AFTERWORD TO FIREWORKS
I started to write short pieces when I was living in a room too small to write a novel in. So the size of my room modified what I did i and it was the same with the pieces themselves. The limited trajectory of the short narrative trates its meaning. Sign and sense fuse to aent impossible to achieve among the multiplying ambiguities of aended narrative. I found that, though the play of surfaever ceased to fasate me, I was not so much expl them as making abstras from them, I was writing, therefore, tales.
Though it took me a long time to realise why I liked them, Id always been fond of Poe, and Hoffman -- Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of woales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unscious -- mirrors; the externalised self; forsaken castles; haunted forests; forbidden sexual objects. Formally the tale differs from the short story in that it makes few prete the imitation of life. The tale does not log everyday experience, as the short story does; it interprets everyday experiehrough a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience, and therefore the tale ot betray its readers into a false knowledge of everyday experience.
The Gothic tradition in which Poe writes grandly ighe value systems of our institutions; it deals entirely with the profas great themes are i and ibalism. Character as are exaggerated beyoy, to bee symbols, ideas, passions. Its style will tend to be ornate, unnatural -- and thus operate against the perennial human desire to believe the word as fact. Its only humour is black humour. It retains a singular moral fun -- that of provoking unease.
The tale has relations with subliterary forms of praphy, ballad and dream, and it has not bee with kindly by literati. And is it any wonder? Let us keep the unscious in a suitcase, as Pere Ubu did with his sce, and flush it down the lavatory when it gets too troublesome.
So I worked on tales. I was living in Japan; I came back to England in 1972. I found myself in a new try. It was like waking up, it was a rude awakening. We live in Gothic times. Now, to uand and to interpret is the main thing; but my method of iigation is ging. These stories were writteween 1970 and 1973 and are arranged in ological order, as they were written. There is a small tribute to Defoe, father of the beois novel in England, ied iory "Master".