment to the Hindu faith, and Tess’s account of her alternative timeline at the Pondicherry ashram. Basing my novel on universalist concepts drawn from a variety of spiritual traditions, I proceeded from the assumption that all life is interdependent, be it human or non-human. Conveying the subjective experience of alternative life forms in written human language, however, proved difficult. I began with “non-ordinary” human experiences, such as past lives, shamanic journeying and other mystical experiences, and then explored animal viewpoints to prepare the reader for an even greater leap from the limited perspective of the third-dimensional Earth individual to the broader perspective of the multidimensional Terran collective.
While I am influenced by Huxley’s novel of ideas, where characters act as the representations of their beliefs and are used by the author to examine philosophical and esoteric concepts (see Huxley, Point Counter Point), I have been flexible in this approach, preferring aesthetics and empathic character development over didacticism. In Tess’s “cancel culture” chapter, I explored alternative points of view by incorporating belief systems in dialogue with each other in a social climate of polarised opinion and broken public debate. Because this chapter was set in the mundane world, realistic action and well-rounded characters were paramount to preserve the atmosphere of the narrative. In Kayla’s later chapter inside the labyrinth, where she discusses the nature of reality with her Terran soul council, the difficulty with Huxley’s technique becomes even more apparent. I found it almost impossible to balance didactic ideas with the sense of wonder and surprise I was striving to achieve. The process detracted from the characters, and they began to function simply as a mouthpiece. Even though the souls in the labyrinth were connected, individual personality (a third-dimensional ego-construct) was supposed to be fading by this stage of the narrative and it was perhaps not as important to distinguish between the individual voices as it might otherwise have been, I changed my approach to focus once again on character and voice, realising that re-enchantment requires more than the intellectual expression of ideas.
My narrative begins with the contemporary first-person voices of three sympathetic protagonists, Jordy and his sisters, Kayla and Tess. When Kayla later describes their shared childhood, her viewpoint shifts to a memory or dream state, and her language becomes more immediate. The thoughts and perceptions of the child render the character’s subjective experience and draw the reader into her world (or possible worlds).
Kayla’s language fragments as she drifts deeper into the dream state, capturing both her romantic perspective and her sensation of drifting out of the mundane world:
The colours swirl and change they seep out of my mind and into the tiny room brushing against my skin winding around my body drawing me back into the past.
Breathe, Kayla … Slow, deep breaths.
When I open my eyes, the narrow bed in my little house on Waratah Street is gone and I’m there eight years old standing at the edge of the tailings pond in my ragged pyjamas
the ghost trees watch over me dead and twisted
Jordy’s old t-shirt flaps against the barbed-wire fence
the yellow moon shines in the water
As her focus shifts to her apparent past lives, Kayla narrates her experiences in an adult voice, with more reflection and self-awareness. She then switches back to her eight-year-old mind, with a direct and less self-conscious voice. There is a brief transition to the adult present, a distraction which shows the reader that Kayla still has some control over her experience, and then back to the eight-year-old moment, ephemeral and fragmented. At this point, the reader is right inside the child’s thoughts as she runs through the darkness to escape the “monsters”. The section finishes with the more adult voice relaying the remainder of the evening’s events and concluding there is “something wrong with me”.
Despite Kayla’s fears and the disparaging comments of her siblings, she is presented as a reliable narrator who believes the truth of the experiences she relates. Her mother, though less reliable, supports Kayla’s reliability with her unwavering faith in her daughter’s stories and with her early comments to the doctor in Karrikan:
“Kayla has always told the truth,” she said. “From the time she was very little. Always. Even when the other kids teased her and made her cry. And I don’t believe for a second that these experiences are a fantasy. She speaks Hindi, for God’s sake.”
It is difficult to argue that Kayla’s past lives are a fantasy when she returns from her experiences with phrases and words of Irish Gaelic, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Tamil, Wiradjuri, Hindi, and other relevant languages. I employed these languages throughout the novel, defining the words where necessary, to enrich the narrative and make the characters more believable. Similarly, I used this technique to authenticate the extraterrestrial experiences in the latter part of the project, to the extent of having Uncle Bill teach Jordy a sixth-dimensional Miyayan light language:
I’m desperately grasping for meaning. I know that naramil is a verb and it means literally “do just the one-real-god-in-all’s zone of very good understanding of reams of information” (whatever that means); and Sarem means “of Saren”, Od means “like” or “of”, and nimemil means “courageous heart”.
Caracciolo writes that “we shouldn’t downplay the role artistic creativity has in exploring the limits of our imagination, and in bringing us closer—through linguistic, stylistic, and narrative inventiveness—to what we take to be non-ordinary forms of experience” (42). He argues that through manipulation of “our phenomenological and folk-psychological competence”—in other words, our familiarity with other minds—“such stories can create the illusion that it is possible to engage with—and experience the world through— mental processes radically different to ours, such as those of nonhuman animals or alien creatures” (43). Caracciolo refers to Herman’s analysis (“Storyworld/Umwelt”) of how stories can connect the human and the non-human, and supports his argument with a close reading of “The Night Face Up”, a story first published in 1956 by Julio Cortázar about a man who fades in and out of consciousness after a motorcycle accident, at the same time having lucid “dreams” that he is an ancient Indio being hunted by Aztecs in the forest. As the story progresses, the reader’s imaginative engagement with the first-person narrator’s mind gradually leads us from the initial assumption that the Indio experience is a dream, through a period of uncertainty, to arrive at the disturbing realisation that the protagonist is in fact the Indio who is dreaming about the twentieth-century motorcyclist (Cortázar).
Kayla’s narration follows a similar trajectory. When she describes her childhood and the “past lives” she is experiencing, the events are depicted as a series of turns, which the local doctor diagnoses as epilepsy and attempts to treat with mood-stabilising anticonvulsant drugs. The defamiliarised text could be explained away easily at this early stage as “dreams, fantasies, or hallucinations”, the first strategy that Jan Alber suggests readers will take when confronted with “unnatural scenarios” (82). In these sections, I avoided capitalisation and punctuation, preferring a more informal structure. I adopted the same technique that Toni Morrison uses in her 1987 novel Beloved to convey the thoughts of her protagonist’s ghostly daughter of the same name:
I am alone I want to be the two of us I want the join I come out of blue water after the bottoms of my feet swim away from me I come up I need to find a place to be the air is heavy I am not dead I am not there is a house there is what she whispered to me I am where she told me I am not dead I sit the sun closes my eyes when I open them I see the face I lost Sethe’s is the face that left me Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile her smiling face is the place for me it is the face I lost she is my face smiling at me (106)
Like Beloved’s, Kayla’s thoughts are conveyed in fractured prose, spaced without punctuation to provide textual interest and to indicate that she is experiencing something out of the ordinary. This is where the similarities end. The language in Beloved is repetitive and urgent: “I am not dead I am not […] I am not dead”. The child longs to be reunited with her mother. Her thoughts become more desperate and malevolent as the story progresses and, when she later appears to her family as a young woman, her voice is calculating and obsessive. Morrison uses the fractured language to indicate the supernatural otherness of her character, but the child’s mind is firmly attached to this world. By contrast, Kayla’s voice is dreamlike and vague, fragmenting to reflect the mystical experiences that take her beyond the rational mind and out of the mundane world:
[…] no brother no sister no barbed-wire fence no muddy lake filled with monsters
only silence pure and absoluteand that vast
seemingly infinite
space
I employed the same fragmented language technique in later scenes where Tess describes her shamanic journeys—accessed first by dancing in the park and later through the ingestion of acacia tea—which could also be viewed “within a realistic framework” (Caracciolo 44) as drug-altered states of mind. As the narrative progresses and such experiences become more comprehensive, the language is no longer fragmented. The seemingly unnatural experiences become a normal part of the characters’ everyday world and it is not as easy to dismiss them as fantasy. Instead, the reader is forced to consider the possibility that the “ordinary” worldview in the first part of the narrative is only one version of the truth.
In the process of leading the reader from dreams and hallucinations to shamanic journeying and psychedelic drug trips to alternative perspectives of reality, I experimented with free verse to convey the animal mind, drawing on the ephemeral, sense-based language of poetry to communicate non-human experience. The first instance of this in the text is the shamanic experience in the park, where Tess sees the world through the eyes of a spirit eagle:
The mood of this passage is tribal and earthy, with the mention of “white bones”, “drops of blood in the dirt” and “the drums”. While a shaman might shapeshift into the form of their spirit or totem animal, they generally retain their human mind and do not become that animal (see Harner, ch. 4). Thus, Tess narrates her shamanic experience from a human perspective rather than through the mind of the eagle. Later in the text, Tess and Harry discuss the differences between shamanism and therianism, priming the reader for the deeper anamorphic experiences that lie ahead. While Harry insists he has the soul of a tiger, Tess notes the obvious difficulties inherent in this statement: “How does he know? I mean, how do you get inside the head of another species? Do tigers even think the way we do? I have enough trouble getting inside the head of other humans, let alone a wild animal”.
As the narrative progresses, however, it becomes more difficult for the reader to naturalise such experiences, signalling that they might in fact be glimpses of other worlds rather than the fantasies of a distorted mind. The fragmentation of the language in Tess’s shamanic experiences echoes the earlier fragmentation of Kayla’s language during her “past-life” episodes and her other, more numinous, experiences. In part 2 of the narrative, the language is further defamiliarised to prepare the reader for the transition of all three narrators to alternative dimensions of consciousness. I have taken my cue from Les Murray and his poems “The Cows on Killing Day”, “Pigs” and “Shoal”, each written from a different first-person (first-animal?) collective consciousness. In “The Cows on Killing Day”, Murray writes from both the whole herd perspective, “All me”, and the individual cow’s perspective, “One me”, shifting from cow to cow: “Me, old and sore-boned”, “Me, that other me”. He describes the everyday world as he imagines a cow might see it:
All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining.
All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling still from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out.
(Learning Human 112)
In his 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” American philosopher Thomas Nagel argues that consciousness is subjective and the only way to know what it is like to be a bat is to be a bat. In Nagel’s view, a bat’s consciousness cannot be reduced to a description of its physical and mental processes because it is unique to that creature’s state of being. Murray may well have been responding to this when he wrote the poem “Bats’ Ultrasound” in his invented onomatopoeic bat language:
ah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?
O’er our ur-area (our era aye
ere your raw row) we air our array,
err, yaw, row wry—aura our orrery, our errie ü our ray, our arrow.
(Learning Human 108)
Murray’s poem does nothing to refute Nagel’s argument, but it does illustrate how a writer might experiment with sound and form to depict non-human communication.
Ted Hughes is another writer who attempts to take his reader inside the animal mind, regarding the journey as a means of healing spiritual wounds and comparing the “fundamental poetic quest” with the healing crisis that Mircea Eliade claims is universally experienced in shamanic traditions (Schuchard 62). Hughes evokes mythical animal experiences in his collections The Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal and Wodwo, using his “animalizing imagination” to examine the human condition and search for spiritual healing in a more instinctive realm (Bleakley 79). Some scholars argue that the progression of Hughes’s work through these three collections, from a “taut, terse” mimetic style to free verse with “irregular stanzas and irregular punctuation”, reflects the poet’s journey into the human unconscious and the “endless and unanswered questions” he still has at its completion (Hong 50). “The Thought-Fox” (Collected Animal Poems 54), one of Hughes’s earliest animal poems, takes the reader from the poet’s imagination (“I imagine this midnight moment’s forest”) to a sense of the mythical (“Something more near // Though deeper within darkness // Is entering the loneliness”) before leading us from a delicate glimpse of the fox—its nose, its eye and its paw prints in the snow—to its overwhelming physical presence, “a sudden sharp hot stink”, and then back into “the dark hole” of the poet’s head.
Like Hughes’s, my aim was to explore the transition between the human mind and the instinctive animal consciousness, following each of my narrators beyond their ego-personality and into other modes of existence. Kayla’s transition into the ant mind is one example. The passage was not written to stand alone, as “The Thought-Fox” or Murray’s cow and bat poems do, but to provide contrast with the seemingly mundane sections in the overall work. By the end of the ant passage, Kayla’s human thoughts and memories emerge from the collective sense-based observations of the hive mind, creating the sensation that she is shifting between different states of perception:
we six-legs hunt for odours stacked like leaves
we lick sweet droplets of greenfly-sugar
and pincer-cling to slender branches, drunk on honeydew
[…]
the track twists along the creek bank, past pebble mountains, through clumps of white-tipped blady grass until
we climb the vast grey roots, up and up and
a spark of memory
smoke choking, flames too bright
the place where a woman
danger, return to the nest head count, leave no one behind
where a woman dances
Tess has a similar sense-based experience when she drinks acacia tea and enters the snake mind. Like Kayla, she becomes completely immersed in the instinctive animal mind, evoked by free verse and simple alliteration, before her rational human mind re-emerges to analyse and comment on the situation in regular prose:
I am no longer me. I am lirru …
hissa hiss slip slither
slow paths soft
sand beneath snake belly
stalking long-haired rats
sliding over
rising hillocks slipping through
spiny-leafed spinifex
hot sun on cool skin
sensuous
satisfied
These shamanic and animalistic experiences are a precursor to the later multidimensional and extraterrestrial experiences of the narrators, and the use of similar language techniques prepares the reader to suspend their disbelief and follow the narrators into alternative states of consciousness.
Putting aside the ongoing debate about the nature of consciousness itself, I rely on Caracciolo’s point that even if Nagel is right and we can never truly experience the perspective of another creature, artistic creativity has a role to play in imagining the consciousness of others, both human and non-human (42). Thalia Field demonstrates this by “developing a narratology beyond the human” in her polygeneric text Bird Lovers, Backyard (Herman, “Hermeneutics” 3). This experimental work features, among a variety of other genres, the story “This Crime Has No Name”, a short fiction narrated posthumously by a sparrow who reads Wittgenstein and writes in scientific terms. Field, a practising Buddhist, experiments with different techniques to reveal the connection between the human and animal worlds, and to illustrate the limitations of our anthropomorphic vision. She describes her “organicist” approach to writing as “a way of waking mindfully into an inseparable world” (8).
In his science-fiction novella “Story of Your Life” (1998) Ted Chiang takes the study of linguistics out of this world, exploring how language might function in other dimensions. Chiang provides a thorough and highly technical analysis of the extraterrestrial “heptapod” language and explains how it differs from our language, but he does not make any attempt to write from the heptapod point of view, and even though he appears to take his inspiration from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (1940), which suggests that language shapes our ideas and the way we view the world, his narrator Dr Louise Banks acknowledges that she does not experience reality the way a heptapod does: “My mind was cast in the mold of human, sequential languages, and no amount of immersion in an alien language can completely reshape it” (Arrival 166). Occasionally, however, Dr Banks, a linguist who is recruited by the military to decipher the heptapod language, has “glimpses when Heptapod B truly reigns” and she “experiences past and future all at once” and perceives “that entire epoch as a simultaneity” (167). In part 2 of my novel, I attempted to give the reader glimpses of Terran consciousness by having each narrator switch to their fifth-dimensional Terran voice in short passages set against the ordinary Earth chapters. I distinguished these passages by employing the same style of lyrical prose and poetic imagery that I used for the other non-ordinary experiences. My aim, by the end of the work, was to give the reader a clear signal that every instance of this type of narration could be interpreted as a glimpse into an alternative reality rather than into the fantasies of an unhealthy or drug-affected mind.
The Terran passages are written in a loose, unstructured form, switching from the individual voices of Kayla, Jordy and Tess to the collective voice of all three narrators, who describe their shared thoughts, feelings and perceptions of the world. It is challenging to write from a perspective so foreign that the ordinary rules of time and space no longer apply. Ursula Le Guin provides a useful example in “The Shobies’ Story”, where she employs the third-person internal focalisation of a range of different characters, including Gveter, the “only Cetian in the crew”. Le Guin writes: “Gveter perceived nothing. Unduring a nonperiod of no long, he perceived nothing was had happening happened that had not happened” (Outer Space 91). Le Guin’s story centres around the crew of an intergalactic spaceship called “the Shoby” and their first attempt to “churten” on a test flight from Ve Port to the brown planet. To use this new transportation technology, each member of the crew must consciously perceive themselves as “transilient—as being in the other place—the destination” (94). During the churten process, the crew’s consensus “reality” is destabilised, and each character sees the world differently. They discover that the only way to churten back to Ve Port is to tell their individual stories until the narrative emerges as a cohesive whole, thereby restoring stability and reconstructing consensus “reality”. The most striking thing about this story for my purposes is how the rhythm and pacing of the narrative changes to reflect the destabilisation and subsequent reconstruction of consensus “reality”.
This is not the only work in which Le Guin uses rhythm to achieve a specific effect. She notes that when she was writing her novel Tehanu the story came in flights and demanded she be outdoors. She thought of the work as “riding the dragon” (Wave in the Mind 183). It is perhaps not surprising that Tehanu has been described as “a restless book with very strange pacing” (Walton), with many scholars arguing that it offers the reader a more challenging and contemplative journey than Le Guin’s earlier Earthsea books. In The Wave in the Mind, Le Guin quotes Virginia Woolf (Letter 1618): “But telling the story is a matter of getting the beat—of becoming the rhythm, as the dancer becomes the dance” (180). Le Guin attempts to explain this by analysing extracts from the works of Woolf, Tolkien, Austen and other writers, aiming to be “scientific” but concluding that “Woolf was right, that every novel has its characteristic rhythm. And if the writer hasn’t listened for the rhythm and followed it, the sentences will be lame, the characters will be puppets, the story will be false. And if the writer can hold to that rhythm, the book will have some beauty” (183).
The Terran sections in my novel offer the reader a change of pace within the narrative, transitioning to a more lyrical prose to reflect the fluid, sensual nature of the Terran experience:
I rest inside water molecules as they tumble from the silver spout. I am vaporised, dissolved in droplets of steam. I hold seed-memory, green leaves ready to sprout in black moist soil. I move through moments, through possibilities, through time-stamped universes, to step into my being at the Eco-Centre, where we work in labs to study fungi living symbiotically with plants. Warm hot growth in small dark boxes. Sweet earth smell. Taste and touch of smooth grey flesh.
I wrote the Terran passages outside, sitting on a fallen tree beside the river. As I wrote I saw the world differently, I saw people differently, and I was filled with hope. I heard the Terran voices in my mind and, unlike the other parts of the work, which I thought about and wrote deliberately, I found that I could only write these sections when I let go and “became the dance”. Brian Attebery writes that the “eccentric viewpoints sought by fantasists” are “enabling mechanisms, ways of evading the rational censor, so that our own tribal storytellers can resume their proper function, reclaim their unique discourse, and recapture the modern world for the imagination” (Strategies 141). When I let myself go and wrote from the heart, I found this to be true.
In editing the Terran sections, I again became the dancer, using a different font in solid blocks of text to evoke a futuristic feel and to capture the sense that the events and world described are a singularity, packed with many layers. Apart from the Terran voices, there are only two other instances in the novel that I believe could be enhanced by experimental typography: the reproduction of digital communications, which I employed to indicate a shift from the narrator of that part of the story to the narrator of the specific message; and the voice of the seventh-dimensional oversoul, which Kayla channels on Terra. I would like to see some form of visual marker for these sections in the published novel, particularly to emphasise the shifts in paradigm. I am, however, conscious of book designer and scholar Zoë Sadokierski’s view that if visual techniques are employed, it should be done carefully to avoid breaking the reader’s immersion in the story (“Typographic”). One case in point is Max Porter’s 2019 novel Lanny, in which he experiments with typography to evoke the otherness of Dead Papa Toothwort, a mythical forest being. The italics and uneven lines in the text distinguish Dead Papa Toothwort’s chapters and illustrate how the mythical forest being hears the mingled voices of the ordinary people in his small English village. While this makes the work unique and adds textual interest, it could be seen as distracting by a reader less comfortable with such overt visual signifiers.
A similar issue arises when developing languages for multidimensional/extraterrestrial characters. Science fiction and fantasy writers are sometimes guilty of using invented words that are impossible to pronounce and ultimately detract from the story. By contrast, a carefully constructed language or a strategically placed “alien” word can enliven the text and add colour and richness to the work. As with the defamiliarisation techniques discussed above, the challenge for the author is to employ the available literary tools without drawing too much attention to their artifice.
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