If you think that maybe you should get back together with some of your oldest friends, maybe even look up that lover of four, no, six years ago—
If you think that it’s time, finally, to forget your old life and hitchhike out to Minneapolis, say, or Seattle, and find a job, maybe take some classes (starting, you think, with philosophy)—
You lower the soda can to the ground.
And you choose.
CLUB STORY
essay
John Clute
from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: Third Edition (2011–), sf-encyclopedia.com
It was way more than simply gratifying to stand beside Octavia Butler, in one of the goodly as-if worlds we make, and to receive a Solstice Award this year; and I’m very happy consequently to supply a sample of my stuff at Catherine Asaro’s invitation. However. The problem with most of the nonfiction I’ve done is that most of it is in the form of reviews, which get republished elsewhere and which are in any case not entirely right for this context. The problem with most of my nonreview nonfiction pieces is that they are either too narrowly focused, or too long, to belong here—in any case most of the general pieces I’d want to preserve have already been packed into a collection Beccon Publications put out last year, Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm. And the problem with taking something from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, versions of which have taken much of my time for the last 35 years, was that most of what I write there is entries: not quite the thing. But I thought a bit, and realized there were a few, extended entries like Edisonade or Hitler Wins, that might fit. In the end I selected Club Story, an entry (and a tool for describing genre) that has seemed to get bigger (and with more to describe) almost daily.
So before it gets too long, here it is, modestly tampered with for readability outside its initiating context. What I’ve done is mainly remove hyperlink indications from the text. You can assume that any author without birth/death data immediately appended has a linked-to entry in the SFE, and that capitalized words or terms, like Time Opera, link to entries. I’ve also drastically simplified the ascription practice for citing titles and their dates. The piece is divided into two parts. Part Two is where I get punch-drunk. Thanks for your patience.
1. Assemblages of tales told within an enabling frame-story to a group of companions in a sheltered venue were not always known as club stories, a term of nineteenth-century provenance that does not, perhaps, very adequately encompass the implications of the Decameron (circa 1372) by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), or the Canterbury Tales (written before 1400) by Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1343–1400). Only in hindsight, moreover, does the term do much to expand upon our knowledge of the colloquium format used by Sir Thomas More to disengage the presentation of Utopia (1516) from any fixed register of seriousness or advocacy. It may, however, be applied very cautiously to the actual proceedings of the Scriblerus Club (founded 1712, disbanded 1745), of which Jonathan Swift (almost all of whose work was distanced through the use of satirical masks) was a founding member; and to suggest the nature of occasional publications as by Martin Scriblerus, mostly written by John Arbuthnot (1667–1735). But Club Story is still a term of only tangential utility until recent centuries—even though there is clearly a thin line of connection between the Platonic colloquium and imaginary nineteenth-century gatherings—when it surfaces through, for instance, the specific homage paid by Robert Louis Stevenon in the title of his New Arabian Nights (1882), and its successor, More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885) with Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson (1840–1914), perhaps the first collection in English fully to express the ambience of the nineteenth-century form. The familiar club story—such as Charles Dickens adumbrated in Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840–1841), and Edgar Allan Poe, though with only one auditor, clearly exploited in “A Descent into the Maelström” (May 1841 Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine), and which Stevenson and those he influenced brought to maturity—is a far cry from the great assemblages of European medieval material from which culture-founding creators like Boccaccio and Chaucer took their inspiration. Nor does the modern club story normally refract complex Eastern models—from the fifth-century Pañchatantra to the multi-sourced Arabian Nights themselves—in which a frame-story figure like Scheherazade recounts a series of tales under orders; European examples of this category do not seem very common, though The Pentamerone (1634–1636) by Giambattista Basile (circa 1575–1632) roughly fits the model. Any focus on these culture-creating world-encompassing story assemblages makes it clear that the range of implications held within the term club story cannot be addressed by taking the nineteenth-century model as a template. To describe the form as a tall tale told by one man to other men in a sanctum restricted to those of similar class and outlook, who agree to believe in the story for their mutual comfort, and who themselves may (or may not) tell a tale in turn, is to submit to a particularly narrow understanding of a very broad and deep tradition. But the term itself remains useful.
Club story collections featuring a solo raconteur who is not under coercion—they only occur within the last century or so—are not in fact very common, though the most famous modern club story sequences—the Mulliner collections by P G Wodehouse, beginning with Meet Mr Mulliner (coll 1927) and continuing for several years, and the five Jorkens collections by Lord Dunsany, beginning with The Travel Tales of Mr Joseph Jorkens (coll 1931) and continuing for two decades—do focus on one storyteller who tells a number of tales, some featuring the storyteller himself, some recounting urban fantasies and other implausibilities. But both Mulliner and Jorkens are volunteers. As narrators, they are inherently unreliable, though the club story format, if it does not support the truth of their tales, does at least sanction the safely enclosed telling of them.
For club stories as narrowly defined, whether or not narrated by a single figure, safe telling is vital. Certainly it was no coincidence that the form should have become popular in the UK towards the end of the nineteenth century, for by this point the texture of Western World had begun to show marks of strain throughout, an effect that had been gradually intensifying for more than a century. Through the fin de siècle period climaxing finally in the death of Queen Victoria, and through the years leading up to World War One, the great progressive march of Western history had begun to seem more and more problematical, and the swollen empires of Europe were increasingly being characterized in fiction—especially in the literatures of the fantastic—as entities fatally vulnerable to infection. For socially dominant white UK males, whose sense of reality was beginning to fray under the assault of women, and Darwin, and dark strains of Marx, and Freud, and Flaubert, and Zola, the club story created a kind of psychic Polder against the epistemological insecurities of the dawning new world. By foregrounding that sense of sanctuary, authors and readers could sideline the question of the believability of the tall tale; and the tale could therefore be accepted by the males to whom it was addressed not for its intrinsic plausibility but—defiantly—as part of a shared conspiracy to maintain an inward-looking, mutually supportive consensus that the world outside could continue to be gossiped about, and manipulated, in safety. Most club stories are set literally in safe havens, most are told by men to men, and most are conservative in both style and content, though they are conveyed in a tone of moderate self-mockery, an example of this being Jerome K Jerome’s After Supper Ghost Stories (coll 1891) which, though set not in a club but around the table after Christmas Eve dinner, softly parodies the club-story format and the tales told therein. Most club story collections incline more to fantasy than sf, though most incorporate some sf material. Some of the exploits recounted in Andrew Lang’s The Disentanglers (1902) are of sf interest, however, though more frequently—as in G K Chesterton’s The Club of Queer Trades (1905)—examples of the form read more like lubricated Satire than fantasy.