WISH I WAS HERE – M. John Harrison (2023)

“How do you know what to say before you know how to say it?”

I’ve read most of Harrison’s 21st century output, and loved it all – aside from Empty Space, which I DNFed at 60%, and resulted in a fairly lengthy analysis that might interest you if you’re interested in theorizing about literature, genre, deconstruction and science fiction.

I always mean to read something of his 20th century work – his debut appeared in 1971 – but he keeps on publishing new titles. This new book is new indeed: formally inventive. Part memoir, part short fiction, part poetics – with a focus on the latter.

Wish I Was Here contains lucid thoughts about the nature of writing, our culture at large and the function of speculative fiction; but also sharp ruminations on life, growing older and memory, amongst other things. It’s a wonderfully mixed and varied reading experience that frustrated me at times, but which is always imbued with a depth that seems bottomless, steeped in the experience of a life both centered and at the edge of things.

Harrison’s prose is not always easy, but whenever I reread a part I did not get at first, it turned out that I was to blame: there’s nothing in these pages that concentration can’t handle. Moreover, in each case, it turned out that Harrison had found an elegant combination of words to tentatively express something which is hard to express to begin with. Part of Wish I Was Here is about the ineffable – the mystery of life and existence – but not the ineffable as some storified narrative, not the miracle as some event in a causal chain.

So – I’m not ashamed to admit I didn’t get everything, but that doesn’t seem necessary, and I don’t mean this in the way some readers still enjoy certain poems while they don’t get them either. I think that would be the easy way out: approach parts of Wish I Was Here as prose poems. That’s not it. Harrison chiseled his latest from the tremendous amount of notes he made during his life, and it is obvious that some of these notes are private and as such incomprehensible to others – it does not make them poems, even though they are just as composed, contain metaphors too and sound A-okay when read out loud. 

All and all, when I turned the final pages, the book had floored me – even though I hadn’t been aware that there was a fight going on. Not that Harrison is a boxer, a chess player or an existential wrestler. But it is about getting grip – grip while you sit, breathe and read, grip on a bunch of words that signal something.

After the jump, some more.

At the very beginning of the book, still on page one, Harrison describes being disassociated:

There are people who learn to dissociate early – to orbit whatever is happening to them without taking part. By late adolescence, we’re rarely losing height, let alone touching down. Memory never quite works for us. Our distance from events is already too great. I soon discovered that writing things down helps less to close that distance than you’d think. But notes make good source material, and when you keep notebooks they eventually begin to suggest something. About what, is not clear. But something, about something.

There’s the movement of “people” to “we” to “I”. There’s a cluster of metaphors that don’t feel tacked on or just there for mere embellishment. There’s the subject matter of not really fitting into existence, memory, and writing. And there’s the suggestion of something unclear, but there nonetheless.

As has been written before, Harrison likes to stress the novel as an artifact, something produced, written.

Of course, the books themselves became spaces. I think that’s always an error, to allow yourself to regard a book as having an interior, as being a world rather than a written thing.

I don’t agree so categorically: there is middle ground. It can be fun to be transported to another world. It’s not necessarily an error – not all entertainment is bad or politically shallow. But I do agree that the best books – the best works of art and artifice – do indeed do something interesting as a written thing, as something made, as something formal. But that doesn’t mean they can’t become spaces. Immersive literature is only temporary denial of reality, not metaphysics.

So yes, Harrison likes proselytizing about his views on literature, and might come across as a dogmatic, but that’s only a problem if you are the type of person that insists that every time people express an opinion they should start their sentences with “In my view this” or “I feel that”. Harrison is clearly typing about what he likes, and if you can’t take that, why read a book like this at all?

It’s also loud and clear Harrison isn’t the poster boy for mental balance. There’s traces of bipolar disorder, obsession and alienation. I felt pity quite a few times: as in his prose, Harrison seems to have trouble defining who he is, and comes across as a loner. It struck me that hardly any of his friends or loved ones are mentioned, and his life seems to have operated in a kind of social vacuum – at least judging by this vague anti-memoir. I counted the word ‘we’ only 7 times, and ‘our’ only thrice. He seems to have moved a lot, without a tribe – except maybe for fellow climbers, and there’s a great passage where he describes being classless too. Writing seems a method of dealing with anxiety and the repressed anger of not fitting in.

I bought into writing as an escape route rather than an honest admission of what I saw and experienced. By the time I was thirty, this had given rise to a set of internal contradictions and political paradoxes which took some effort to resolve. (…) it was no longer my job to escape, or to yearn, or to facilitate anyone else’s yearnings, including his. My job was to stare grimly at things and write them down. That exercise led only to paradox and guilt; and though it’s a position that still generates conflicts for me, productive conflicts that make writing fun, it’s also an embarrassment.

His mental status notwithstanding, his age – born in 1945 – does give him an interesting perspective on science fiction, having lived and experienced the most dynamic period in human history ever, the period in which abstract thought entered village life.

Are we bored with this old future now? Have we read it all before? Did the fiction that proposed it turn smoothly from a warning into a to-do list? Whose fault is that? It’s not the ideology so much as the lack of imagination. This is it: consumption. This is the offer. This is how it is. This is the sheer inevitability of these goods: an elite who pretend to be populists manage the rest of the population and offer in return this locked-in set of opportunities. This is what we take from you: work all your life. This is what you get in return: the digital funfair and fatty sugared-up meat our people can make look really good. (…) Did you know? Fast smooth things got faster & smoother! (…) If there’s a real age-versus-youth problem – one, that is, which isn’t stoked by middle-aged middle management like any other transient program of divisiveness – it’s this: all our future goals, all our ideas about philosophical and economic goods of the future, were decided seventy or eighty years ago; and, apart from their means of satisfaction, have not changed since.

Both the future and science fiction has led Harrison down, and he writes so almost verbatim. Not only scifi, but Hollywood too, and most other storytelling.

It’s the same old story of telling the story, that’s all the story I get from it. I am deeply dissatisfied by being promised a new story each time but only being told that one.

I guess that disappointment has to do with the pattern recognition faculties that have produced science in the first place.

My idea would be this: human beings, readers of the world and of books, are so used to interpreting events as carriers of a causal narrative or rational argument that they don’t really see the event in itself any more.

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Though causes are everywhere present and dependable, the search for causality is to welter around looking for explanations you can’t have, using epistemologies and ontologies at best provisional. Why waste time, especially in fiction.

And so indeed, Harrison is a mystic.

Immanence: the constant act of interpreting things that weren’t made. The Map Boy says, it’s like the world is a difficult painting of something. It’s the understanding of stuff not directly – not even indirectly, not even one time removed – but by the index of something that might, if you look at it in the right light, be evidence of the possibility of evidence. How do you understand a thing by its shadow when you don’t even know how shadows are thrown?

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There’s so much else to quote from Wish I Was Here, but I’ll stop. Quoting from this book amounts to spoiling it. Besides: these quotes work so much better in their original environment that I’m actually doing them a disservice. So I’ll stop. I don’t want to analyse this book. I just want to proselytize for it.

I might reread it before the year is over.

Highest possible recommendation – among the best books I’ve ever read.

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