Alan Moore talks to John Higgs about the 20th Century

There's a lot of your work

that says quite a lot of interesting
things about the 20th century.

Certainly the first thing that sprung
to mind was From Hell,

was an idea in From Hell, which was
a big inspiration in my KLF book,

but the idea was that the act of
Jack the Ripper, um,

was what gave birth to the 20th century. I
was just curious where that idea came from.

Well, that was my conceit
that resolved a lot of the material

that had emerged during
my research into From Hell.

Um ... when I was just looking
into the 1880s,

I noticed all of these things
that had happened,

that I think in 1882, Michelson and Morley
actually performed the experiments

which were meant to iron out a couple of
last wrinkles in the theory of the aether,

but ended up completely disproving
that aether existed,

which was a kind of result, but not
the one that they were looking for.

You'd got France going into Indochina.

You had got the beginnings of the
modern art movement with Walter Sickert.

You'd got some of the first kind of
modern realist writings

with people like Emile Zola.

You'd got a surprising amount of focusing
upon prostitutes in literature and the arts.

And all of these things, which had gone on
to really colour and shape the 20th century,

and then in 1888,
these senseless, violent murders.

It just seemed to me that
symbolically, I could kind of

position the Jack the Ripper murders
as the birth throes of the 20th century,

with Jack the Ripper as a kind of
really ghastly midwife.

[chuckles] Yeah, and there's the whole
tabloid sort of thing growing up around it

and that sort of violent sort of stew,
so it sort of ...

What struck me about reading Providence,

even though it's not so overtly
about the 20th century,

is the Lovecraftian world view
probably sums up that time

better even than my book or anything
deliberately about the 20th century.

Do you see it as a ... ?

Well, yeah, I mean, I see ... Researching
Providence was quite an eye-opener,

and it changed my opinion of Lovecraft.
Not of his stature as a writer --

in fact, I think that only continues
to increase the more I think about it --

but more of an understanding of him
in relation to his times.

The thing is, Lovecraft is generally
positioned as an outsider,

probably because that was the name
of one of his most famous stories,

so it's not much of a reach.
But you actually look at Lovecraft,

he was homophobic. This at a time
when gay men, principally gay men,

some gay women as well,
but that was different,

were starting to emerge quite vocally and
very visibly onto the streets of New York.

There was a huge gay subculture in the
early 20th-century New York.

It wasn't just something that started
after the Second World War.

And these were becoming more visible.

You'd got women; I mean, Lovecraft
was certainly not a misogynist, but ...

he was perhaps somewhat awkward or
conflicted in his relationships with women.

This was at a time when women
were just about to get the vote.

There had been 20 years of the biggest influx
of immigrants that America had ever seen,

up until 1910, 1920, um,
and that had led to conservative fears

that American identity was going to be lost
beneath a tidal wave of miscegenation,

inbreeding, sort of. All of these fears
were exactly those of the white,

middle-class common man. I mean, the
Russian revolution had just happened in 1917,

and in America there were all of these
strikes, which at the time

looked like, oh, it's going to
happen over here.

In fact, most people, when you
talk about the Red Scare,

they think, oh, that's the 1950s,
that's McCarthyism.

The Red Scare was 1919, and in some ways
Lovecraft became a perfect barometer

because he was so sensitive,
so unbearably sensitive,

that all of the fears
of the early 20th century,

including the fears of ... uhhh ...
man's relegation in importance,

given what we were starting to
understand about the cosmos.

Lovecraft was unlike other people of his
day. He actually understood that stuff.

He was very quick.

He didn't like Einstein, but he was very
quick to assimilate Einstein's ideas.

He didn't like quantum theory,
but he almost understood it.

Yeah, this was it. He, in some ways his
stories represented the kind of landscape

of fear, the territory of fear,
for the 20th century as a whole.

So he didn't like the modernists at all,
in terms of writing and things like that.

But he was a closet modernist himself.
I mean, yeah, he hated Gertrude Stein,

T.S. Eliot, James Joyce.
He wrote a brilliantly funny,

and actually very well-written
parody of The Wasteland,

called Waste Paper.

But, you actually look at
Lovecraft's writing,

and much as he's decrying
all of the modernists,

and much as he's bigging up
his favourite 18th-century authors,

people like Pope, um,
actually Lovecraft is a modernist.

He's using stream of consciousness
techniques,

he is using glossolalia more impenetrable
than anything in Finnegan's Wake,

he is using techniques of deliberately
alienating the reader or confusing the reader.

His descriptions tend to be
along the lines of,

"Here's three things that
Cthulhu doesn't look like."

Or he would describe the colour out of
space as only a colour by analogy,

so what, is it a sound, is it a rough
texture, or a smell? What?

These are deliberate kind of techniques.
They're not flaws.

They are techniques of
alienating the reader,

of putting the reader into
an uncanny space,

where language is no longer capable
of describing the experience.

Yeah, and that sort of -- for horror,
it was, it was ...

all the Gothic horror had sort of gone
and it was just the sort of modern horror.

Yeah, well that's important because all
horror, or most horror up 'til Lovecraft,

had all been predicated upon
the Gothic tradition,

which is a tradition where you have an
enormous vertical weight in time

that is bearing down upon
a fragile present.

A history of dark things in the past
that are leading up to

some terrifying denouement
in the present day.

With Lovecraft, yes, there is an awful lot
of talking about Rimmer,

antiquity and the past.

But with Lovecraft I think that it's
a much more present horror of the future.

He's talking about that time when man will
be able to organise all of his knowledge

and when that time comes,
the only question is

whether we will embrace this new
illuminating light,

or whether we will flee from it into the
reassuring shadows of a new Dark Age,

which is very prescient, given, say,
current fundamentalism,

which is a direct -- a response to
too much knowledge, too much information.

Let's take it all back to something
that we're sure of,

that God created the world in six days.

Yeah. In that way Lovecraft was sort of ...

yeah, he was really exploring all of the
-- he was a very --

he is still a very contemporary writer.

I think that if you wanted to do as
Michael Moorcock did, in the '60s,

Michael Moorcock was mainly
interested in modernism.

He noticed that the science fiction genre
was laying around with its wheels up,

and that nobody was doing much with it
apart from kind of cowboys in space,

so he thought,
"Why don't we hijack this,

"and make science fiction
a vehicle for modernism?"

And then, yeah, J. G. Ballard,
all the rest.

I think you could do the same thing with
Lovecraft, alone amongst horror writers.

I think that Lovecraft's preoccupations
were so forward-looking that --

and his writing techniques were so unusual
-- that yeah, you could use Lovecraft

as the starting point for a new kind of
modernist horror, if you will.

That sense of linking the 20th century
to this sort of impending horror, um,

reminds me a bit of Century, or
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, vol. 3,

the Century one, which for my mind is
probably the bleakest of all the Leagues

sort of thing. It's got that sense that
the creative imagination withers away

during the 20th century.
Is that what you were aiming for?

Yes, it was. I got quite a bit
of criticism for that.

I know that people were saying, after
reading the third book, they said

that it was my equivalent of saying,
"It were all fields 'round here once."

Which it wasn't.
That wasn't what I was saying.

But what I was saying was that
I don't think it was unfair to choose

The Beggar's Opera as representing
a big, important cultural event of 1910.

I don't think it was unfair choosing
Donald Cammell's Performance

as representing a big, important
cultural event in 1969.

And I don't think it was unfair choosing
J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter

as representing a big cultural event
from the early 21st century.

I would say that if you were to plot
those things on a graph,

the line isn't going up.
[JH, laughing] Yes.

I think that it's a fair comment

that our approach to culture

in the mainstream has degenerated.

That the values that people used to
put into a work of art,

those have been eroded.

And, yeah. I was trying to express that in
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

because the whole of
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,

it's about this massive planet of fiction
that has been a kind of a counterpart

to our own world
for as long as we've had fiction.

That we've made up this world that,
it's the world we want,

the exciting world where exciting things
happen and meaningful things happen,

and if you look at those two worlds,
there's interesting points of comparison,

that they have similar events
that shaped them,

but slightly different, and they
worked out slightly differently.

So in Century it was using The League
to look at the 20th century

from the point of view of
20th-century culture,

and to draw what conclusions
seemed accurate.

I wasn't saying that all culture in the
late 20th century was rubbish.

I wasn't saying that culture was doomed.

I was saying that mainstream culture
was becoming repetitive,

was not having original ideas,

would no longer be capable of
coming up with a Performance,

let alone a Threepenny Opera.

Yeah, it's, I mean, what struck me
when I was doing my 20th-century book

was especially all the guys who took us
into space, took us to the moon --

Sergei Korolev, Wernher von Braun --
the importance of Jules Verne to them.

And then that culture of Buck Rogers
and Flash Gordon and things like that.

And I was thinking about that when I was
watching -- d'you know, have you seen, um,

Prometheus, the, uh ...
[AM] I haven't.

It's really grim. Basically they
realize humanity's been, uh,

built by aliens, so they go off
to find these aliens,

and they finally find the aliens to say,
"Oh, godlike thing, why did you create us?"

And the alien goes, "Oh, are these things,
these beings still around?"

and just starts like punching them
in the face to sort of kill them.

And it's about as bleak an idea
as you can imagine,

and I just kind of wonder if
Wernher von Braun and those guys

were growing up with that level
of science fiction,

whether they'd have been quite so keen
to go for the moon and push us forward.

Well, I mean, I think that science fiction
-- it's interesting what --

the way that science fiction
was handled in the 20th century.

I mean, science fiction, all right,
there's a lot of precursors for it,

but a non-controversial starting point would
probably be Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

[JH] Yeah.

And then you'd move on to people
like Wells and Verne,

about a century later.

Now, all of those are actually kind of grim
warning visions of the potential future.

They are potentially alarmist about the
nature of technology and what it will mean.

With Mary Shelley, she was reacting
to the Industrial Revolution,

which was actually starting up around her
while she was writing Frankenstein

in 1814 or whatever it was.

Wells, he is, all of his science fiction
books are for the most part dystopias.

Time Machine, with its view of the class
system of Wells' day,

even more stratified, literally, so that
you've got working-class cannibals

living underground and feeding upon
these dopey, drippy middle-class

sort of food animals, basically.
[JH] It's the austerity story.

[AM] Yes, exactly. And Jules Verne.
Now, obviously Jules Verne

is getting much more of a kick out of his
big machines, but he always says,

"And imagine if these machines were to
fall into the hands of a madman!

"Like Captain Nemo, who I secretly admire."
But at least it is a warning.

1910, 1915, America discovers science
fiction in the form of Tom Swift.

And it is a different thing altogether.

It is not about giving
dire warnings for the future.

It is about saying, "Look how great
America's going to be in the future."

It's almost, I suspect ...
The tendency, in older nations,

when we want to big ourselves up,
is to reach back to the past,

to something imaginary in the past,
like King Arthur or something like that.

America hasn't got that amount
of history to deal with,

so in some ways what America needs
is science fiction.

When we're trying to say,
"Look at what we were,"

then America more or less has to say,
"Look at what we will be."

And so their science fiction from the 1920s,
with the boom of the pulp magazines,

it was all of this bright, optimistic
new frontier stuff,

where it was going to be
Cowboys and Indians all over again,

only it was going to be
Earthmen and Neptunians.

But you could just go through the whole
of the tropes of the Western genre

and pioneer fiction, but in space.
And it became this ... in my opinion,

that was probably one of the worst things
to ever happen to science fiction.

It took until the late 1940s,
after Hiroshima,

for these new voices that had got
a radical sense of doubt

to start to creep back into science
fiction, and that gave a brilliant era,

probably the best era, of science fiction.
From, say, late '40s to the mid-'70s,

when George Lucas brought out Star Wars,

a piece of fundamentalist science fiction
if ever there was one,

and turned the clocks back to the
science fiction ideas of 50 years before.

Now we're in the position -- that whole idea
between science fiction and the real world

interacting with each other -- now we get
things like Black Mirror, with the pig,

and then, on Monday, that's no longer
science fiction, it's the, uh ...

whether this is the sort of level of
leeway between fiction and nonfiction

that we wanted at the end of this period.

Well, I mean, I have said in the past
that I believe that the membrane

between fiction and fact is porous
and semi-permeable,

and I have become used to
my most ridiculous ideas,

whether that be coming up with
V for Vendetta

and then suddenly seeing a load of
Guy Fawkes-masked anarchists

invading the world stage
-- which is a good thing --

or having come up with the idea related to
my film project, Jimmy's End,

of having a sinister clown manifesting in
various locations around Northampton,

and returning from holiday and finding
that a sinister clown had manifested

in Northampton, at the end of my street,
about a hundred yards from my front door.

You start to get the impression that, yes,
sometimes things can percolate through

from the realm of ideas
into the realm of actuality.

I would say to Charlie Brooker
that it's his own fault.

That, sort of, he shouldn't have written
about British prime ministers

in an unholy relationship with a pig
if he didn't want this to happen.

Y'know? So ... happy now?

This is assuming, of course,
that it's not true,

which -- I like to think it probably
isn't true, and that Lord Ashcroft

is enough of a shit to have done that,

but part of me just sort of,
it fits a bit too well,

it just feels a bit too much like
a real occult initiation sort of ceremony.

I remember somebody saying --

this might have been someone like
Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo --

saying about the idea of
Donny and Marie Osmond being married,

and he was saying, "Yeah, I know that
that's not really true,

"but in my heart it's true."
And I think that that is the way I feel

about the revelations about David Cameron,
that, we all know that in his secret soul,

David Cameron is exactly the man who
would do something like that.

If he has not done it literally,
he has certainly done it metaphorically.

So, yeah. I say,
without a shred of evidence,

that I am going to believe that
for the rest of my life.

Lovely, thanks very much, Alan.
[AM] You're very welcome.

We'll go forward to the 21st century

with that as the start of our
[unclear] of imagination. Thank you.