THE GREAT BETRAYER



The best novel of dark fiction this year is The Traitor by Michael Cisco. In a world much like our own, in a history much like that of Europe during the great revolutionary year of 1848, two men with the power to eat spirits stage a rebellion against the constraints of everyday life. One man, Wite, become a pure force of nature. The other, Nophtha, allows himself to be captured and explains his betrayal in a journal full of delirious sentences and wild circumstance. Here's a taste:



I will die and die and die but I am ready, I'm going stronger than I came, I will die spitting the saliva of my outrage at them, moreover coughing the bloody pieces of my testament at them, my gentle guards and the soldiers down below, the city all around and the palace out of my sight and their brainless music-box of a King. I won't die cowering I have my Wite and Tzdze Tamt and "blunder" Illan and Voy, Xchte and uncle Heckler and tired dying imaginary Nophtha on the floor writing in his cell and seizing you at the last moment, I'm rising for the last time to seize you for one more moment, the gleam of Wite's spectacles is hovering over your shoulder! No one will be spared, whatever so-called good deeds you've done, your tepidity and every so-called evil soul in the world will be devastated all the same.



In the pseudo-secondary world of The Traitor, Cisco mines and problematizes this anxiety with the aid of the fantastical. What if a man could stand up to the power of the state, thanks to the number of explosive powers he gets from eating spirits? Spirit-eating is big business in the society of The Traitor, as someone has to eat the past in order to make way for the future. The country is under occupation by the Alaks, and Nophtha, then a young outsider in his own culture, has a gift for spirit-earing and is groomed by the occupying force for the occupation. He encounters Wite, a notorious soul-burner (one who eats spirits for his own benefit as opposed to social benefits) and Wite's sisters, with one of whom Nophtha falls in love. But the Alaks aren't about to tolerate a soul-burner running around on the countryside. Not that they have much to say about it. Nohptha, weaker and torn by ill-formed desires and urges thanks to decades of meaningless everyday living on the other hand. The Traitor is a hard book to explain -- it's like Tolstoy and Kafka writing lyrics for Rage Against The Machine -- so I won't bother. Instead, I asked Michael Cisco himself a few questions:



The Traitor is both a prison notebook and a memoir of a person who didn't do much other than follow a messianic figure. Why this structure and why the voice of Nophtha instead of Wite?



The story came to me largely through Nophtha's voice, as a monologue. The content and form where really not distinct. I then discovered Wite through Nophtha, rather than the other way around. Wite isn't self-conscious enough to be much of a narrator for his own life, I thought his mentality was better implied than described, and the distance between him and Nophtha was the most interesting single thing in the story for me. The real question was why Nophtha would follow Wite. I don't want to give the impression that I set out to write about this or that issue; but some 'issues' that preoccupy me will tend to steer stories for me, and I've always been concerned about the ways in which people will follow charismatic leaders even into atrocities, or I could say, the way people will use charismatic leaders to rationalize a desire for atrocity. I didn't write with Notes from Underground in mind, either, but the rough contours of that kind of voice-out-of-a-cave narrative were there around me while I wrote The Traitor.



Is Wite committing his atrocities, or is he a freedom fighter? Why or why not?




Wite evidently acts strictly from impulse; it's not clear whether or not he has any other ideas in mind. Nophtha would say that he doesn't trifle with anything as disgusting as rationalization, ascribing reasons for actions, as if anything as ephemeral and changeable as a reason were necessary or useful. For Nophtha, Wite might as well be a natural force. What Wite is for Wite is for Wite to know. Nophtha's motives are pretty strictly negative. Attack. Destroy. Prevent. What happens afterwards and whether or not that could be called freedom doesn't particularly concern him.



You say that Nophtha only destroys...but he writes the journal that makes up the novel. Is it even possible to destroy without creating something new?



Sure. We could say that the nuclear disarmament movement grows out of Hiroshima, but that movement was not created by the people responsible for that destruction. I'd say it's a matter of life and death, whether destruction is the end, or whether destroying in order to create is the end. Bloom talks about "clearing space" in order to create, but this presumes a prestidigitational creation ex nihilo; I think that arrangements of things are destroyed, and the things themselves put into new arrangements. And some destruction and creation of things happens too.



In the novel, Nophtha is never quite where he thinks he is or where he wants to be, but the point certainly is not that one is somehow condemned to create no matter how destruction-minded one may be. There are ironies in Nophtha's circumstances, but they are aspects of his particular character, and not of any cosmic order. Wite is the much more strictly and purely destructive force.




You often wear your influences on your sleeve - in your collection Secret Hours for example you discuss specific influences of the stories in that collection. In The Traitor, things are a bit more diffuse. We can see Kafka, Robert Aickman, and who else...? What's the literary inspiration?



Thomas Bernhard was by far the preponderant influence on The Traitor. He was an Austrian writer (died in 1989) that I encountered in graduate school; his style I found at first almost entirely opaque, then, abruptly, after about seventy pages or so, something went click! and afterwards everything flowed by easily. Bernhard's best-known novels include The Lime Works, Old Masters, Correction, Extinction, The Loser, and his autobiography is Gathering Evidence. It was his manner of address to the reader and in particular his employment of repetition that most interested me; he has a way of repeating himself with minor variations that makes it seem as if the object of his words is being scrutinized from a variety of angles, like a sculpture. I wasn't thinking much of Kafka, and not of Aickman at all, actually, as I had not yet discovered him. Thomas Ligotti, who is a fellow Bernhardian, said the style reminded him more of Beckett than of Bernhard, I should add, by way of disclaimer. It's not much of a disclaimer, since I rejoice in any comparison to Beckett.



There were some other minor influences, but much of the story, including the background world, had been hovering in various attics of the windmills of my mind for a while by the time I wrote The Traitor.




I think genre literature would benefit by expanding the horizons of its influence and ranging farther afield. This is plainly what Jeff VanderMeer has done with Nabokov and Angela Carter, for example. On the other hand, in many cases one discovers that "serious" writers often wrote what might have, under the conditions of markets other than the ones they knew, been presented to the public as genre fiction. All the better to look at them, then, in order to discover the wider context of imaginative or fantastic literature and the greater array of possibilities that most genre writers aren't bothering to avail themselves of. Of which they aren't bothering to avail themselves.



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Avail yourself of The Traitor today.