shrinking masculine space in real life. 

Think Iron John (Robert Bly) and men beating their chests deep in the woods.  Back in the 1950s gender space was clearly demarcated.  The cellar, for example, was the location where size-challenged Scott Carey fought and defeated the feminine other embodied by a inch tall Black Widow spider (Richard Matheson, The Shrinking Man)

 

Ballardian (adjective, named after the author) is the mental awareness of something very sinister lurking beneath the veneer of consumer (and often suburban) normality. 

A perfect analogy for the garishly illustrated pulp novel?

 

Cut Up: borrowing from the Surrealist painter, Bryon Gysin, William S Burroughs used random combinations of text found in newspapers and books to bring new texts into being.  Musician and artist, David Bowie, borrowed the technique from Burroughs, using it to give voice to his fictional construct Ziggy Stardust (see BBC Omnibus programme Cracked Actor)

 

Die Young and attain cult immortality, if you believe the many populist books on ‘the ones that burn’ (Malcolm Lowry). 

Yukio Mishima was impelled towards death, despite a paradoxical attitude to body cult. Thomas Chatterton, the boy poet, was immortalised by the painter Henry Wallace as a suicidal loner.  Death by your own hand isn’t a fool proof formula though.  The rising young America writer, Weldon Kees, disappeared on the Golden Gate Bridge, never to be heard of again … or about, for that matter.

 

Ecotopia ‘was the first attempt to portray a sustainable society,’ insists Ernest Callenbach, the author of the 1975 novel.

  ‘This more than its modestliterary merit, explains its durability,’ he confesses.   It’s certainly the case that there is no shortage of eco cults today.  Even Terry Nation’s cult 1970s TV show Survivors – a green-tinted view of post apocalyptic Britain – has been remade by the BBC.

 

Falling is a recurring motif of cult fiction: in the Walter Tevis novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, Thomas Newton is the Icarus character, an alien whose human transubstantiation is a metaphor of corporate corruption as well as the fallibility of the human condition.   No need to wait for the last judgement … according to The Fall (Albert Camus) it ‘takes place every day’.

 

Genre Blending is the pomo prerogative of cult writers like Stephen King, ostensibly a horror supremo but with more interest in reflecting everyday American life.  Not always proud of the tag Schlock Meister, King has publicly regretted the casual death of so many characters, comparing literary bloodshed to pornography. 

Truly transgressive writers like Dennis Cooper provoke category crisis … gay fiction? … how very dare you.  Cooper’s five novel George Miles Cycle tests the boundaries of fiction as characters memorialise their sex-murders of young boys … or do they only fantasise it?   The ‘last true literary outlaw’ (according to Bret Easton Ellis), Cooper leaves the reader to face up to the dubious pleasure of the text.

 

Hybridity is a popular theme with the integrity of body and identity challenged by the idea of the cyborg.  Notions of pure Japanese national identity are, for example, undermined by the clash of tradition and modernity manifest in Japanese anime (such as the Tomie books by Junji Ito) and manga.  

Jefferey Eugenides’ Middlesex, meanwhile, tells the story of a genetic mutation and intersex metamorphosis.  The book itself is a hybrid: according to the author it is ‘part immigrant saga, part psychological novel, part comic epic, part medical mystery’.

 

 

 

What links these books?  If there’s anything, it is the relationship between the text and your outlook ... the seismic shift in worldview that's brought about by the book.  But that’s a subjective test … and one which could be applied to a very broad range of titles.

 

Maybe cult is nothing more than a buzz word bandied about by cynical publicists and booksellers (ahem) to pitch everything from the offbeat to the upbeat (maybe anything with a beat).  But if the idea of publicity seems antithetical to genuine cult, it’s perhaps because of the narrow lens through which we view popular culture.

 

The etymology of cult reveals the semantic convention of linking its Roman roots in agricultural practice (cultivation) with its Latin ones in religiosity (adoration).  The cultivation of a particular set of beliefs isn’t something that trickles down but is cultured from the ground up, as it were.  It is no surprise that cult can be traced back to the first pamphlets off the printing press while the advent of the pulp novel, in particular the cheap American softback, heralds a golden age of cult. 

 

Queercore is more than hardcore gay fiction.  Jean Genet’s imaginative appropriation of banal artefacts, such as a tube of Vaseline, amounts to both a magical use of an everyday object (its bricolage, see Levi Strauss, Raw and Cooked) and a symbolic up yours to ‘straight’ policing (see Dick Hebdige, Subculture).  

 

Road to nowhere … never mind destinations, just roll with life, scribble it down as it happens, then type it all up feverishly onto one roll of teletype paper … oh, but first organise the notes obsessively and then revise ‘the roll’ meticulously to make the novel publishable (Jack Kerouac, On the Road) … and if all that seems a little too laborious and purposeful, take the fast lane riding low with the Hell’s Angels (Hunter S Thompson). 

Steppenwolf is a book by Herman Hesse, a name stolen by a rock group.  Soft Machine …. William Burroughs.   Swann’s Way … Marcel Proust.  Actually the list of rock monikers goes on through the rest of the alphabet.  But back with Hesse, and S, Steppenwolf is about an outsider who considers himself better than those about him.  His punishment? -- to ‘listen to the radio music of life’. 

 

Too true? in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, there is no single point-of-view that can reveal truth while, in Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison) speaking the truth is to risk social invisibility: ‘I've never been more loved and appreciated than … when I've tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear’ 

Ultra Violence  is the hyperreal aggressiveness  performed by Alex and his droogs in  A Clockwork Orange.  Anthony Burgess was inspired by British youth subcultures lashing out against consumer-led class change. 

 

Virtual Reality – it’s getting hard to tell reality from what you viddy at the sinnies (Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange); memories aren’t to be relied upon (Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and some lives are better lived virtually by far (such as Piers Anthony’s paralysed cop character in Killobyte).

 

Way out of War: there are few classic heroes in cult fiction, most characters, like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five struggle to make sense of their lives.  The same is true of villains – people aren’t evil, it’s the absurd human conditions they find themselves in.  Such as war.  In Michael Herr’s Despatches, drugs offer a way out.  Billy Pilgrim deals with war by simultaneously inhabiting a better mental world.   Insanity seems the only way out for John Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, except, of course, there isn’t a way out … not even desertion. 

 

Generation X is the lost generation who followed on the heels of the baby boomers (born, therefore, between 1961-1971).  The term was introduced by Charles Hamblett and Jane Deverson in their book of the same name as a way of describing Mod subcultural identity and behaviour.  The vox pop style of the book, much imitated by music and style magazines, gave the youngsters an opportunity to tell their own stories.  In Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X : Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the characters tell each other stories to deal with ‘mid-twenties breakdown’, ‘boomer-envy’ and  anomie.

Yaqui: Carlos Castaneda’s account of shamanic teaching (The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge) turns out to have been a sham … or maybe all that peyote resulted in him hallucinating the Mexican’s mystical messages.