SOURCE: "Last Orders and First Principles for the Interpretation of Aldiss's Enigmas," in Reflections on the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Fourth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, edited by Michael R. Collings, Greenwood Press, 1986, pp. 69-78.

[In the following essay, Smith explains how Aldiss's "Enigma" stories in Last Orders provide insight into his theories of science fiction.]

Brian Aldiss writes himself into the last part of "Journey to the Heartland," the concluding story in Last Orders, as the subject of the third interview with characters and author about the story. As Author, he offers a pair of alternate endings: one a "sad . . . non-sf ending," the other a happy ending appropriate to science fiction.¹ He comments, apropos of the second ending, that many science fiction stories end that way: "the screwy ideas, instead of being certifiable, turn out to mirror true reality. The hero is proved right and everyone else is proved wrong, from Aristotle onwards. Paranoia triumphs, logic is defeated. That's one of the reasons why outsiders believe sf to be a load of nonsense" (p. 220). When Aldiss-the-Interviewer objects that the character whose madness would thus triumph is only interpreting dreams, Aldiss-the-Author responds that "interpretation is everything—and not merely in my story" (p. 221).

When an author like Aldiss interviews himself at the end of one of his stories, provides two endings, and insists upon the primacy of interpretation, readers do well to take him at his word and reread his stories with new attentiveness to critical method. Aldiss's suggestion led me to read and reread Last Orders (1977), a collection of fourteen mutually referential, reflexive, self-aware fictions concerned with the interplay of reality and artifice; its structure and content suggest not only a method of reading and interpreting the text, but also a theory about science fiction.

I base my approach to Last Orders on the enabling assumptions of pragmatic and inductive criticism: first, that we are not solipsists, but a community of readers who agree that we can read and interpret the same text; second, that the goal of critical reading is to produce hypotheses that propose ways of trying to find and understand the unity of structure and intended meaning in any text, especially in a collection like this one. Such interpretive hypotheses might also suggest ways of understanding the collection itself as part of the author's oeuvre. Further, I assume that as readers and critics we bring to our reading and hypotheses important information, ideas, attitudes, and expectations about an author or genre as well as about modern literature and its social and cultural contexts. These two complementary approaches, first inward through close heuristic analysis of structure, and then outward by means of the identification and comparative interpretation of allusive references, can be only briefly demonstrated here.

A reader's first exploration of a text provides the occasion for inductive analysis of structure and of cumulative revelations or perceptions of continuities in ideas, characterization, or structures. This kind of heuristic, inward reading tests analytical expectations and responses against a text's later revelations, and, when applied to Last Orders, it provides the grounds for asserting that the collection suggests its own method of reading.

To begin at the beginning, inspection of the contents and acknowledgments pages for clues about the structure of Last Orders reveals not only the presence of an "Author's Note" followed by the title story in the significant position of beginning the collection, but also the numerical listing of several stories called "Enigmas" (one through five) among the other nine unnumbered stories. A comparison of the dates of original publication found on the acknowledgments page with their arrangement in Last Orders shows that the stories are not chronologically ordered. The ninth and tenth stories were the earliest published (1973), while the second story was the last to be published (1977). One may infer that a purposive structuring has occurred, and that the arrangement from first to last constitutes an interpretable design.

The "Author's Note" implies both the thematic coherence of Last Orders as a collection of stories and the awareness that it should be read and understood from the start as exhibiting self-consciousness of its place as a text within its genre of science fiction. Cast in the form of a parable, the "Author's Note" recounts a meeting, in a small room crowded with drinking, smoking, laughing people, between a well-dressed man and another man playing sentences on a piano-sized typewriter (p. 8). The sharp dresser represents the mainstream reader, the outsider; when he asks why the typewriter player turns out "that fantasy stuff," he provokes a statement about genre and intentions: "I believe in what I do. This is where I sing the science fiction blues" (p. 9). The sf-blues player recognizes that his genre is out of the mainstream, and that his own work creates offense among readers, but he prefers to operate from an antagonistic position. When the well-dressed man objects that people prefer to be made happy and "to hear about real things," the typewriter player responds that readers can't have it both ways: "See, my stories are about human woes, non-communication, disappointment, endurance, acceptance, love. Aren't those things real enough? Nobody's fool enough to imagine that any near-future developments will obliterate them. Change there will be. . . . But the new old blues sing on for ever . . ." (p. 9).

The initials "B. W. A." at the bottom of the page, as well as the heading "Author's Note," make the identification of Aldiss with the typewriter player obvious and necessary. Yet the choice of parable rather than direct statement implies that the reader must be aware of the function of its narrative form. Despite this attempt at distancing, if analysis and interpretation of the author's parable seem easy and obvious, they also invite the reader into the work to test the parable's meaning against the stories to come: will they constitute the fictional form of the new-old science fiction blues? Will they be written in a style that offends? Will they be about the real things in human experience which outlast near-future developments? Will they differ from both mainstream fiction and ordinary science fiction? Such questions and expectations should remind the reader that there are both inward and outward kinds of analysis implied here: inward technical analysis of structure, based on close reading, comparative thinking, and induction; outward comparative and judgmental analysis based on knowledge of Aldiss's other works, of the genre, and of modern mainstream fiction.

The bar or party setting for the "Author's Note" seems to mirror a particularly modern milieu: it is full of people who "knew the world was going to end next week" (p. 9). There is a continuity in the apolcalyptic situation extending between the "Author's Note" and the collection's eponymous opening story, which takes its title from the English bartenders' cry at closing time. Drinking up at the end of the world is precisely what the three characters in the story do. Aldiss sketches briefly some of the components of a cosmic collision story like H. G. Wells's "The Star" then overturns the generic expectations by refusing to complete the plot pattern implied by the story's exposition. There is no account of a planetary disaster followed by a Wellsian meditation on life as viewed from the cosmic perspective; nor is there a Heinleinesque adventure in which Man, aided by technology and the survival instinct, triumphs over Nature. The opening seven or eight paragraphs establish the situation: the moon, fissured and shattered, is approaching Earth, and Jim, a capable police captain on a rescue mission, is picking up the last remaining inhabitants of the planet. He finds two people chatting in a bar—they are happy to talk and tell stories, and they do not find the threat of the world ending significant enough to want seriously to be rescued. They are average citizens of a future world: an extraterrestrial-swimming-pool engineer and an older unmarried woman. Because of their ordinariness they would be unlikely characters in most action-adventure science fiction—they are more like the ordinary people who appear in the fiction of Dickens, Kafka, and Dick.

As it becomes clear that the Captain's rescue mission will fail because the victims prefer drinking and conversation, and as the Captain is drawn into their comfortable way of talking and storytelling, "Last Orders" becomes an overture or fable that enacts the subversion of the standard themes, plots, and characters of science fiction. The attraction of companionship, storytelling, stories, and their subjects (frustrated romance, works of art, the patterns of cracks in a ceiling, maps, an antique chest with a secret drawer in which a woman hid a secret diary) suggest that readers of the remaining stories should not expect science fiction's stock in trade, but should prepare for the interpretation of patterns, of maps, fissures, cracks, of the meaning of secret diaries in secret drawers, of the significance of art masterpieces such as Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling (in Houston), and of copies of art (the engineer has built an off-Earth swimming pool with a million-piece mosaic copy of Michelangelo's "Creation" at the bottom).

If one is drawn away from generic expectations of apocalyptic disaster or adventurous rescue, and if one goes willingly into the bar with Captain Jim, and finally if one is content to take a drink and enter the back parlor for more stories, then the text has subverted the reader, too.

The end of the world still threatens, but it is frozen, incomplete, a looming iceberg rather than an irresistible process. Like the swimming-pool engineer, fascinated by old works of art in new settings, one must also look for the patterns and cracks, the fissures and indeterminacies that suggest maps of meaning and unexpected ways of thinking about science fiction.

Thus the "Author's Note" and "Last Orders" suggest the outline of a heuristic interpretive approach that itself will be modified by other stories in the collection, beginning with the next fable, "Creatures of Apogee," which beautifully complements the previous tale of the end of the world as faced (or ignored) by three storytelling humans. In "Creatures of Apogee" three aliens contemplate the severe, cyclical, climatic changes (prefiguring those described in Aldiss's Helliconia novels) about to occur as their planet approaches its sun along an extended elliptical orbit. Their race will have to retire from the surface for many generations, to be replaced by the creatures of perihelion, another form of planetary life that lies dormant and then revives to live out its active generations when the annual great changes occur. While the three humans of "Last Orders" retire to tell stories, the three aliens retire "to rest, to sleep, to dream" (p. 27). If "Last Orders" can be interpreted as a story that subverts the expectations of science fiction readers for action and adventure and suggests that readers think about the fictionality of what they read as well as the function and value of storytelling in everyday life, then "Creatures of Apogee" complements "Last Orders" interpretively, too, because just as the humans go to tell stories, the aliens go to dream.

Dream and storytelling both involve creative and interpretive manifestations of the imagination or subconscious mind. Both modes reflect and reify a reality known to the dreamer or storyteller, just as the collection, Last Orders, reflects and reifies in its stories a reality known to Brian Aldiss and frozen in words for his readers. His stories and dreams ask us to reflect a new ways about the reality we share with the author, and also about the ways we capture that reality in stories, dreams, and even stories-as-dreams or dreams-as-stories.

Aldiss, who has shown his fascination with the theory of fiction and with dreams in many ways and in many texts—Report on Probability A being best known in this respect to his readers—opens Last Orders with three suggestive and instructive pieces that call upon the reader to think not only about life under the threatening conditions of potential environmental, cosmic, or nuclear disaster—the end of the world—which seem to overshadow us in the second half of this century, but also about the ways in which we write, dream, and read stories, especially within the genre of science fiction. The topics of dreaming and storytelling extend throughout most of Last Orders, and one inward approach to analysis of the collection would be to continue testing, serially and heuristically, my hypothesis about the stories as self-conscious fictions.

Had we but world enough and time, this kind of criticism were no crime; but the consequence of what might be called (with apologies to Andrew Marvell) "vegetable criticism"—the close, inductive analysis of structure and meaning—is that it can "grow / Vaster than empires and more slow." The remaining stories in Last Orders could be analyzed and interpreted in the same inward and fruitful way, but there are so many additional avenues outward, so many correspondences of topics, ideas, characters, and techniques, such a complex texture of allusions and cross references, of reflexive dreaming, and of self-conscious humor, that they can only be mentioned and sampled briefly here. I will concentrate on those aspects that reveal the mutually reflexive relationship of artifice and reality already shown in the first three pieces.

The concern for artifice may be found not only in the structure of parallelisms and correspondences related to storytelling, dreaming, and interpretation; it is also present in the texture of allusions to some of Aldiss's other fictions, to fiction and poetry by other writers, and to paintings and painters. Such allusions, like the presence of Aldiss as the subject of the interview which concludes Last Orders, insist on interpretation of fiction as artifice, but simultaneously force recognition of "The Uncomfortable Pause Between Life and Art," the apposite title of an Aldiss story collected in The Moment of Eclipse (1970). Not only is the title relevant, but so is the story itself: Aldiss appears as the narrator and directs the story to an audience unfamiliar with his status as science-fiction writer (it was originally published in Queen, a British magazine aimed at an affluent general readership). Aldiss describes himself as having just viewed an exhibition of William Holman Hunt's paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and he mentions, "Since there is no danger that any of my present readers have heard of Report on Probability A, I might as well say that one of my themes was a paralysis of time, which I pretended to detect and find exemplified in the anecdotalism of this canvas [Hunt's The Hireling Shepherd], and similar Victorian paintings."²

References to Hunt's paintings in Aldiss's fiction suggest how he uses fiction to comment upon and remake art, just as artists often choose moments from fiction as subjects for illustration. Hunt's paintings appear several times in Last Orders, most notably in "Enigma 3: The Aperture Moment," a set of three stories in which the relationship of art to insanity and to self-knowledge is juxtaposed with ideas of frozen time and animated paintings, especially Hunt's The Awakening Conscience. The same story includes the animating of another Victorian painting, Sir Edward Poynter's Faithful Unto Death, which has an apocalyptic personal resonance for Aldiss—he recalls it in the opening paragraph of an essay, "The Fireby-Wireby Book": "My maternal grandmother's home was in Peter-borough, a prim house built of Fletton brick. . . . Upstairs was a forbidding picture which made the way to bed terrible: Sir Edward Poynter's Faithful Unto Death, showing the Roman centurion at Pompeii about to be engulfed by lava, while the population fled."³

Aldiss suggests interpretations for the Hunt and Poynter paintings, and others, when he fictionally animates them into new contexts in Last Orders. That such interpretations beget others should also be expected: for example, Poynter's centurion about to perish nobly at Pompeii suggests Captain Jim of the Space Police in "Last Orders," and also, therefore, all the dutiful heroes of science fiction who are subverted in Aldiss's fiction. There is another correspondence: Captain Jim retires into frozen time at the end of "Last Orders," figuratively to hear told the stories that make up the rest of the volume; conversely, the centurion in Poynter's painting is animated by the artist of "The Aperture Moment" as the artist's way of escaping from his conviction that time is frozen. Hildegarde Neverson, or Neff as he is also named, claims that humans live inside an iceberg of time suspended between the temporal closure of one universe and the beginning of another. Neff imagines that a new Big Bang will start the cosmic clock again; "Till then we retain in our heads the broken dreams of a past universe" Last Orders, (p. 103). When another character asks the artist whether he will be freed from the ice when his paintings move, he answers, enigmatically, "A start has to be made somewhere" (p. 101). These characters provide, in my interpretation, a true estimation of themselves: they are frozen in Aldiss's language; if the fiction (and art works in fiction) that contains them like an iceberg could be animated, then the characters, like Pirandello's famous Six, would begin to live.

The metaphor of frozen life and the paradox of life in an iceberg are parts of another network of allusions in Last Orders. These, too, suggest the paradoxical artificiality and reality of fiction and they imply similarities between Last Orders itself and the "artifiction" written by the artist of "The Aperture Moment," Hildegarde Neff. Significantly, Aldiss describes this mode of writing as containing many simulacra; as in "artification," so in Last Orders, where the British novelist Anna Kavan exists as a simulacrum, an image or semblance of her real self. Aldiss adapts the title and central metaphor of Kavan's last novel, Ice (1967) to his metaphor of frozen time and frozen life. Kavan, who died of a drug overdose in 1968, is resurrected into a kind of shadow life in Aldiss's fiction. She appears in five stories in this collection, and Ice is recommended by one character to another in a sixth. Her resurrection is appropriately fictional, since her own name was a fictional construct uniting one of her character's names with the name of Franz Kafka. Named Helen Woods at birth, she legally changed her name to Anna Kavan after writing six novels. She also dyed her dark hair to the same platinum blonde color that she gave the hair of her unnamed female protagonist in Ice. It figures constantly in the novel's imagery as a correlative of the metaphoric power and presence of ice. Aldiss selected Ice as the best science fiction novel of 1967 and met Kavan not long before her death. She was surprised to learn that she had been writing science fiction. In Billion Year Spree Aldiss describes Ice as "its own self, mysterious, in some ways unsatisfactory, an enigma—like all the greatest science fiction, approaching despair; but in its acceptance of the insoluble, also full of a blind force much like hope."⁴

In Last Orders Aldiss animates the simulacrum of Anna Kavan variously as writer, lover, and object of desire; the stories sometimes refer to her as having died in an automobile accident on the ice, recalling the conclusion of Ice itself, wherein the two major characters are in a car driving fatalistically through a "cold world of ice and death."⁵ In such stories she becomes what she intended for the heroine of Ice to be, an archetype of desire. At least, so the characters in the closing story of Last Orders, "Journey to the Heartland," interpret her: Alice recommends and offers to lend Ice to Rose-Jean, suggesting that if she reads it, she will "understand what I mean by the pursuit of archetypes" (p. 206).

Kavan's fictional persona in life and her life as transformed and idealized in fiction are both reflected in the way Aldiss develops the enigmatic style of the fictions in Last Orders. If Ice to him seems "an enigma" worth imitating, then the influence of Kavan appears both as homage to her fictional techniques and as resurrection of her simulacrum in fictional alternate identities in the enigmatic stories where Aldiss animates her character.

Enigmas, technically, are short prose or verse compositions in which something is described by intentionally obscure metaphors—in other words, they are obscure or allusive compositions like riddles or parables. The adaptation of the form to science fiction is one of Aldiss's significant accomplishments; he has brought enigmas from the fantastic yet everyday worlds of Kafka and Kavan into the genre, which, at its best, ambiguously and enigmatically exalts and deplores positivistic extrapolation into the ftiture. Aldiss describes his awareness of the form and its users in an afterword originally published with "Enigma 2: Diagrams for Three Stories" when it appeared for the first time in the anthology, Final Stage:

I've been trying recently to construct what, for want of a better word, are called Enigmas. These are slightly surreal escapades grouped in threesomes—a form which provides the chance for cross references and certain small alternatives not always available in one story. I've always admired fiction which avoids glib explanations and espouses the sheer inexplicability of the universe (hence an affection, I suppose, for Hardy, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Kavan); these attempts are dedicated to the enigmatic universe in which we find ourselves.⁶

The three parts of "Enigma 2" are united, Aldiss says, by a theme of confusion of identity (p. 47); they also are united by concerns for dreaming, for interpreting the meanings of dreams, and for the role of art in culture. Anna Kavan appears in the first and third parts, and the deliberate confusion of her fictional identity with the allusion to her real self and circumstances epitomizes other such deliberate confusions in the three parts. Near the end of the third part, Aldiss includes a meditative section that refers to the problem contained in Kavan's presence and in the title of his earlier short story, "The Uncomfortable Pause Between Life and Art." The section appears as notes for the continuation of the story:

Try to show how difficult life is for people, even for aliens.

How difficult art is. How it dies when reduced to a formula.

How art perhaps should be difficult and not have wide appeal. Even how enigmatic the universe is, full of paradoxes and unpredictable side-effects.

How arbitrary everything is. . . ." (p. 70)

These remarks help elucidate both the enigma and the thematics of deliberate difficulty which are present in Aldiss's work and in his theory of science fiction. Paradoxically, too, Aldiss's enigmas are not so difficult that they cannot be solved or interpreted. There exists in his work as much of an impulse to be understood as to be difficult, and it appears not only in privileged paragraphs that contain key ideas for unlocking enigmas, but also in the networks of allusions within and among his works. The network of references to Anna Kavan remains the most apposite example for Last Orders, since these allusions tie together several stories and since they are also related to a more general thematic concern for artifice and reality, which pervades the collection and extends beyond it to outside texts and art works.

One more significant appearance by Anna Kavan remains to be discussed: she is one of the three characters in "Backwater," the story separating the third and fourth Enigmas in Last Orders. Her presence reaffirms the links between Ice and Last Orders; doing so creates another one of the several fictional lives that Aldiss imagines for her; and, implicitly, suggests comparisons and links to her other lives in other stories and to her own "real" and self-created identities. Here she lives as the lover of an obscure novelist in Yuma, drinking and celebrating life (she has already spoken for death, and has been killed, in "Live? Our Computers Will Do That for Us," the fifth story in Last Orders). She functions in "Backwater" as one of a triad of characters who present views on life, art, and criticism. The other two, the novelist Jimmy Petersen, and the "theories-critic" Frank Krawstadt, carry on a desultory, ironic debate with one another and with Anna. The only one to find what he is searching for is Krawstadt, who has come to Yuma to inspect Petersen's collection of antique twentieth-century pinball machines. Petersen mistakenly believes Krawstadt to be interested in his fiction; when Petersen finds that he is valued only for his collection, he despairs. Anna, in this story impersonating a boozy embodiment of the Life Force, wins Petersen back to an acceptance of his life and work. As he decides that he can continue to write his novel-in-progress, Anna suggests that he name it Now that the Future Is Safely Past. Time, once more, has been frozen, here into an eternal present.

If Anna speaks for life and Petersen for art, Krawstadt represents the critic and historian of twentieth-century culture. According to his "Total Environment" theory, pinball machines and science fiction were two important "reactives" helping to shape the culture of the past: "science fiction began as a palatable way to serve up science-fact to the young, and later spawned futurology and what is now called philofiction. I find, paradoxically, that the most neglected arts are often seen to be the most potent reactives when viewed in the light of my theory" (pp. 131-32).

Anna scoffs at such theories, and Petersen, at this point convinced that Krawstadt wants to "rediscover" his autobiographical novels, scoffs at Krawstadt. At the end of the story, however, with Petersen redeemed from despair, the grouping suggests the kind of science-fictional happy ending Aldiss mentions in the closing interview of Last Orders: Petersen and Anna are ready to continue life and art together, and Krawstadt is upstairs delightedly rummaging through galleries of Ballys, making theories and interpretations out of the artifacts of popular culture. Aldiss's idea of a happy ending, if applied there, would suggest that Krawstadt's critical theory, instead of being certifiable, turns out to "mirror true reality" and to vindicate the practice of serious criticism of pinball machines and of science fiction.

There are constellations of meaning for such critics to trace among the galaxies of delight in Last Orders, those enigmatic triads of "philofiction" or "artifiction" stories which, in turn, contain enigmatic triads of characters (from the three inhabitants of the bar in the title story, to the three aliens in "Creatures of Apogee," to the triads of major characters in "Journey to the Heartland" and "Backwater") Thus Last Orders self-consciously implies a theory of enigmatic science fiction as a genre of literature which both reflects and paralyzes the portents of apocalypse in our time. The stories, considered as the new-old, science fiction blues, capture the themes Aldiss finds important and "real": "Human woes, non-communication, disappointment, endurance, acceptance, love" (p. 9). But Aldiss's experiments with form insure that the stories produce ironies of artifice as well as the joys of discovery when puzzling cracks and fissures in a fictional structure resolve into a map of understanding, or when enigmas are discovered to have a secret drawer in which the author has hidden some pages from a secret diary. Some enigmas defy divination and keep their secrets while in shifting ways the stories present versions and visions of the relationships between life and art, between criticism and fiction, between dreaming and storytelling.

While mysteries will remain unsolved, and critics will differ about proposed readings, there will continue to be a need for interpretation of these enigmas. By positing some first principles for interpretation—both Aldiss's and my own—I have tried to show that the stories in Last Orders can be analyzed inwardly and inductively to adduce from structure their reflexive and enigmatic meanings. I have also tried to show that interpretation may be aided by referring to a texture or network of allusions that extends outward among the stories, outward into Aldiss's fiction and non-fiction, and outward further into other texts and art works. A lengthy commentary that considered simultaneously both internal and external contexts could conceivably account in large measure for the thematic and structural coherences and for the richness of meaning in Last Orders's narrative development, irony, and allusions. But such analysis and interpretation are beyond the scope of this paper, and would perhaps better befit Frank Krawstadt's Total Environment theory of criticism: they would constitute a totality only imaginable in fiction, never achievable in life.

Notes

¹ Brian Aldiss, "Journey to the Heartland," Last Orders and Other Stories (London: Cape, 1977; rpt. London: Panther, 1979), 219. Further references to the Panther paperback edition of Last Orders will be made parenthetically in the text.

² Brian Aldiss, "The Uncomfortable Pause Between Life and Art," The Moment of Eclipse (London: Faber & Faber, 1970; rpt. London: Panther, 1973), 92.

³ Brian Aldiss, "The Fireby-Wireby Book," This World and Nearer Ones (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1979), 143.

⁴ Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (New York: Doubleday, 1973; rpt. New York: Schocken, 1974), 317.

⁵ Anna Kavan, Ice (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 176.

⁶ Brian Aldiss, "Afterword" to "Diagrams for Three Enigmatic Stories," in Final Stage, ed. E. L. Ferman and B. N. Malzberg (New York: Charterhouse, 1974; rpt. New York: Penguin, 1975), 90.