The Harlequin of SF

I first encountered Harlan Ellison via a YouTube video. It was a program that originally aired on the Sci-Fi channel (before it became the SyFy channel), titled Masters of Fantasy, which focused on authors and other creators within SF culture.

In about 30 minutes, it gave me an overview of the impact this man had on the SF field, both through the works he edited such as the anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, and works of his own making, such as his story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and his much-lauded Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever.

Though the program was merely an overviewing profile, it was enough to ignite my curiosity. I wanted to learn more about this man and his work, so I set out to find some of it.

The first story of his I actually read was a story called ‘“Repent Harlequin,” Said the Tick-tock Man.”’ By the time I arrived at this, I’d already been a reader of SF for some time, having been a great aficionado of authors like Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. Le Guin. I expected something in the way of a cohesive story fitted with proper character and plot.

The first time I read “Harlequin”, however, I must admit, I was flabbergasted. I had heard that this piece was one of the most famous in Ellison’s oeuvre, yet I didn’t understand why. “That’s it?” I asked myself. “It didn’t seem to be worth all the hype.” Then I came back to it. Once I looked over it again and again, rereading to see if I could find anything substantial, I finally found it (literary criticism after all is the art of looking for things that may or may not be there). It was an eye-opener.

I decided that what I was in fact reading was a great, anti-authoritarian piece of work. It was a railing against the dying of the light, the light of individuality, of personal freedom, of simple human choice. Most of all, it seemed to be a railing against the Almighty, itself.

Before I go further, let me explain something about myself. I was raised Catholic, and I lost my faith by the time I left high school. Initially, my rebellion was just against the church as an institution. I felt I could not be a part of an organization that stood for so many things I found to be wrong, such as the oppression of women, the ostracizing of those who didn’t believe, and the hatred of LGBTQ people. I saw the Catholic Church as being, to put it bluntly, anti-Christian (a charge I now level at pretty much every denomination). So I emotionally divorced myself from it.

And the fact that had to do that, and that this thing I'd literally put my faith in for my whole life  had turned out to be this great ugly blotch, enraged me.

Harlan’s fiction gave me a portrait of that kind of rage, a way of understanding it. In many of his stories such as “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” “The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World,” and “Knox,” we see a man railing against evil, in its various incarnations, that try to control and manipulate humanity into becoming its propagators, its slaves.

That anti-authoritarian spirit infected me, just as it did all the writers who read Harlan when he first published these works. I personally don’t think I carry it off as well as Harlan did, but I think some essence of his voice now resides in my work. Influences, after all, are very difficult to directly detect in oneself. However, that freedom to rail against what you perceive to be evil, and to dig deep into yourself and write about what enrages or hurts you in general, wasn’t the only way Harlan’s work affected me. He also gave me license to experiment.

To return to my previous example, “Repent Harlequin,” begins with a long passage from Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience, and it sets the tone for the idea it tackles. His story “Knox” begins with lines from that famous work, “First they came for the Jews, and I was silent…” This was the sort of intertextuality that I had seldom seen done in the SF I’d read before, but because of Harlan, I suddenly found myself being able to do it, openly and proudly, so long as it served the story.

"Repent Harlequin," was also one of the first times I'd seen well exicuted nonlinear storytelling. It starts in the middles, moves to the beginning, and then concludes, all without the use of obvious flashback. "The Beast that Shouted..." was shocking to me because of it's seeming randomness. It's written in seemingly unrelated vingettes, which eventually reveal to be truly interconnected.. Harlan's works, like these and others,  granted me the liberty to play with the very structure of my stories. (Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't in my case, but his work's example allowed me to at least try to do it).

Without Harlan's work, I doubt I would've ever felt free enough to do such things.

That was how Harlan the writer affected me. The man named Harlan Ellison is a different story.

I regularly rewatch a documentary about Harlan released in 2009 call Dreams with Sharp Teeth. This film gave me a portrait of who Harlan was, away from the typewriter. What I saw was an angry little man, who spent his life fighting the demons from his childhood, and his best weapon was his surliness. That surliness came out in his stories. The rage he felt at those who had treated him like garbage growing up had never left him. Instead, it affected and colored every part of his life.

It was the rage at his childhood bullies at that caused him to send a dead gopher to a publishing house for screwing him over. It was the rage at a college professor who told him he had no talent that caused him to attack numerous producers and directors while working in television, one confrontation resulting in a producer having a broken pelvis. It was the rage against the injustice at his father’s early death that caused him to emphasize that life is not fair and pass that on to all potential writers, who thought themselves entitled to being writers, and caused him to step on so many toes in his life, just to even his internal score-card.

And, most of all, it was that same rage that produced his great fiction.

This, however, brings up a major question of our contemporary times: can/should we separate the art from the man? Cory Doctorow and a staff writer from the New Republic (whose name escaped me as I wrote this, but I looked up and discovered was Jeet Heer) both pointed out this question. Can we honor Harlan’s legacy, without condoning some of the worst things he did in his life? Can we see the work for what it is, objectively, or can we only see it as the product of an unredeemable imperfect mind?

As an English major in college (yes, I know--useless degree, ha-ha), I was always taught to look at the work, both as a separate entity from the author and as an extension of the author’s own personality. Thus, I’m able to look at Harlan’s work in both ways, like how you can look at one of those trick images and see either Marilyn Monroe and/or Albert Einstein.

Both perceptions are correct, depending on how you look at them.

Harlan was a volatile man, who did things that are inexcusable. However, I can see why he did them, without condoning them. I don’t think he should’ve sent a gopher to a publishing house (I think it’s funny that he did, but I certainly wouldn’t have done it), but I can understand why he did it. That’s what it means to have empathy.

I can still see the value of Harlan’s work without sanctifying him. He was simply a person, and to be human means to be imperfect.

Fiction--as I mentioned in a previous essay--is different from all other arts. It has a way of outlasting their creators to the point that while their narrative and characters achieve immortality, the authors merely become a name on a volume. Few people know who Kenneth Grahame is, but The Wind in the Willows remains a masterwork of children's fantasy literature.

What Harlan left us, in his fiction, was an insight into one of the unf
lattering corners of the human condition. His stories are windows into the rage that everyone has the capacity to feel if we were pushed to that point. That, however, is only the beginning. Harlan has only been gone a short while.

Those who retain living memories of him and his dark-side may not be able to look at his work without seeing that. Eventually though, such people will be gone, so only future posterity will be able to tell us if his work possesses greater value than it already does.

Hemingway once calmed, "To last, one must endure," and, it's at least my belief that the Unrepentant Harlequin’s work will.

*No copyright infringment intended. All images are the property of their creators and owners.*