Joanna Kavenna on Parallel Worlds

Your first book?

I’ll start with Lovecraft, who thinks reality itself is completely nuts, and that anyone who thinks there is a single absolute or straightforward interpretation of our reality is obviously barking mad. “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” is a story about Slater, a “white trash vagrant” who falls into this psychotic rage and murders his neighbour. When the narrator meets him in an asylum, Slater keeps having these bizarre visions of amazing things with green lights, and oceans of space and beautiful music, and mountains and valleys, and also of this blazing entity that has it in for him. Obviously the narrator thinks: how can this illiterate idiot have these extraordinary visions, where did they come from? The narrator attaches a telepathic device to Slater so that he can experience it as well, whereupon conveniently Slater dies, and this voice starts communicating to the narrator and says: I come from this world that you enter in your freedom of sleep – once you enter your dreams you lose all the trappings of your tedious reality and enter this wonderland. He says in sleep we all roam through many ages and lose all the limits of time and space.

The narrator has to be regarded as having had a nervous breakdown, and Lovecraft is using dreams as a way in, to justify it all, but really every time the story takes fire and leaps at you it’s because of these descriptions of this extraordinary place.

The Lovecraft stories that I really love are these ones that some people call the Dreamland Cycle (this story is often classified as one of them) about worlds that you enter through dreams. But even within these worlds, people say: don’t push too much against the boundaries of what you’re permitted to see, so there’s still that sense of prohibition. You have to be absolutely certain you can cope; so it’s always about how much disillusion of your sense of reality can you deal with in these worlds? How far can you go before you say: actually I’d quite like things to be normal? In the end we don’t like to lose our entire identity and humanity.

What happens in The Garden of Forking Paths?
 
Ostensibly it’s set in the Second World War but as Borges always does, he creates this world of bizarre, really occult coincidences that are completely unbelievable, unless you’re in Borges’s world. It takes the form of a signed statement narrated by a Chinese spy living in Britain during the First World War. He has an ancestor, Ts’ui Pen, who worked for years on what was later called a completely pointless enterprise: to write a huge novel and create a labyrinth. The labyrinth was never found, and the novel was regarded as totally contradictory and meaningless ­– in one chapter the hero’s dead, in another he’s alive – so it appeared during his lifetime that this guy was a complete failure. The spy finds out that what Ts’ui Pen was trying to do wasn’t creating a labyrinth as a physical object: what he wanted to do was to create a book which embraced all possibilities that exist in time, and in which all possibilities were realised for the spy character. The spy is told: it’s not just in this guy’s literary imagination; we’re in just one of many worlds.

The reason why this story’s so fascinating is because it’s always said that it predates Everett’s many-worlds theory by about 15 years – it was written in 1941, and really Everett is advancing his theory in the mid 1950s, but it’s not until the 60s and 70s that it’s becoming discussed within the scientific mainstream. So you get this classic example – as you do with HG Wells – of someone who’s philosophically incredibly brilliant, as Borges obviously is, and manages to predate what is then classified as scientific theory simply by thinking about the universe in an interesting way. Really that was all that Everett was doing – because many-worlds theory is again about all the forkings that occur at a particular moment in time.

Getting to a quantum truth via creative thinking?

Exactly, but Borges is showing that these quantum “truths” are in themselves just imaginative – they’re not really any closer to truth than Borges himself. Science – Michio Kaku and so on – didn’t start this debate: literature has been doing this for centuries, talking about parallel worlds. Don’t come in in the last decades of the 20th century and think you’ve invented it all.

And the Marge Piercy?

It’s about a 37-year-old called Connie Ramos who starts communicating with a character from the (or a) future called Luciente. Luciente comes to Connie’s present but then takes Connie to her future, where people live in rural communities, make all their own food, bring up their children communally and have polyamorous relationships and a tribal identity. Connie gets put in an asylum, not because of these visions, but because she gets in a fight – she’s from this very poor underworld – and her visions of the future become related to what’s happening to her in the asylum. There’s this treatment they’re testing out in the asylum where they insert a device into the patient’s brain to control their emotions by flicking a switch.