Collision of Realities: Establishing Research on the Fantastic in Europe 3110276720, 9783110276725

Table of contents :
Preface
THE FANTASTIC – THEORY AND HISTORY
The Art and Science of Heterocosmic Creativity
“It’s not what you see – it’s how you see what you see.” The Fantastic as an Epistemological Concept
The Nightmares of Politicians. On the Rise of Fantasy Literature from Subcultural to Mass-cultural Phenomenon
Fantastic Liminality. A Theory Sketch
VISUALIZING THE FANTASTIC IN OUR CULTURE
Fantastic Language/Political Reporting. The Postcolonial SF Illocutionary Force is with us
Visualising the Fantastic in Strange Embrace
Love your Zombie. Romancing the Undead
God Hates Fangs? Morality, Ideology, and the Domesticated Vampire in American Culture
The Semiotics of Sexual Transformation. Ursula and Ariel as Representations of Metamorphosis in The Little Mermaid
FANTASTIC GENRES: FANTASY
Taking a Zebra to Vegas. Allegorical Reality in the Percy Jackson & the Olympians Series
“Real adventures weren’t about Hogwarts and Muggles.” Intertextual References in Amanda Hemingway’s Sangreal-Trilogy
On Alien Alders. The “Erl-King” inspirations in Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher Saga
“It’s magical!” Supernatural Elements in Children’s Literature and Young Adults’ Fiction
Story Matters. Story and its Concept in Tolkien and Pratchett
Grimmerie and Primer. Wicked and Diamond Age as Instructional Texts
FANTASTIC GENRES: SCIENCE FICTION
The Haunted House of Science Fiction. Modern Ghosts, Crypts, and Technologies
Difference and Resistance in M.T. Anderson’s Feed
Disharmony and Dystopia. Music in Classic Dystopian Fiction
Facing the End of the World. Margaret Atwood’s Post-apocalyptic Science Fiction
Is the Scientist Still Mad? Renegotiations of a Cultural Stereotype in New Hard Science Fiction
Utopian, Dystopian and Subversive Strategies in Recent German Alternate History Fictions
CONFERENCE THEME STORY
A Pocketful of Faces
Contributors

Citation preview

Collision of Realities Establishing Research on the Fantastic in Europe Edited by

Lars Schmeink Astrid Böger

De Gruyter

The publication of this volume was made possible by a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG).

ISBN 978-3-11-027654-1 e-ISBN 978-3-11-027671-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. ” 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ⬁ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Content LARS SCHMEINK, ASTRID BÖGER, HANS-HARALD MÜLLER Preface .................................................................................................................. 1

THE FANTASTIC – THEORY AND HISTORY BRIAN STABLEFORD The Art and Science of Heterocosmic Creativity .......................................... 7 JAN CHRISTOPH MEISTER “It’s not what you see – it’s how you see what you see.” The Fantastic as an Epistemological Concept ............................................. 21 RENÉ SCHALLEGGER The Nightmares of Politicians. On the Rise of Fantasy Literature from Subcultural to Mass-cultural Phenomenon ....................................................................... 29 CLEMENS RUTHNER Fantastic Liminality. A Theory Sketch ............................................................................................... 49

VISUALIZING THE FANTASTIC IN OUR CULTURE MARLEEN S. BARR Fantastic Language/Political Reporting. The Postcolonial SF Illocutionary Force is with us .................................... 67

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MARKUS OPPOLZER Visualising the Fantastic in Strange Embrace .................................................. 85 CHRISTIAN LENZ Love your Zombie. Romancing the Undead ................................................................................... 103 SIMONE KNEWITZ God Hates Fangs? Morality, Ideology, and the Domesticated Vampire in American Culture ......................................................................................... 119 PAUL BEEHLER The Semiotics of Sexual Transformation. Ursula and Ariel as Representations of Metamorphosis in The Little Mermaid.......................................................................................... 139

FANTASTIC GENRES: FANTASY LILY GLASNER Taking a Zebra to Vegas. Allegorical Reality in the Percy Jackson & the Olympians Series ......................................................... 155 ANNE KLAUS “Real adventures weren’t about Hogwarts and Muggles.” Intertextual References in Amanda Hemingway’s Sangreal-Trilogy ....................................................... 175 JUSTYNA DESZCZ-TRYHUBCZAK AND AGATA ZARZYCKA On Alien Alders. The “Erl-King” Inspirations in Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher Saga ................................................................ 187

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KARIN KOKORSKI “It’s magical!” Supernatural Elements in Children’s Literature and Young Adults’ Fiction .............................................................................. 205 MARGARIDA MCMURRY Story Matters. Story and its Concept in Tolkien and Pratchett........................................... 219 WALLACE T. CLEAVES II Grimmerie and Primer. Wicked and Diamond Age as Instructional Texts ........................................... 233

FANTASTIC GENRES: SCIENCE FICTION MINWEN HUANG The Haunted House of Science Fiction. Modern Ghosts, Crypts, and Technologies.................................................. 251 JACOBO CANADY Difference and Resistance in M.T. Anderson’s Feed ................................... 271 ALLAN WEISS Disharmony and Dystopia. Music in Classic Dystopian Fiction ............................................................... 285 ARIANNA CASALI Facing the End of the World. Margaret Atwood’s Post-apocalyptic Science Fiction ................................ 295 SARAH HERBE Is the Scientist Still Mad? Renegotiations of a Cultural Stereotype in New Hard Science Fiction .......................................................................... 311

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INGO CORNILS Utopian, Dystopian and Subversive Strategies in Recent German Alternate History Fictions .................................................. 325

CONFERENCE THEME STORY PAUL DI FILIPPO A Pocketful of Faces ........................................................................................ 341

Contributors ...................................................................................................... 359

Preface LARS SCHMEINK, ASTRID BÖGER, HANS-HARALD MÜLLER It has not been an easy process to establish a field as elusive and perpetually misunderstood as the fantastic in European academic discourse but we are finally at the stage where the field is being taught and researched at universities on a regular basis. To write “finally” might of course sound a little drastic, especially given that since the 1970s the fantastic has been found a worthy object of research by select academics. There have indeed been and continue to be publications in the field, small symposia, even a European special collection of the fantastic exists. What has been lacking though is a systematic organization of these academic structures and resources that would bring ‘fantastic studies’ up to eye level with other areas of literary studies (which is still the discipline where most research in the fantastic is happening). Recent media interest in the fantastic, sparked in particular by the technological progress of CGI magic on the silver screen, but also by surprise bestselling book series, has in its wake brought the fantastic as a whole into the limelight and out of the genre fiction closet. Consequently, the fantastic as an object of academic inquiry is attracting an ever-growing number of researchers, who are looking for means to cooperation and exchange ideas in regard to their work. They have been frustrated by the fact that networking, at large conferences or within research projects, has thus far been a privilege of the American academic realm, where such possibilities and the facilitating structures have been in existence for more than 30 years and where the European influence might be characterized as an exotic perspective. And yet much has happened in Europe, too, in the last few years, for there is a departure of minds, a feeling of optimistic enthusiasm in the field, which has brought with it a momentum of change. In 2010 it was therefore possible for the first time to organize a large international conference on the fantastic, “Fremde Welten: Wege und Räume der Fantastik im 21. Jahrhundert”, in Germany. At this event more than 150 very diverse researchers united under one agenda and established a basis for inaugurating an academic association for research in the fantastic. The Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung e.V. (GFF) was initiated on October 1st 2010 in

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Hamburg with more than 80 inaugural members and has since been engaged in establishing academic structures and networks that allow members to present their work in a way commensurate with its relevance within popular cultural discourse. With this work, the association has not only strengthened the fantastic as a valid field of research but has also built a scholarly reputation and generated a healthy self-awareness that helps represent the field in its respective academic disciplines. To this end, the association both organizes annual conferences (the last in Salzburg 2011) and publishes a twice-yearly academic journal, the Zeitschrift für Fantastikforschung. Further, the GFF has set as its goal the academic publication of research in the field, especially of the results from the annual conferences. The two volumes at hand, Collision of Realities: Establishing Research on the Fantastic in Europe (Ed. by Lars Schmeink and Astrid Böger) and Fremde Welten: Wege und Räume der Fantastik im 21. Jahrhundert (Ed. by Lars Schmeink and Hans-Harald Müller) each present reworked research papers from the inaugural conference in Hamburg in October 2010. Together, the two anthologies offer an interdisciplinary cross-section of current research in the field of the fantastic. Given the size and the strong international orientation of the conference (with half of the papers presented in English), we have decided to publish two non-identical volumes of proceedings that complement each other, one in English, one in German, so that close to 50 essays can here attest to the active and innovative research on the fantastic being done in Europe. Like the editorial team itself, the ranks of our contributors are filled by researchers of different generations and disciplines, thus these anthologies symbolically allow a meeting of disparate approaches that is hard to imagine within other fields of research. From the beginning, research in the fantastic has not been able to establish a consensual definition of its object of inquiry, and particularly the continental European debates on the in- and exclusivity of the terminology used to define the fantastic illustrate the differences in methodology, approaches and aims of the research involved. It is no wonder then that these debates have also found their way into the essays presented here and need to be addressed. The discord on matters of basic definition might on the one hand seem a hindrance to progress in research and has indeed been viewed as such by some critics. On the other hand though, one might see the opportunity that disputes of definition provide for a lively and constant renegotiation of the fantastic genres. The lack of unity in terminology might provide a basis for continuous reconceptualization, for questioning concepts and limitations of the fantastic. It is for this reason that we have decided to allow for a broad frame of approaches and differences in terminology, at the conference as well as within the pages of these volumes. We do not wish to participate in the ongoing debates by prescribing a certain definition of the fantastic

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and have thus left matters of definition, of the in- and exclusivity of the terms, as well as of the methodology used to the discretion of the contributors themselves. We also realize that given the number of different disciplines involved in these volumes and the variability of academic practices in those disciplines in regard to publication, citation etc. our most important task will be to balance the needs of specific disciplines with the overall necessities involved in editing an interdisciplinary anthology. The anthology at hand, the English volume of the conference proceedings, is divided into five sections, four of which represent centers of research in the fantastic, while the last section remains a special nod to the creative side of the field. Thus, section one, “The Fantastic – Theory and History” discusses theoretical approaches to, as well as historical developments in the genre. The second section, “Visualizing the Fantastic in our Culture” opens up from traditional focal points and allows for fantastic inquiry into everyday politics, graphic novels, film and television as well as children’s fairy tales. Sections three and four then deal with the two most prominent “Fantastic Genres”, “Fantasy” and “Science Fiction” respectively. These last two sections remain focussed on literary studies, allowing for both overviews and specific work analyses in order to present the (currently still) most important medium of ‘fantastic studies’ in its full variety. Finally, the fifth section shifts the focus from the academic to the creative side of the fantastic, honoring our guest author, Paul Di Filippo, and his ‘theme story’, written exclusively for the occasion of the inaugural conference. Lastly, we would like to thank all involved and especially our sponsors for making the conference as well as the inauguration of the GFF possible and allowing us to publish the results in the form of these volumes. We would like to express our gratitude to the German research council (DFG), the University of Hamburg, the ICA and the American consulate general in Hamburg for their generous support of the conference. Our personal appreciation goes out to the efforts of our team and their work: Julia Gatermann (organization, editing), Tim Gehlert (organization), Kathryn Baker (proof-reading, networking), Steven Wosniack (technical support, recordings), Johanna Bauch and Nicole Zajac (administration, logistics), as well as all of our student assistants that helped with the smooth running behind the scenes.

THE FANTASTIC – THEORY AND HISTORY

The Art and Science of Heterocosmic Creativity BRIAN STABLEFORD In the first part of Aesthetika, the work that founded the modern philosophical discipline of aesthetics, published in 1750, Alexander Baumgarten characterized the construction of works of art as “secondary creativity”, attributing godlike powers and responsibilities to artists. The principal corollary of this standpoint is that the production of a work of art is no mere matter of designing an image, but involves, tacitly at least, the construction of an entire world. Because he belonged to a school of philosophy descended from the work of Gottfried Leibniz, Baumgarten accepted the argument put forward in Leibniz’s Theodicy, which asserts that because God is both omnipotent and good, any flaws in His creation must be attributed to the inherent limitations of the creative process, and that the existent world must be the best of all possible worlds. Leibniz used this argument to solve the problem of evil – the question of why, if God is omnipotent and good, so many terrible things happen in the world. Baumgarten’s analogous strategy might have opened up new scope for considering the question of bad art, but he did not exploit it in any elaborate fashion, being perfectly happy with the conventional view that although secondary creators might indeed be omnipotent to determine the form and content of their secondary worlds, very few were good, in any sense of the word. One consequence of his commitment to the Leibnizian perspective that Baumgarten did extrapolate, however, was his conviction that the measure of an artist’s competence was the extent to which the artist in question could follow God’s example in synthesizing the best of all possible worlds within a work of art – which is to say, in mimicking the world of primary creation faithfully and skilfully. He was acutely aware of the fact that the great majority of existing art-works did not do this, and in order to put a label on this tendency he improvised a term from the Greek: heterocosmic creativity. In Baumgarten’s view, heterocosmic creativity was a significant source of badness in art. One can see how this argument acquired a certain plausibility in respect of the history of painting before 1750. Baumgarten was able to look

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back on a pattern of progress in which the discovery of new materials, including oil paints, and new technical devices, such as the rules of perspective, had led to dramatic advances in visual realism. He was not in a position to know that the future history of painting would move in a seemingly contrary direction, with the development of such schools of art as impressionism, cubism, surrealism and abstract expressionism; we can only speculate as to whether that chain of developments would have filled him with sufficient horror to make him rethink his thesis. In terms of literary work, Baumgarten was living in an era when techniques of narrative realism were still in their relative infancy, with their greatest triumphs yet to come, but he had sufficient information, and sufficient faith in his argument, to anticipate a pattern of development similar to the one he detected in the history of painting. The chronological discrepancy might help to explain why, although art critics long ago abandoned any commitment to Baumgarten’s ideals, many literary critics continue to hold that narrative realism has an intrinsic and unchallengeable superiority, and that heterocosmic creativity in literature is inherently bad. That attitude has overflowed into the criticism of new media products that can be seen as extrapolations of literary endeavour, such as cinema and TV drama. The whole point of the organization whose foundation we are celebrating is, of course, to argue the opposite: that the use of the fantastic in the arts is by no means an inherently bad thing, and can, in its best examples, be magnificently good. In brief, we are here to support and celebrate the fact that heterocosmic creativity is not a kind of blasphemy, but ought rather to be judged as a stimulating challenge to the artist’s powers, requiring at least as much of artistic ability as mimetic creativity, and perhaps more. Like Voltaire in Candide, we are taking up arms in order to expose certain absurdities in the Panglossian perspective, not merely to dismiss the proposition that the world in which we find ourselves must be the best of all possible worlds, but also to decide what to do about that, by way of cultivating our gardens. In view of the apparent success of Baumgarten’s argument in relation to the progress of literary realism, it is useful to preface a discussion of the challenges and opportunities of heterocosmic creativity with some consideration of the way in which technical developments have facilitated the advancement of narrative realism, in much the same way that visual realism was favoured by advancements in the technics of painting. It is all the more important to do so because the significance of some of the developments in question is often overlooked, their effects being taken for granted. In the realm of drama, the development of theatrical apparatus has a conspicuous solidity and the evolution of stagecraft is measurable without overmuch difficulty, but developments in other literary realms have been

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less obvious. In the world of texts designed to be read rather than performed, the most significant advance – the printing-press – has absorbed and obscured its own prehistory, because texts written before the advent of print are now read exclusively in printed versions. It is, however, worth taking emphatic note of one of the covert effects of the invention and evolution of print: the gradual partial displacement of what might be called “reading by ear” by “reading by eye”. The symbols of written language were devised to represent phonemes; their purpose was to translate visual code into auditory experience. People routinely learn to read by learning to translate the alphabetical code into sounds, which they pronounce overtly or covertly. The key devices of poetry, most obviously rhyme, are dependent on the assumption that the written words will be translated into actual or imaginary sounds. With the advent of print, however, the standardization of the shapes of letters, and hence of whole words, permitted the development of a kind of mental short cut, by means of which printed texts could be translated by readers directly into meaning, without bothering to spell out the auditory images symbolized by the letters – a process potentially much more rapid than formulating auditory images, but suited only to prose, in its most prosaic aspects. Reading by eye is a skill that not every reader develops, and even skilled readers vary widely in the extent to which they employ it, but its gradual spread in the 17th and 18th centuries, as printed books became less scarce and easier to construe, paved the way for the development of new literary forms specifically designed for that kind of fast reading, most conspicuously the novel. Novels are designed to be read more rapidly than poems and, in a sense, more all-consumingly, cultivating a greater intimacy between reader and text by cutting out the process of auditory mediation. The greater intimacy of “reading by eye” made it easier for readers to “identify” with characters in books, experiencing their adventures almost as if they were standing in the characters’ shoes rather than merely listening to tales of their exploits. To put it another way, it made it easier for readers to experience a text as if they were actually entering into the world of its secondary creation, rather than merely studying it from without. These developments were crucial to the spectacular evolution, during the two centuries following Baumgarten’s death in 1762, of the now-familiar techniques of narrative realism, which fabricate a more convincing illusion of actuality within the experience of the text, assisting readers to immerse themselves so fully in the text’s secondary world as almost to believe themselves within it while they are reading. It helps that, in order to read, readers must disengage their sense of sight from its normal engagement with the environment, converting their eyes into mere decoding devices, thus making it easier for them to forget that what they are doing is scan-

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ning symbols on a page and releasing them into the virtual territories of their imagination. The techniques of narrative realism, including such artifices as indirect description, naturalistic dialogue and the evolution of the third-person limited viewpoint, gave authors of novels much greater opportunities to make the worlds within their texts seem like convincing reproductions of the real world, and made the experience of mimetic worlds-within-texts seem much more tangible to the reader. By virtue of an inevitable corollary, however, they also gave the authors of novels greater opportunities to make heterocosmic creations more convincing and more tangible. To Baumgarten and his followers, this would only have made heterocosmic creativity appear more dangerous, because it created scope for readers to be distracted and deflected from the world of actual experience, offering seductive opportunities to remove themselves from it temporarily, in a spirit of what came to be labelled ‘escapism’: a term that has become the bane of heterocosmic creators and their adherents. Because of this a priori dismissal of the function of heterocosmic creativity, relatively little attention has been paid to certain difficulties intrinsic to the relevant creative processes, by comparison with the attention paid to the specific difficulties of constructing mimetic secondary worlds. In the remainder of this essay I shall attempt to call attention to some of those difficulties, the methods by which writers have attempted to overcome them in the past, the corollaries of those methods’ employment, and the prospects for future developments in that ongoing struggle. Baumgarten knew perfectly well that the vast majority of literary works produced prior to 1750 had been heterocosmic, including those reckoned the greatest, whose artistic merits seemed unchallengeable. His quasi-Leibnizian argument offered a ready means of explaining and excusing this fact; the heterocosmic elements in the worlds of epic poetry and medieval romance were explicable as flaws in the understanding of the world innate in the relevant era, and posed no threat to the genius of their authors. There was a sense, in this way of thinking, in which the creativity of ancient authors need not be damned as heterocosmic at all, because it allegedly reflected and reproduced the world as they believed it to be. The allegation is dubious – it is highly likely that the authors of Homeric epics and chansons de geste knew perfectly well that they were fantasists – but it does raise an important issue regarding the conditions of comprehensibility pertaining to heterocosmic creativity. The comprehensibility of mimetic creativity is deceptively unproblematic. Since the readers of a text live in a world identical to the one that the writer is attempting to re-create, reader and writers should both feel at home there, and have abundant common reserves of information and un-

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derstanding on which to draw in securing that feeling of being at home. In theory, writers only have to name places and objects for readers to have a sense of where they are within the secondary world and what they are dealing with. In practice, the matter is not simple at all, since an individual reader’s experience of the world and the writer’s may be very different, and the name of a place or an object might conjure up a whole host of associations in a particular reader’s mind that are quite different from the associations that the same place or object have in the writer’s mind, thus confusing the process of communication. What seems like common ground can, in fact, be direly treacherous – a point made in considerable detail in one of the earliest manuals of creative writing, Vernon Lee’s The Handling of Words, but which tends to be glossed over in more recent practical guides. The potential gulf between the stocks of knowledge and means of understanding possessed by writer and reader, or storyteller and hearer, is nowhere more obvious than in stories produced for the consumption of children. Because a child’s knowledge and experience of the world differs so markedly from an adult’s, the cultivation of mimetic realism in children’s stories is very difficult – which is the principal reason why heterocosmic creativity is so commonplace in stories designed to be told to, or read by, children. Indeed, the heterocosmic world typical of children’s fiction – Märchenland, in German parlance – provides a significant common ground on which adult consciousness and child consciousness may meet on more-or-less equal terms. An adult and a child have very different experiences of the real world, but they have a very similar experience of Märchenland, where much of what needs to be known about the heterocosm in question is wholly contained and confined within the stories. A similar situation can be seen to exist in many adult works; although it seems unlikely that the poets and dramatists of ancient Greece or Medieval France believed that the worlds in their texts were similar to the world of their everyday experience, they nevertheless knew that it was a world with which their audiences were perfectly familiar, precisely because it was a mythical world, largely self-contained and self-explanatory. Far from inhibiting understanding, the fact that the texts in question made liberal use of a particular and familiar version of the fantastic facilitated understanding, and provided a solid basis on which to build artistic edifices. Arguably, it was not until Baumgarten’s time that the ready comprehensibility of the kind of heterocosmic creativity embodied in folkoristic and mythical fictions began to break down. The reason for the breakdown was not so much the progressive decline in belief in the supernatural – although the historical process that followed the Age of Reason with the Age of Enlightenment posed a challenge to what Coleridge called “the willing suspension of disbelief” as well as to sincere belief – as the equally-inexor-

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able progressive increase in literary individualism. By 1750, what had started out as common ground had already been subject to all manner of enclosures and privatizations as writers claimed imaginative territories for their own, and set out to embellish them with new mythologies, which routinely began as mimics of pre-existent ones but became insistently idiosyncratic. Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516), which extrapolates the basic substance of the familiar Chanson de Roland into an extremely elaborate and highly original imagistic tapestry, is one of the most conspicuous examples of this kind of literary manufacture, although Chrétien de Troyes’ much earlier Conte du graal (1191) went largely unrecognized because its inventive substance was widely misconstrued as pre-existent folklore and relentlessly copied as if it were. At any rate, writers engaged in this kind of personal appropriation increasingly revelled in the challenge of extrapolating new heterocosmic worlds, liberally furnished with the produce of their own idiosyncratic imagination. By the time Baumgarten was formulating his theory of aesthetics, the bases provided by the traditional “consensual heterocosms” no longer seemed necessary as launching-pads, and were casually discarded from such masterworks of bold invention as Jonathan Swift’s account of Lemuel Gulliver’s travels and the most adventurous of Voltaire’s contes philosophiques, Both of these writers did borrow, in a deliberately flippant manner, from existing mythologies, but they were forced by the nature of their enterprise to seek out new bases for extrapolation in philosophical and scientific speculation, thus helping to lay the foundations for a new kind of heterocosmic creativity. Voltaire underlined what might be regarded as the fundamental paradox of this kind of heterocosmic creativity by titling the first of his highly fanciful contes philosophiques, “Le Monde comme il va”: The World as it Is. The underlying philosophy of his endeavors in this vein is that, in order to see the world as it really is rather than as our mistaken beliefs and prejudices lead us to think that it is, we have to remove ourselves intellectually and imaginatively from the prison of our preconceptions, into an essentially fluid heterocosmic world, whose possibilities are not rigidly fixed by any shared system of beliefs or common knowledge. In this view, heterocosmic creativity is not inferior to, nor less valuable than, nor even an enemy of, mimetic creativity but a vital complement to it. In this view, heterocosmic creativity does not threaten our consciousness of what is real and what is not, but offers the possibility of refining and reconstructing that consciousness to make it more accurate and more appreciative. This is an argument that has been made on numerous occasions since – one of its most eloquent 20th century versions can be found in J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories” – but it has always had to be made in protest against the opposite view, which has remained commonplace in spite of

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its flagrant absurdity. In taking up its banner again, the organization whose foundation we are celebrating with this volume will still be swimming against a substantial tide. The new phase that the evolution of heterocosmic literary creativity entered with such creators as Swift and Voltaire threw the central problem of sophisticated heterocosmic creativity into sharp focus. If such creativity was to be developed to the full, as cleverly, as beautifully and as sublimely as possible, then it had to develop new techniques by which fruitful communication with readers might be achieved. In order to understand and appreciate increasingly sophisticated works of mimetic literature, 18thand 19th century readers needed to develop more extensive stocks of knowledge, not merely of the world in which they lived but of other works of literature – for no book is an island, any more than any man is. It was not merely writers who needed to learn and master the techniques that could assist readers to identify with the characters in novels and apparently enter into the world within the text, but readers, who had to learn to use the apparatus provided, cultivating the art of self-immersion in texts and all the associations permitted by that immersion. That kind of learning process is obviously facilitated when writers and readers share a good deal of knowledge about the world in which they live, but it is even more profoundly facilitated when they share common myths and illusions about the world in which they live – myths and illusions in the construction and maintenance of which literary works have played, and continue to play, a considerable part. This applies in greater measure to mimetic creativity than to heterocosmic creativity, to the extent that what the progress of narrative realism since 1750 has produced has not been a more accurate reproduction of the world as it is, but rather a new mythology of the world, which is seriously at odds with its actuality in some significant respects. In the same way that readers have had the opportunity to learn to use the techniques of sophisticated mimetic fiction as writers have developed them, so they have had the opportunity to learn to use the techniques of sophisticated heterocosmic fiction, in parallel with the learning processes that have allowed writers to be increasingly adventurous in constructing them. In accordance with the convoy principle, the necessity of travelling together has slowed the whole process down, to the extent that many of the great pioneers of modern fantastic literature found it very difficult to reach an audience in their own lifetime, and had to hope that their reputations might grow posthumously – as evidenced by the fact that the most prolifically original of all the pioneers of modern fantastic literature, Edgar Allan Poe, died of neglect at the age of 40. The same phenomenon has been evident as heterocosmic creativity has spread into newer media, such

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as cinema and TV. Slow as it has been, though, progress has been made, unsteadily but inexorably. We can see that progress not merely in the proliferation of idiosyncratic literary heterocosms, but in the evolution of the narrative strategies by means of which heterocosmic materials are rendered comprehensible to readers. Fantastic texts can be roughly divided, as Farah Mendlesohn has pointed out, into three major types, which she calls “intrusive fantasies”, “portal fantasies” and “immersive fantasies”. In an era in which techniques of narrative realism have made rapid progress, as they have in the last 250 years, there has been an obvious utility in intrusive fantasy, in which the world within the text is initially established as a mimic of the actual world, but is then modified by the intrusion of a fantasy element. The convenience of this approach, in terms of narrative construction, is further enhanced by the fact that the strategy includes a “natural story arc” around which a plot can easily be constructed. The intrusive element functions, by definition, as an anomaly, whose eventual banishment is bound to provide the story with a satisfactory sense of closure. The convenience of this story arc is, however, not without cost, for it makes the tacit assumption that all disruptive innovation is bad – or, to put it Leibnizian terms, that the status quo is the best of all possible worlds, which merits jealous protection against any and all changes. In magical fantasy, where the intrusive elements are usually drawn from a mythical past that is now manifestly obsolete, that tacit assumption is not particularly harmful, but any kind of fantastic fiction that aspires to criticize the world as it is must assume that it could and might be better. In science fiction, for instance, where the intrusive elements include new discoveries and inventions, the seductive story-arc in question becomes a powerful anti-progressive rhetoric, starkly at odds with what many of its practitioners consider to be the genre’s fundamental assumptions. Portal fantasies similarly begin by establishing a mimic of the actual world within the text, but juxtapose that mimic with a heterocosm, into which one or more characters will travel, sometimes by means of an arduous journey, but often by means of a facilitating device that functions as a convenient portal. This kind of fantastic fiction can make good use of the progress involved in reading by eye, because its readers’ identification with viewpoint characters can enable the characters in question to function as vehicles transporting the readers into the heterocosm, and allowing them to participate in the learning experiences that the characters undertake as they explore and come to terms with the exotic world beyond the portal. As with intrusive fantasy, this narrative strategy comes ready-fitted with a natural story-arc: the story will reach a satisfactory conclusion when the characters return home, hopefully with a better understanding of and a

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wiser attitude to the world they temporarily left behind. Although it is by no means as inherently anti-progressive as the standard story-arc of intrusive fantasy, this too is a limitation. The most elementary form of portal fantasy is the dream fantasy, in which the heterocosm is defined as an ephemeral vision, and all portal fantasies tend in that direction, carrying an underlying implication of insubstantiality, and perhaps of futility. Portals are barriers as well as means of admission, keeping worlds apart as well as allowing transition from one to another, and warding off the possibility of active transformation. An immersive fantasy is a story set entirely within a heterocosm, whose characters are natives of the heterocosm rather than the experienced world of the writer and reader. This type of narrative poses a much greater challenge to writer and reader alike, who must establish a common understanding without the crutches provided by intrusive fantasy and portal fantasy. Where the narrative is set in a particular heterocosm already familiar to both writer and reader, many of the difficulties disappear, and communication may become easier than it is in sophisticated realistic texts, but the more idiosyncratic the heterocosm becomes, the greater the practical problems of its construction, representation and explanation to readers become, and the more demanding the labour that writers and readers must put into their respective tasks. Writers who begin with familiar mythological materials, building their own fabulous edifices on previously-laid foundations, evidently have a simpler task than those who want to build their heterocosms from scratch, according to their own blueprints, but the complexity of the latter kind of labour is routinely subjected to various kinds of short cuts. The generic science fiction that evolved in the American pulp magazines was able to make much more extensive use of immersive fantasy than the native European traditions of scientific romance, because its writers and readers rapidly developed a consensual mythology of the future, which projected the US creation myth of expansion across a western frontier into space: a mythology that saw the future in terms of a continuing exploration of the solar system and the galaxy, planting colonies and settlements along the way. This mythos became a framework in which all manner of strange heterocosms might be established for examination and analysis, although it was soon supplemented by further frameworks – most importantly, the notion of a multiverse of parallel worlds, in which alternative histories could easily be situated. The logic of the situation dictates that innovative uses of the fantastic in works of art are bound to be esoteric to begin with, as writers struggle to educate an audience, often developing small cult followings of readers possessed of unusual interests and skills before attaining a degree of exotericism – an achievement that not all innovations contrive. In the 20th

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century, cinema and TV have become major agents of that kind of expansion, their nature as mass media inevitably transforming the esoteric into the exoteric whenever adventures in heterocosmic creativity are successfully adopted by them and adapted to them. That has been the case with the science-fictional myth of the Space Age, which became exoteric in its TV manifestations at exactly the point in time when the last vestiges of its always-precarious rational plausibility evaporated. It is not entirely a coincidence that the same point in time saw a dramatic increase in the exotericism of other kinds of immersive fantasy, spearheaded by the belated popularity of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. As was only to be expected, the subsequent proliferation of modern generic fantasy initially featured a host of works so similar to their prototype as to be virtual clones, but, as was also to be expected, once a new host of readers had become accustomed to the skills necessary to adapt themselves to immersive fantasies, more abundant scope for innovation and idiosyncrasy was opened up. Mendlesohn’s taxonomy of fantasy includes a fourth category, which she eventually decided to call “liminal fantasy”, and which seems at first glance to be marginal to the principal tripartite classification, although she is correct to call attention to its particular contemporary importance. A liminal fantasy, as its label suggests, is one in which the heterocosmic element is somehow placed on the edge of perception, present but denied the status of focal concern, not being perceived as an intrusive anomaly. In effect, the narrative proceeds as if it were a realistic narrative, taking the contents of the known world for granted and referring to them in familiar terms, but it mingles unfamiliar elements in with the familiar without calling particular attention to them, weaving them subtly and seamlessly into the fabric of a modest heterocosmic creation. In practice, of course, readers of naturalistic narratives are always liable to find elements of the world within the text that they do not recognize, which are alien to their own experience if not to the writer’s. Readers have to get used to taking such components of worlds-within-texts aboard as and when they crop up, so there is no particular hardship involved in doing so, at least for practised and sophisticated readers. This creates scope for writers interested in heterocosmic creativity to exploit that readiness, by introducing elements of the fantastic as if they were merely aspects of the real world with which some readers might happen to be unfamiliar. Writers do that consistently with non-supernatural elements of invention, including some that give rise to transformations of attitudes in the real world; as Oscar Wilde observed, life imitates art far more assiduously than art imitates life. The addition of frankly supernatural devices to the repertoire merely adds an extra turn of a well-oiled screw.

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Liminal fantasy has an obvious appeal to writers ambitious to employ the fantastic in a sophisticated fashion, because it is innately sophisticated, by comparison with the essential frankness and frequent brutality of the other three categories. It also has a seductive appeal to writers committed to the cause of narrative realism, who wish to carry its fundamental techniques one step further, employing them more innovatively. It therefore provides a useful interface, where diplomatic relations might be reopened between contentedly-esoteric connoisseurs of the fantastic and slightlydiscontented connoisseurs of narrative realism. Were it not for the recent formation of that interface, we would probably not be where we are today, and we would surely find it more difficult to envisage a way forward. The capacity for sophistication reflected in the contemporary proliferation of liminal fantasy exists in tension with, if not opposition to, the capacity for exotericization reflected in the increasing use of fantastic material in such media as cinema, TV and computer games. In terms of narrative imagery and representation, the proliferation of such material has been heavily dependent on technological innovations in computer-generated imagery, which have paved the way for a different kind of sophistication. While upmarket literary texts have progressed in the direction of making their heterocosmic elements less garish, weaving them into narrative fabrics in which they are routinely made to seen normal and natural, mass market products in the visual media have often moved in the opposite direction, deliberately exploiting and extrapolating the garish and the spectacular. This inevitably poses problems for writers, and others involved in similar creative processes, who wish to negotiate adaptations and translations of material from one kind of text to another, as well as for consumers and critics who want to enjoy and support the merits of one kind of sophistication while deploring the effects of the other, but such problems are not new and are unlikely ever to disappear. Even if Alexander Baumgarten had not been seriously mistaken in evaluating heterocosmic creativity, there was never any chance that the development and popularization of his aesthetic philosophy would reduce its exercise. Even if heterocosmic creativity were, in some strange sense, blasphemous, that would not diminish the challenge that it poses to the imagination, or the pleasures inherent in meeting that challenge. Perhaps, in fact, it is time to move away from Baumgarten’s way of thinking entirely – not merely its quasi-Leibnizian approach to solving the problem of badness in art but its more fundamental approach to the very idea of “badness”. Friedrich Nietzsche argued, in Beyond Good and Evil, that moral philosophers had laboured too long under the burden of defining good in entirely negative terms, merely as the amelioration of such manifest evils as hunger, disease and injury, and ought instead to devote more attention to

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positive goods that might not only enhance a trouble-free life but illuminate ones that were not yet freed from everyday evils. Perhaps our predecessors laboured too long under a philosophy of criticism that is obsessed with finding fault, forcing us to devote too much attention to the illgrounded accusation that heterocosmic creativity is inherently faulty, and too many attempts to justify its exercise by attempting to meet criteria designed for application to mimetic creativity. At any rate, we all know that it is now time to devote more attention to positive artistic virtues, which might not only enhance fault-free texts but illuminate those that are not yet freed from mundane flaws. That, obviously, is the fundamental mission of the newly founded organization this volume celebrates: not so much to defend heterocosmic creativity against its attackers, but to explore its possibilities and virtues more fully, to analyse its methods and techniques more cleverly, to celebrate its past and present achievements more eloquently, and to participate in its future achievements. Because the field is so large, the task is complex and difficult, but there is strength in numbers, and the opportunities are proportionately great. Works Cited Anon. The Song of Roland. [La Chanson de Roland.] c1150. Trans. C. K. ScotMoncrieff. New York: Dutton, 1920. Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso. 1516/1532. Tr. by Guido Waldman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Baumgarten, Alexander. Aesthetica. [Aesthetika]. 1758. New York: Olms, 1986. —. Passages from Aesthetika. A History of Aesthetics. Katharine Everett Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn. London: Thames, 1956. Chrétien de Troyes. Perceval, The Story of the Grail. [Le Conte du graal.] c11811190. Trans. Nigel Bryant. Cambridge: Brewer, 1996. Lee, Vernon. The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Literary Psychology. London: Lane, 1923. Leibniz, Gottfried. Theodicy. 1710. New York: Stock, 2001. Mendlesohn, Farah. The Rhetorics of Fantasy. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 2008. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. [Jenseits von Gut und Böse.] 1886. Trans. Helen Zimmern. London: Foulis, 1909. Swift, Jonathan. Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World in Four Parts by Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships. London: Motte, 1726.

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Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy Stories.” Tree and Leaf. London: Allen, 1964. 11-70. —. The Lord of the Rings. 3 Vols. London: Allen. 1954-55. Voltaire. Candide. Geneva: Cramer, 1759. —. “Le monde comme il va: Vision de Babouc.” 1746. Romans et contes de Voltaire. 2 Vols. Paris: Jannet, 1854.

“It’s not what you see – it’s how you see what you see” The Fantastic as an Epistemological Concept JAN CHRISTOPH MEISTER 1. From Experiencing to Labelling the Fantastic In the following I would like to propose a new definition of the fantastic. However, I want to preface this attempt by a personal account of how I came to experience the fantastic as an aesthetic phenomenon, and why I came to believe that it actually isn’t one to begin with. When I chartered the terrain of the fantastic I started out with science fiction and authors such as Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Kurd Laßwitz, Karel Čapek and perhaps first and foremost, Stanislaw Lem. Then I ventured on to explore fantasy, and as Harry Potter wasn’t around in the early 1970s, it was mainly Tolkien’s lore that captured my attention. Thereafter my focus shifted to the uncanny as I re-traced the literary history of the fantastic in reverse, setting out with H.P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, E.A. Poe, and then eventually exploring Romantic predecessors such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ludwig Tieck and Horace Walpole. For the purpose of my doctoral thesis I then returned to a German bestseller of the early 20th century: Gustav Meyrink, whose debut novel Der Golem (1915) had been an unprecedented literary success. Set in the Jewish ghetto in Prague towards the end of the 19th century the novel is generally considered one of the best examples of so-called “Prague fantastic literature.” However, on closer inspection it proved that Meyrink does not fall into the same category as authors like Kafka or Perutz. For despite his fashionable and flamboyant outer appearance, and despite the acclaim which he had rightly earned as a writer of ironical short-stories published mainly in one of the leading literary journals at the turn of the century, the Munich based Simplicissimus, Meyrink was in reality a practicing believer of a whole number of spiritual, mystic teachings. As he grew older he developed an ever-increasing attraction to the occult. While the cleverly constructed Golem did not overwhelm its readers with the author’s private belief system, the subsequent novels progressively manifested Meyrink’s

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tendency to use fiction in order to preach his personal occult beliefs. The somewhat byzantine title of my doctoral thesis (Hypostasis: The Logic of Mythical Thought in the post-1907 Oeuvre of Gustav Meyrink) tried to underline this important shift from an aesthetic to a mystical orientation in Meyrink’s writings. My main argument was (and remains) that Meyrink’s fiction, irrespective of its content, displays a certain logical trait, a type of language use and thought structure structurally identical to the mythical form of symbolic thought as defined by Ernst Cassirer in his Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1923-1929). The literary quality of Meyrink’s later novels is certainly disputable. But it is precisely this oeuvre’s eventual turn towards the didactic and dogmatic, which points us to an intrinsic problem of our traditional conceptualisation of the fantastic as an aesthetic category. Beyond the level of its mimetic appeal as an encounter with ‘strange worlds’ the fantastic actually presents a fundamental philosophical, or rather, epistemological challenge – and this is the aspect I wish to focus upon in the following in order to understand more deeply what is easily frowned upon as a naïve fascination for the strange and the deviant. 2. The Concept of the Fantastic The problem with tackling the fantastic on a philosophical level begins with the word itself: ‘fantastic’ is already a noun and an adjective at the same time. Of course the same applies to its terminological opposite, ‘the realistic’. Yet our conventional use of the two terms shows a decisive difference: A realistic experience is generally not interpreted as an experience of the realistic, but simply as one of something that is real; in other words: the term ‘realistic’ simply serves as an adjective. By contrast, a ‘fantastic’ experience, if we use the expression sensu strictu and not as a vague metaphorical praise for a ‘cool’ or otherwise enjoyable encounter, is more than just an experience which we characterize as one of a specific modality. It is, at the same time, an experience of the fantastic, an encounter of a ‘world’ of unique experiential and ontic quality. In the common view it is the ontic difference that characterizes the fantastic: a fantastic world functions according to different laws than a realistic one. However, when we label something as ‘fantastic’ we do not just categorize by way of predication an object domain in ontic terms: by the same token we specify the mode and conditions that govern our own cognitive and emotive processing of whatever the content at hand might be. This insight, I guess, is what makes Todorov’s seemingly clinical approach so compelling. Though structuralist in methodological terms, his was the first defini-

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tion that pinpointed the essentially transient and highly subjective nature of the fantastic, thereby shifting the focus from representational content to cognitive process. What I will try to do in the following is to go one step further, towards the metaphysics of the fantastic. But before embarking on that, let us first try and get a firmer gip on the concept itself. What type of concept is the fantastic? Implicitly, I have just argued against the perhaps most common use and understanding of it as a genre category. If the fantastic were a genre term then we should be able to apply it in a similar way as other genre terms, for example, Bildungsroman or detective novel. The reason why this does not work is that genuine genre categories are historically and culturally contextualized and, moreover, medium specific. Clearly, in our current use of the term ‘fantastic’ we do not understand its applicability to be constrained by criteria such as medium and historical or cultural setting. By the same token, to employ the term as a genre category would also result in a confusion of categorical levels: the fantastic comprises and is realised in many genres, such as vampire stories. To state that the fantastic is a category that cuts across genres and is, at the same time, in itself a genre should strike one as contradictory. If the term ‘fantastic’ is not a genre label or, in more general terms, not an aesthetic category, what other type of category might it be? Approaching the question from a phenomenological angle, we might be led to believe that it is indeed an ontological one. According to this position, the concept ‘fantastic’ belongs to the class of terms that enable us to differentiate distinct modes and possibilities of being, of types of worlds and existents. The dominant paradigm of realism – understood as an ontological qualifier – denotes a type of world in which anything that exists or happens can be explained by way of empirical observation and logic reasoning. It follows that things and events that cannot be observed and accounted for in this manner are by definition not real: they do not form part of the type of world which realism proclaims to be the exclusively realized one. No one will dispute the fact that the fantastic is at loggerheads with ontological realism – but does that already make the fantastic an ontological category in its own right? I do not think so, because realism and the fantastic are not logically symmetrical concepts either. From the position of realism, it is rather simple to naturalize the fantastic, i.e. to re-describe some event or object initially labelled as fantastic in such a way that it will conform to the realist’s ontological premise. The easiest way to achieve this is to bracket the fantastic with a modifier, such as ‘fiction’ or ‘hallucination’. Fiction, understood as a specific type of symbolic representation, is by definition real, and so are hallucinations – they are after all empirical, albeit partially pathological real-world phenomena. This ontological categorization of the form of representation, however, has no bearing on the status

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of the representational content at hand. That some people dream up fictitious worlds populated by non-real entities like unicorns is, as such, a real fact. But being dreamt does not impinge upon the ontological status of the unicorn as such. In other words, the unicorn itself will not become more real and less fantastic simply because it appears in a dream. The reason is that we generally consider the content (unicorn) and the form (dream) of a representation as two different aspects and domains. Therefore making the form more acceptable to realist conventions of representation is not going to turn the content, the unicorn, into a more real being. If realism and the fantastic were indeed concepts of the same order, one should be able to turn this dialectic on its head and bracket, so to speak, ontological realism (not aesthetic) by an ontological fantastic, without a negative effect on what is inside the bracket, namely realism. This sounds complicated, and it is indeed so. In practice it would amount to the proposition that a non-real unicorn can somehow conceptualize a non-non-real entity or event. This is only possible if we allow our unicorn to somehow ‘forget’ its own ontological limitations, something that a myse-en-abyme or a metalepsis might try to achieve. As an aesthetic mind-bender that’s of course perfectly fine and enjoyable, but in a logical test for conceptual symmetry a paradox like this is fatal. Ontological categorizations and the fantastic are logically incompatible, and so are the related concepts. This realisation has a profound philosophical consequence: for we obviously do use the terms in our day-to-day practice as if the labelling of an object as ‘fantastic’ automatically implied its non-reality. But if our use of terminology amounts to an undue confusion and mixing of ontological and other categories, what exactly is the purpose of calling something fantastic? If ‘fantastic’ is neither a genre, nor an ontological concept, what other type of concept can it be? My suggestion is: (the) fantastic is an epistemological concept. To put it in other words, it is a concept by which we indicate the conditions under which we perceive things and events and acquire knowledge about them. This definition sounds very familiar to the ontological one that we just discarded. However, its decisive difference is one of focus as well as of cause and effect. Rather than categorizing the phenomena, the objects, we now categorize the mode by which we process the phenomena sensually as well as cognitively. To conceptualize ‘the fantastic’ as an epistemological category thus pays tribute to the well-known fact that the ontological labelling of phenomena is never absolute, but context-dependent. For example, from Hansel and Gretel’s point of view witches belong to the type of objects that exist, not because of some abstract ontological criterion, but because you take them to be perceivable. Ontologies are secondary constructs, and our philosophical reasoning about what is possible in this world, and what is not, is by and large an extrapolation from past experience. In this

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vein what matters about the fantastic is not that something fantastic happens. Indeed, we can assume that in any fantastic world, a lot of inexplicable events will occur without even having been noticed, just as it happens to be the case in the real world. What matters is that somebody witnesses some of these events and thereby puts into question the validity of the realist epistemology. The effect of this attack on the hegemony of realist epistemology is so radical because the distinction between the two is itself of a fundamental nature. Whatever brand of realist epistemology one might decide to subscribe to, all of them share one decisive characteristic: a realist epistemology distinguishes between things that one can perceive and know about, and things that will by necessity remain obscure. In other words, all realist epistemologies are governed by the principle of constraint. By contrast, the governing principle of fantastic epistemology is exactly the obverse. It is by definition unconstrained. This does not mean that we will perceive and know everything. It only means that on the level of principle, there is no super-rule in force that would exclude certain types of experiences from being made, and certain types of knowledge from being attained. It is this tension between the principle of epistemological non-constraint on the one hand and the practice of a pragmatically enforced cut-off in the processes of perceiving and reasoning that gives the fantastic its particular dynamic and transitory character. As an epistemology, the fantastic makes a big promise – yet when it delivers on it, it voids it, as all promises are by necessity voided by their fulfilment. The promise is that of the ultimate transcendence of human epistemic boundaries, albeit a transcendence of a temporary nature. In a concrete work of fantastic art delivery on that promise must come by way of example: limitations of form, time and space dictate that we can only encounter a certain number of pre-selected phenomena and not the entire universe beyond the looking glass. Yet despite these pragmatic limitations, we will attain a knowledge which realist epistemology would never have allowed us to acquire in the first place. It is this founding in the principle of liberation from epistemological constraints that makes the fantastic so flexible in terms of historical context, thematic emplotment and medial realisation. And it is this epistemological signature that gives the fantastic away as the secular cousin of spiritual mysticism. In a metaphysical perspective the fantastic is therefore perhaps best conceptualized as an experiment in epistemological un-constraining. Applying this different epistemology might result in pleasant or in unpleasant, in uplifting or in terrifying experiences – this is where the conventions of the various fantastic genres and their topoi will take over. But these are

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beyond the scope of our current investigation. All that matters to us here is the question of principle. 3. From Don Juan to Donnie Darko Apart from themes and plotlines, every genre and medium has of course its own way of engaging us in the experiment of fantastic epistemology. Textual realisations of it have the distinct advantage that they can effortlessly switch from fictional mimetic representation of epistemic processes to their – essentially trans-fictional – discursive reflection, and back. On the other hand, visual realisations, and particularly those in films, are extremely powerful in immersing us in a protagonist’s epistemic situation. However, when it comes to reflection and discursive post-processing of these experiences, film often has to rely on rather cumbersome devices. Take for example Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko: an eclectic mix of genres, cinematographic and literary quotes and the classic fantastic theme of reverse engineered causality that is visually and experientially compelling. Unfortunately, the movie requires no less than an entire treatise on The Philosophy of Time Travel plus a talking bunny named Frank to allow at least its protagonist to get an idea of what is going on in Donnie’s world. Of course, the lasting appeal of Donnie Darko is in no small part owed to the fact that even with a talking bunny and a text book (plus a couple of web sites and fan portals) one cannot really make out heads from tails in this tale. Carlos Castaneda’s three volume first-person literary account of his exposure to the Mexican-Indian shaman Don Juan, a cult book whose appearance in Germany in the early 1970s happened to coincide with that of Tolkien’s fantasy, may be considered as a counter example. As the subtitle of the first volume states, the narrator wants to introduce us to a coherent body of thought, namely to The Teachings of Don Juan. Moreover, one could perhaps argue that Don Juan is not really a fantastic tale in the first place as the supernatural experiences of the protagonist are drug induced. However, at the end of the concluding volume of the trilogy, Castaneda’s hero no longer requires the aid of peyote and other consciousness enhancing substances. Completely sober and corpus mentis, he experiences an epistemological break-through that is metaphorically referred to by his teacher Don Juan as stopping the world. Castaneda’s description of this event demonstrates the power of the word in evoking both the experience as such, and in enabling us to partake in the protagonist’s attempts at interpreting them. In Don Juan and Donnie Darko we experience the fantastic in two distinct media, and in two works of art that set out with very different ambi-

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tions – one a fully-fledged anthropological fiction with a mystic teaching at its core, the other a post-modernist bric-a-brac of filmic genres, quotes, motives, allusions to Zeitgeist and youthful Angst that keeps its fans busy to the current day. Yet in terms of the epistemology in force in the two representations, they prove to be mutually interchangeable. Both are driven by an epistemology that prizes the discovery of a potential new- and otherness of man’s existence over an affirmative epistemology that only serves the conventionalized real. If we reject what is perceived by either of the protagonists in his respective world as merely improbable and unrealistic, the epistemological promise of the fantastic is lost on us. If however we do decide to partake in the temporary lifting of epistemological constraints, we will see the world differently. Looking at it through Donnie Darko’s eyes and mind we are bound to discover hidden causalities and dark forces ruling, and we will eventually tumble into an abyss of inexplicable consequences. Looking at it through Castaneda’s eyes, however, we might experience the contrary, as the hero does at the end of his search. To him the connectedness of everything becomes transparent, and his fantastic vision responds to the mystical promise of all acts of episteme – that our quest for knowledge will eventually harbour a result that marks the end point of all need for further explanation. This, the epistemological and teleological dimension, is the core element of the fantastic, and I believe that Castaneda expressed its true nature very well at the end of the third book in the series, The Lessons of Don Juan, where his first person narrator reports: Suddenly I felt that my body had been struck and then it became enveloped by something that kindled me. I became aware then that the sun was shining on me. I could vaguely distinguish a distant range of mountains to the west. The sun was almost over the horizon. I was looking directly into it and then I saw the ‘lines of the world.’ I actually perceived the most extraordinary profusion of fluorescent white lines, which crisscrossed everything around me. For a moment I thought that I was perhaps experiencing sunlight as it was being refracted by my eyelashes. I blinked and looked again. The lines were constant and were superimposed on or were coming through everything in the surroundings. I turned around and examined an extraordinarily new world […] I felt something warm and something oozing out of the world and out of my own body. I knew I had discovered a secret. It was so simple. I experienced an unknown flood of feelings. Never in my life had I had such a divine euphoria, such peace, such an encompassing grasp, and yet I could not put the discovered into words, or even into thoughts, but my body knew it. (267)

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Works Cited Castaneda, Carlos. The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. New York: Washington Square, 1968 —. A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971 —. Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972. Meister, Jan Christoph. Hypostasierung: Die Logik mythischen Denkens im Werk Gustav Meyrinks nach 1907. Frankfurt: Lang, 1987. Meyrink, Gustav. Der Golem. Leipzig: Wolff, 1915. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Cleveland: P of Case Western Reserve U, 1973. Films Donnie Darko. Dir. Richard Kelly. Perf. Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone. Pandora Cinema, 2001.

The Nightmares of Politicians On the Rise of Fantasy Literature from Subcultural to Mass-cultural Phenomenon RENÉ SCHALLEGGER “Those who refuse to listen to dragons are probably doomed to spend their lives acting out the nightmares of politicians.” This quote, taken from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1976 article “Fantasy, Like Poetry, Speaks the Language of the Night” (qtd. in Wood 5), exemplifies the irreducible gap between humanitarian ideals and Realpolitik, between dreams and hopes on the one hand and nightmare and despair on the other that so many, especially the young and the educated, experienced during the late 1960s. The peace movement voiced its protest against atomic bomb testing, against the deployment of US troops in a senseless and brutal war in Vietnam, against the destruction and unhindered exploitation of nature for economic profit. Non-violence and free love, the search for deeper meaning in the rubble of disillusionment with tradition, these became the guiding values of an entire generation. “And 1968 was a bitter year for those who opposed the war. [...] The victory of the ethic of exploitation, in all societies, seemed as inevitable as it was disastrous,” Le Guin describes the situation years later (“Introduction” 127). During the latter half of the decade a new focus for frustrated hopes and dreams had risen into the collective awareness of an ever growing number of discontented high school and college students all over the US: a book, or rather a trilogy, written by a hitherto unknown professor of English language and literature at Oxford, originally published in the UK ten years earlier (1954/55) and only made popular in the US by an unauthorised paperback reprint in 1965 (Moorcock viii). The Ace Books massmarket edition of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings together with Lin Carter’s Ballantine Adult Fantasy series that provided an avid readership with reprints of Fantasy classics as well as new talents from 1965 to 1974 created a cultural phenomenon, a literary genre no less, from what had been a number of texts on the fringes of marketability and

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far beyond the academically accepted literary canon of the day; A genre that came to be known as Fantasy. Soon members of the counter-culture of the late 1960s adopted this new genre as an expression of their dissent. Political opinions, world-views and social fantasies were read from (and into) fictional worlds. Their quasimythical themes reverberated with hidden meaning long thought lost to the post-war generation in traditional systems of belief, be they political or religious. Grand images of nature attracted projected desires for unspoiled idyll and freedom in those living the estranged lives of human resources in industrialised landscapes and societies. Forty years later, The Lord of the Rings has shed the last remnants of its subcultural origin and counter-cultural adoption, has transcended boundaries of genre as well as media: animated films, computer games, role-playing games, and even blockbuster movies have been produced. Peter Jackson’s trilogy of films (2001-2003) has grossed a total of $2,909,086,3951. In its wake, sales of Fantasy books and other media have soared, and not only Tolkien’s name has profited from this effect: Fantasy has become big business, it has become a mass-cultural phenomenon. This article will try to establish an understanding of why the impact of Fantasy as a cultural phenomenon was so decisive during the late 1960s that within a couple of years it went from an audience of “a few thousand throughout the world” (Moorcock viii) in the late 1950s and early 1960s to becoming the focus of an entire counter-culture that eventually transformed into one of the best-selling products on the market of mass-culture at the turn of the millennium. A tripartite structure should provide a comprehensive discussion of this cultural phenomenon. The first part deals with the attempt to define Fantasy, and the problems encountered reach from merely terminological ones to the ontological nature of Fantasy, as well as basic mechanisms of reading and the creation of belief. The second part gives a reduced diachronic overview of the genre: its sources in literature and precursors after the separation between realistic and fantastic literature, as well as its coming of age during the 20th century. Questions about the shifting focus of creation will guide my inquiries here. The last part of this article will then try to shed some light on the functions of Fantasy, what it does and how it works on the levels of the search for Truth (metaphysics), the Self (psychology) and the Other (culture). It is my goal, well conscious of the impossibility of a single and monolithic answer to so complex a problem, to nevertheless create a fuller and

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more comprehensive understanding of the cultural phenomenon that is Fantasy and the impact it has had and still has on people’s lives. 1. What’s in a Name? – Definitions of Fantasy The word ‘fantasy’ is one in a field of related notions like ‘fancy’, ‘fairy-tale’, ‘imagination’, ‘fantastic’ that has by now been established as the name widely associated with the kind of literature that is the subject of this analysis. Stephen Prickett dates the first use of the word ‘fantasy’ in the English language to the Middle Ages, but points out that it originally goes back to the Greek phantasia meaning “a making visible” (173). In early English use it had close connections to “spectral apparitions” and phantoms (“Fantasy”, Oxford English Dictionary), while in Chaucer’s time it was used to denote a mental “image of something that does not exist” (Prickett 173). This neutral attribution to the unreal later took on connotations of the unhealthy or immature, so that from Shakespeare up to the 18th century it was widely associated with the mental states of madmen and children. It was not until the Romantics reclaimed the word in their struggle for the autonomy of artistic creation, independent from the bindings of mimesis, that “fantasy” was again positively connoted as “mental image” or simply “daydream” (“Fantasy”), and it took until 1949 for it to appears as a “genre of literary composition” (ibid.). Whereas Prickett uses a diachronic approach in his definition of the term, Tolkien in his famous essay “On Fairy-Stories” from 1938 situates “fantasy” in its lexical field, differentiating between related terms. For him, “imagination” has mostly lost its original denotative meaning of the faculty to conceive images to “fancy”, which he consequently describes as a “reduced and depreciatory form of the older word Fantasy” (46). Based on this transference of meaning, Tolkien defines Fantasy (and I am using his capitalisation of the term in this essay) as “both the Sub-creative Art in itself and a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from the Image” (47). Adding another layer of meaning to the aforementioned diachronic and lexical variations, Italo Calvino’s inquiry into Fantasy emphasises perceived cultural differences: He claims that whereas in French fantastique has connotations of an expectation of the recipient’s belief in the world presented and a real emotional reaction to it, in Italian fantastico implies exactly the opposite, an expected detachment, the “acceptance of a different logic”, an “unravelling of a logic” (133f.). For Calvino English here follows the Italian definition.

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All of these attempts at definitions contribute to the meaning of the word Fantasy, yet none of them is capable of encompassing it fully. Prickett attributes the emancipation of Fantasy – the making visible of something that does not exist – to the Romantics in their departure from the dictates of mimesis. Tolkien, departing from a purely etymological point of view, creates the basics of an aesthetics of Fantasy: his idea of the sub-creation, of Fantasy as a “making or glimpsing of Other-worlds” (“On Fairy-Stories” 41), closely linked to an affective quality and a sense of wonder, defines Fantasy as a fully developed and serious form of Art, harking back to the concept of myth. Lastly, Calvino adds to these general concepts the dimension of cultural context, a decisive factor in finding an answer as to why Fantasy as a mass-cultural phenomenon had its breakthrough in the US in the late 60s. The most comprehensive approximation to a definition of Fantasy is possibly given by Colin Manlove in his introduction to Modern Fantasy: Five Studies. He describes Fantasy as a fiction evoking wonder and containing a substantial and irreducible element of supernatural or impossible worlds, beings or objects with which the reader or the characters within the story become on at least partly familiar terms. (165)

Here the complexity of the definition is itself proof of the multi-facetted and sometimes even contradictory nature of Fantasy. It is also interesting to note that even critics as elaborate and careful in their writings on Fantasy as Ursula K. Le Guin or Colin Manlove implicitly or explicitly take Fantasy for granted as a genre (or sub-genre) of fantastic fiction together with Science Fiction and Horror. The problematic nature of this assumption and its effect on criticism is at the centre of Brian Attebery’s “Fantasy as a Mode, Genre, Formula”, in which he uses the two extremes in critical reactions to Fantasy – popular, escapist entertainment vs. sophisticated, self-reflexive, subversive storytelling – as a starting point to formulate a more complex system of “Fantasies”. Attebery concedes that Fantasy can indeed be both: mass-market entertainment and complex investigation of the way reality is constructed. He therefore distinguishes Fantasy as a formula – the “commercial product” whose success “depends on consistency and predictability” – from Fantasy as a mode – “a vast subject, taking in all literary manifestations of the imagination’s ability to soar above the merely possible” (294). Between the two, mixing elements of both in varying degrees according to historical and cultural factors, he situates Fantasy as genre. He does not attribute positive or negative qualities to either of his categories, recognising the need for conventions within the fantastic mode, yet refusing the necessity to follow them blindly.

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It seems that as one of the youngest among the great genres of fiction, Fantasy exemplifies most clearly the basic conflict between desired freedom and necessary restrictions inherent to all creation of meaning. Absolute creative freedom would lead to chaos and misunderstanding and thus ultimately be meaningless. Absolute submission to formula would end in stasis, the end of development and ultimately meaninglessness again. Only the free play between freedom and formula, chaos and order, guarantees understanding and the successful creation of meaning. Not surprisingly, this ancient mythological topos has – in Western, rational and (mostly) secular societies – found its most striking expression in Fantasy literature. That the genre of Fantasy has close links to myth, and that it is therefore to be taken seriously, is a concept that can be found in most critical literature on the subject. Ursula K. Le Guin for example reacts strongly to the prevalent image of Fantasy as commercial (formulaic) entertainment in her essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”: I believe that the reader has a responsibility […]. That duty is to refuse to be fooled; to refuse to permit commercial exploitation of the holy ground of Myth; to reject shoddy work, and to save our praise for the real thing. Because when fantasy is the real thing, nothing, after all, is realer. (81)

She equates Myth with Fantasy, a statement that might strike a reader unaccustomed to the effect Fantasy has on an open-minded recipient as daring, yet it echoes Tolkien’s definition of Fantasy as “sub-creation” filled with a sense of wonder and an affective quality reaching out to the reader. This effect depends on what Tolkien calls “Secondary Belief” (“On FairyStories” 38), which he differentiates clearly from the more commonly known “willing suspension of disbelief” Coleridge formulated as a necessary action in the reader of the fantastic in his Biographia Literaria of 1817 (cf. Sandner, Fantastic Literature 320). Whereas Coleridge presupposes disbelief as the natural reaction to the fantastic, postulating the necessity for a conscious act of will on the part of the reader in order to suspend it to be able to enjoy immersion in the otherworld, Tolkien rejects this broken reading experience: for him a successful storyteller constructs a sub-creation, a Secondary World beyond the Primary World storyteller and recipient live in. This Secondary World is just as real as the Primary one within the confines of the sub-creation. Coleridge’s disbelief is hereby supplanted by belief as the desired reaction: “The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed” (“On Fairy-Stories” 37). Fantasy taps into the well of belief, like myth or its institutionalised cousin religion. Unlike those two, the belief Fantasy creates is not of the Primary World, but belongs to a Secondary World, a factor that is essential to understand the social function of Fantasy in the counter-culture of the late 60s.

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In his article “The Encounter with Fantasy” Gary Wolfe develops a theory of eight important steps structuring a recipient’s experience of Fantasy from first contact to the deeper belief he claims results from every successful integration of idea and affect “without constricting the work or reducing it to overt didacticism” (232). From the cognition of the impossible, the realisation that the rules of Primary Reality are violated in the text, the reader passes through the location of the impossible, when the content of Fantasy is situated between individual fantasy and collective myth, and the delimitation of the impossible, assuring the reader that the fantasy is under control, into eventually developing a feeling of the impossible, an emotional attachment to the Secondary World. Based on this, awareness of the affective significance of the Secondary World arises, promising reward for emotional attachment, followed by the awareness of cognitive significance, the presence of a deeper meaning beneath the surface. The interaction between the affective and cognitive significance of Fantasy creates belief in the Secondary World (i.e. Secondary Belief), and if the experience is successfully completed, this belief results in a deeper belief “which permits certain fantasy works to become analogues of inner experience virtually as valid as events of the ‘real world’“ (233). Even though Wolfe’s model is very convincing, and he himself concedes that not all fantasies will be successful in taking the reader through the entire process or are even meant to do so, there are two shortfalls. The first one is that Wolfe claims that his final stage of deeper belief will not only create a set of quasi-real experiences in the reader, but that it also expresses “the author’s own most fundamental convictions” (233). Here the role of the authors seems too dominant, since they are only one end of the process of meaning-making and authorial power is subject to the cooperation of the reader. Furthermore, Wolfe only gives reasons for an unsuccessful experience (one not reaching deeper belief) that are inherent in the text. Yet again, the reader is absent from his deliberations: What if the reader does not want to give in to the stages of belief, like readers interested in a critical analysis of a given Fantasy or those reading it for distraction? These points of criticism are why I disagree with David Sandner’s statement that Wolfe creates “a kind of reader-response criticism of the fantastic” (Fantastic Literature 222). What he does, however, is add another dimension to the definition of Fantasy by expanding on Tolkien’s concept of Secondary Belief and by creating a functional description of this powerful aspect of Fantasy. Well aware that a phenomenon as complex as Fantasy defies any attempt to find a simple definition, I would then suggest the following approximation: Fantasy is a genre constantly oscillating between open mode and static formula that establishes impossible Secondary Worlds and from

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these creates Secondary Belief to inspire concrete affective reactions to the abstract ideas presented. This inclusive and open definition might help to create a clearer concept of Fantasy, while allowing enough leeway for its artistic, psychological and social potential. 2. To the Farthest Shore and Back Again – The Development of Fantasy Fantasy as a genre did not spring from nothing. Like every other form of human cultural expression it has sources, precursors, and evolved in a process of historical development until it reached its current form. The sources of Fantasy reach back as far as literature itself. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest recorded epic of world literature, committed to writing between the 21st and the 6th century BC (Soden 9), stands at the beginning of a long tradition of mythological and epic literature that would later resurface in the motifs and structures of Fantasy. Other famous texts, like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Sanskrit epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, the Germanic Elder Edda and Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, the French Song of Roland, Arthurian Romances, as well as the Welsh Mabinogion are all named as possible sources. More secularly-minded critics would add to these the holy texts of the great world religions, the Old and the New Testament of the Bible, the Quran, and the Vedas for example. But even if Fantasy takes many of the elements present in these texts, recombining them eclectically to create its own Secondary Worlds, calling them precursors to Fantasy might be inappropriate. There is a fundamental, functional difference between them that critics have identified. Manlove postulates that Fantasy is to include a “substantial or irreducible element” of the supernatural or impossible (160). For him, Homer’s epics are indeed to a certain extent about the impact of the supernatural on the lives of mortals, yet they are “primarily concerned with the working out of human destiny” and thus too weak in supernatural content (160). Florian Marzin provides an even more convincing argument: To him the main difference between ancient epics and Fantasy is their Sitz im Leben, their historical, textual and socio-cultural context of production and reception (11). The German expression is – most befittingly – borrowed from Biblical criticism and goes back to Protestant theologian Hermann Gunkel, who used it for the reception of biblical texts. Marzin reaches the conclusion that, unlike Fantasy, ancient texts were used in situations of psychagogia, the instruction of members of the community as to what their society and culture expected of them. They were not didactical texts as such, but carried a strong didactical sub-text using belief to lead by example. For the

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most part this would be Primary Belief, as the audience took the historicity of the accounts for granted. This is the major difference between epic or mythological literature and the genre of Fantasy: both create belief, both – and here I differ from Marzin – have the inherent power to influence people’s behaviour based on Wolfe’s deeper belief, the power of psychagogia, but whereas the original audience of epics was motivated by a social, collective Primary Belief, the audience of Fantasy experiences an introspective, private Secondary Belief. This social function – lacking the religious dimension of ancient texts – was also central to medieval Romances that consequentially have contributed enormously to the pool of motives, characters and plots of Fantasy. While the early medieval Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and the German Song of the Nibelungen both present the reader with archetypal heroic characters fighting dragons and certain doom, their downfall is no longer due to the willful character of supernatural beings but the dissolution of social order. The collapse of the Roman Empire and the resulting massive migrations all over Europe had created an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty: social bonds had to be strengthened for communities to survive. These epics presented their audiences with examples of where failure to uphold social coherence in a time of crisis could lead. Arthurian literature, given form by authors such as Chrétien de Troyes, Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach and, later, Thomas Malory, not only strengthened the motif of the magical item that should become central to Fantasy (Arthur’s sword Excalibur), it also attributed a dominant textual position to the concept of the Quest, the journey the hero has to take away from home in order to overcome a threat, grow in the process and then return to restore his home to a new state of order. Joseph Campbell used this archetypal Hero’s Journey in The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949) to point out universal motifs in mythologies all around the world. Much later, Ursula K. Le Guin made that journey the key motif not only of her influential Earthsea cycle (1968-2001), but of most of her writing, as will be explored in more detail in the third part of this article. While the sources and precursors of Fantasy reach back far into history, the development of the genre itself is a more recent phenomenon. Attebery situates it “at the end of the eighteenth century with the first German Kunstmärchen, literary imitations of the folktales popularized by Musaeus and the brothers Grimm” (303). At that time, fairy-tales and folktales that during the rise of Reason to the status as dominant ideology of Western societies had been relegated to the world of children were resurfacing in literature. The Romantics rediscovered their own, national traditions. In the early 19th century translations of several collections of fairytales reached England: in 1823 the German Popular Stories of the brothers

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Grimm and in 1846 Hans-Christian Andersen’s tales were published in English for the first time. Intellectuals like the Rossettis preferred The Arabian Nights, available in England since the late 1830s, to the “official diet of edifying literature, such as Maria Edgeworth’s Moral Tales, or Day’s Sandford and Merton” (Prickett 176). Following a generation of critical minds like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, artists turned away from cold Reason and the dictates of mimesis, embracing dream, imagination and the fantastic. So it was British authors who established the referential framework for what was to become a genre, using the creative power of the mode of Fantasy. George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858) and Lilith (1895) used the folktales of the author’s native Scotland for the otherworldly adventures of his protagonists who established the groundwork for the conventions of the stereotypical Fantasy hero. Rainer Nagel connects him to Coleridge and his concept of the imagination as supreme creative force, since for MacDonald the imaginary Secondary World has more claim to reality than the Primary World itself (17). Inspired by Coleridge and MacDonald, William Morris, disappointed by modern industrial society, projected socialist ideas into quasi-medieval Secondary Worlds, as in his Well at World’s End (1896). According to Nagel he was the first creator of a unique and comprehensive Secondary World, which would make him the “Father” of modern Fantasy (17). Morris also created a distinctive language for the genre, and he was the first to give his texts the form of epic quests, another key feature of Fantasy. The third in the triad of essential early British Fantasy authors is Lord Dunsany, whose complex fictional world was developed to perfection in his 1924 novel The King of Elfland’s Daughter. Attebery briefly summarises the contributions of the three to the genre of Fantasy as follows: “George MacDonald helped to popularize a certain type of hero. William Morris introduced a distinctive vocabulary and style. Lord Dunsany set a fashion for naming places and characters” (303). While in the UK authors like Eric Eddison, David Lindsay and Mervyn Peake continued to write complex and demanding novels in the tradition of the late 19th century, in the United States a new form of Fantasy that focussed more on adventurous battles and mysterious magic developed: Sword & Sorcery or Heroic Fantasy was born. Using the formulaic aspect of the genre, entertainment was the core interest for writers and readers of these stories. The main medium of publication were not novels, but pulp magazines, a name taken from the cheap, low-quality paper these were printed on. Edgar Rice Burroughs invented Tarzan for the pulps, and introduced John Carter of Mars in All-Story magazine (1912). Most importantly, the Texan Robert E. Howard created his barbarian Conan for Weird Tales (1932), whose constant battles against evil sorcerers have become the genre prototype of Heroic Fantasy. Other notable authors in-

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clude Fritz Leiber, famous for his Swords of Lankhmar series, or Lyon Sprague deCamp, who together with Fletcher Pratt created humorous fantasy novels connected by the main character Harold Shea. Poul Anderson’s later contribution to the sub-genre of Sword & Sorcery, Three Hearts and Three Lions (1961), was just as well received by the audience as his fiction based on Norse mythology that shows the inherent closeness of Heroic fantasy to epics and historical novels. Harking back to Coleridge and Morris’s ideas, Tolkien defined his own concept of the creative process as “sub-creation” which he – a fervent Catholic – saw as a reflection of the Creator’s power in his creation even after the Fall: “The right has not decayed. We make still by the law in which we’re made” (“Mythopoeia” 87). Turning the conventional modus operandi upside down, he first created his immensely detailed world, Middle-Earth, and then developed characters and stories from it: The Hobbit (1937) and his tri-part novel The Lord of the Rings (1954/55). The impact of Tolkien’s works on the then nascent genre of Fantasy cannot be overestimated. Consequently, Attebery attests that Tolkien’s form of fantasy, for readers in English, is our mental template, and will be until someone else achieves equal recognition with an alternative conception. One way to characterize the genre of fantasy is the set of texts that in some way or other resemble The Lord of the Rings. (306)

Tolkien’s influence pervades genre conventions in all aspects: content (a fully established and believable Secondary World), structure (comic, where after the Hero’s Journey order is restored) and reader response (with the restoration of order leading to eucatastrophe, a state of consolation or cathartic sense of wonder) (cf. Attebery 307f.). Besides escape and the consolation of eucatastrophe, Tolkien identifies recovery as the third function of Fantasy: a re-enchantment of the world, a refusal of the ideology of appropriation, acquisition and possession (“On Fairy-Stories” 56f.). For Attebery this recovery translates into Shklovsky’s Formalist idea of estrangement as “the essential operation of all literature”: the process of seeing “familiar objects and experience as strange” (308). After The Lord of the Rings, most texts of the genre reacted directly or indirectly to Tolkien’s concepts. Helmut Pesch even goes so far as to classify all of 1980s Fantasy into Tolkien-imitations, Tolkien-adaptations, Tolkien-variations and original creations (cf. Nagel 19). A clear and conscious break from Tolkien’s conventions is Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga (1961-2005). Elric is a doomed anti-hero so unlike Tolkien’s Aragorn: He is a pawn in an eternal struggle between the forces of Order and Chaos until he rejects both. Where Aragorn successfully restores his lost kingdom and heralds an era of static bliss, Elric eventually fails in his quest and leaves the world blighted and devastated. In the face

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of utter defeat he again chooses to defy the will of the supernatural powers and in a more than bitter triumph destroys the old world, creating a new one where the eternal struggle resumes. This refusal of comic closure and eucatastrophe at the same time reinforces the power of the individual and heightens the emotional impact of the texts. Still, Moorcock also adds a universal and mythical quality to his created worlds by the concept of the Multiverse: all of his heroes are incarnations of the Eternal Warrior reborn into a multitude of worlds to constantly relive the archetypal conflict between Order and Chaos. Another, more subtle divergence from the Tolkienian paradigm of Fantasy is Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series. In A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) the author created a Fantasy-Bildungsroman, describing the coming of age of Ged, a boy from a remote island destined to become the most powerful wizard of his time. The quasi-mythical perspective of Tolkien is here replaced by a very private, psychological one. For Le Guin the traditional quest, the Hero’s Journey, is a journey not to an outer country, but to the ‘Inner Lands’, a term she borrows from Dunsany and to which she gives the added meaning of the subconscious self (cf. “Citizen” 19). For her “most of the great works of fantasy are about that journey”, “a voyage into the unconscious”, a “journey of self-knowledge, to adulthood, to the light” (“The Child” 55). In another breaking of Tolkien’s ideal image of fantasy, Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (1968) highlights the interdependence of the Ideal and the Real in the creation of a “coherent world view” (Nagel 19, my translation). Beagle’s use of genre conventions is a playful, ironic one, with stock characters going against expectations and intentional anachronisms fracturing the impression of a closed Secondary World. As a meta-textual mirroring of Beagle’s theme, his Secondary World is tainted by interferences from the Primary one, yet he manages to sustain Secondary Belief and thus remains well within the boundaries of Fantasy. By his conscious re-writing of Fantasy conventions, Beagle anticipates a development that was to be characteristic of the Fantasy of the late 1980s and especially the 1990s. The 1970s saw the advent of large multi-volume series like Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber (1970-91), Terry Brook’s intensely Tolkienesque Shannara series (1977-2008), Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni-Cycle (1970-2008), or Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever (1977-2007) in which the author makes a cynical and leprous outcast the heroic saviour of an alternate Earth. Following a growing Feminist discourse, the 1970s also saw the emergence of well-developed female characters, as Fantasy was up to that point largely dominated by male protagonists. The works of Patricia McKillip (Riddle-Master trilogy, 1976-79), Tanith Lee (The Flat Earth cycle, 1978-87), Carolyn Janice Cherryh (The

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Morgaine Cycle, 1976-79) and Marion Zimmer Bradley (Avalon series, 198399) are among the forerunners of this paradigmatic change. Even a historical overview as short as this one already shows how fantastic literature, rooted in but differing through the quality of belief it creates from the mythical, was taken up by the Romantics to oppose the Realist dictate of mimesis. It slowly developed into the genre of Fantasy from the end of the 19th century onwards through external and internal differentiation, taking up dominant cultural discourses and building a considerable readership. The genre itself can thus be considered the product of an ongoing process of negotiation, which connects closely to the question of the functions of Fantasy I would like to address next. 3. Of Silence, Shadows and Dragons – The Functions of Fantasy Like myth, Fantasy has the potential to speak to its audience about what makes us human and about our relation to the world around us, the conditio humana. Every cultural artifact does that to a certain extent, the important difference lies in a simple but nonetheless powerful factor: belief. The belief generated by Fantasy is of a different kind from the one mythologies and religions inspire. The latter expect their recipients to accept the stories they tell as part of Primary Reality in a collective, unreflected and dogmatic way and thus create communities of passive objects to authorial discursive power. Fantasy on the other hand, if it is not merely the realisation of a formulaic scheme, calls for Secondary Belief in a world that is co-created by author and recipient, negotiated by a reader who is activated by the affective quality of Fantasy. It creates communities, not of objects, but of actively co-creating subjects. The most fundamental level of the functions of Fantasy is the metaphysical one. At its centre stands the eternal struggle of the human mind for Truth. With the collapse of Primary Belief in the metaphysical as the binding force of Western societies during the Age of Enlightenment, the scientific world-view replaced the religious one as the new system of Primary Belief. During the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, the Western mind was convinced that humanity had conquered nature, possessed it. The alienating Industrial Age reduced nature and humanity alike from Creation to resource, with all the accompanying effects on ethics and the perception of meaning. The power of narrative must not be underestimated. It is the word that creates and shapes realities, or as Tolkien puts it: “spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men” (“On Fairy-Stories” 31). Beyond the active creation of truths through narrative, it can also be

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used as a tool to arrive at a deeper understanding of the nature of reality. “The story – from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace – is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding”, Ursula K. Le Guin states. And more: “There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories” (Language of the Night 25). This does not, however, imply that stories express an absolute and singular Truth, like ideological narratives. Even a deeply Christian author like Tolkien concedes that Man, himself a creation, cannot express Truth (“On Fairy-Stories” 54f.). Every author is thus limited to sub-creation, “‘true’ only as reflecting in a particular way one of Man’s visions of Truth” (ibid. 10). This metaphor implies a considerable divergence from the reality described by the author: not only is it but a vision (an impression filtered by perception and conceptualisation), words as carriers of meaning also only create a ‘reflection’ of the author’s understanding. The story becomes a distorting mirror, all attempts at mimesis futile. The impossibility of mimesis leads Tolkien to the conclusion that since Fantasy does not even attempt to reproduce the Primary World, but engages in the sub-creation of Secondary Worlds, it is “not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent” (ibid. 48). As the origins of Fantasy lie in the Romantics’ fascination with the irrational, the subjective and the dark, the concept of meaning itself becomes a problematic one, even though it does not disintegrate as in more extreme developments of this philosophy, like Nietzsche’s destructive, radically ambivalent open dialectic of opposites or Derrida’s deconstruction (cf. Zima 21ff). While on the one hand the genre taps into the archetypes of myth to empower its texts with meaning and create affective impact, it breaks them through the prism of the individual psyche of the author and reader, even more so than other genres, as there can be no consensus about the true nature of a Secondary World. This is what Le Guin calls the process of “translation” that underlies all Fantasy: the imagery of the subconscious is non-verbal, but in order to express it the author has to translate his vision into “word-symbols” of the conscious mind: “fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night” (qtd. in Wood 5). It is this negotiated middle ground between the universal and the particular, between Truth and meaninglessness, between convention and freedom that lends itself perfectly to those seeking answers outside of dogmatic ideologies, not willing to succumb to the emptiness and hopelessness of the ultimate abnegation of all meaning in silence. This openness and indeterminacy of Fantasy is the main reason why the young generation of the late 1960s in their shared but individual rebellion against tradition and the economic dictates of capitalism relied on Fantasy for their ultimately pri-

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vate search for universal, deeper meaning. Le Guin expresses this insight in a nutshell when she ends her essay “The Staring Eye” as follows: No ideologues, not even religious ones, are going to be happy with Tolkien, unless they manage it by misreading him. […] They will no more keep Tolkien labelled and pickled in a bottle than they will Beowulf, or the Elder Edda, or the Odyssey. (151)

Here it is: the refusal of monological ideology, of scientific labelling and capitalist possession, the plurilogical openness of Fantasy, and the longed for power and meaning of myth. Le Guin speaks as a true child of her times. The psychological functions of the genre underlie her critical appreciation and analysis, but also her own works of Fantasy. Fantasy becomes an expression of the archetypal through the individual, myth filtered through the psyche of author and reader. “Fantasy is the language of the inner self”, she proclaims (“The Child” 59). She internalises the motif of the Hero’s Journey, or maybe she re-internalises it, since the link between journeys out into the world and those into the depths of the soul is a feature many mythologies share. The conscious is replaced by the subconscious as the dominant creative instance, paradigm gives way to association. As Attebery puts it: “fantasy is in a sense mimetic, for it depicts the associational processes of the unconscious” (300). The shift from collective mythology to individual psychology relies on symbolic representation that is highly arbitrary and subjective. When Prickett postulates that there “is (and can be) no point of objective reference” for Fantasy, that “Eternal truths are what we make of them; man is the measure of all things” (178), Fantasy becomes the expression of a reinstatement of the individual in a (post-)industrial world dominated by power-structures and a pervading sense of alienation. Bloom adds his voice to this analysis of the genre when he positions Fantasy as a “belated version of romance”, a literature of anxiety, questioning “the sources of fantasy, within the reader, and the benignity of the handing-on of tradition” (250). The freedom Fantasy has to offer is bought at the price of continued conflict with the self and tradition. This latent auto-aggression and sense of existential angst echoed with many among the young and the educated during the late 1960s, when traditional forms of belief had lost their power of meaning-making, and the search for something to fill the resulting vacuum became the defining feature of an entire generation. Bridging the gap between the past and the present, between the collective and the individual, Fantasy proposed a sense of Tolkienian recovery, a feeling of security in eucatastrophe at the possible danger of falling for shallow escapism. Writers of Fantasy that showed kinship with “altered states of consciousness such as hypnosis, meditation, and drug-induced vision” (Attebery 300) became themselves quasi-spiritual guides for a generation thirsting for new sensations. The

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body and sexuality became central areas of conflict, and the strong sexual subtext of Heroic Fantasy resonated with the new openness towards the physical, while strong female characters were created that could stand beside their male counterparts as equals. High Fantasy provided a suitable background for projections of hopes and desires, but it is Ursula Le Guin’s merit to have popularised a deeper approach to the power of Fantasy. In her essay “The Child and the Shadow” she addresses the Jungian concept of the Shadow, all that is “inferior, primitive, awkward, animallike, childlike” but also “powerful, vital, spontaneous” (54) in us, as central to her understanding of the achievement of the genre. The fear and anxiety Bloom diagnoses as the predominant state of the post-Romantic mind results from the socially expected denial of the Shadow. The human psyche thus weakened seeks the security it finds in the identification with a “collective consciousness”, systems of belief Le Guin calls the “empty forms” of the mass-mind, “cults, creeds, fads, fashions, status-seeking, conventions, received beliefs, advertising, popcult, all the isms, all the ideologies, all the hollow forms of communication and ‘togetherness’ that lack real communion and real sharing” (ibid. 53). Fantasy for her is the literature of emancipation, of coming of age, of healing, where the way to a mature self leads ever inward and the Shadow is both the keeper of the threshold between the conscious and unconscious and a source of power. Only it can lead the questing psyche to the state of a collective unconscious. To “live in the real world”, the individual must first become whole again, confronting its own Shadow, accepting it as part of the Self and withdrawing all projections to the outside world (54). Following her own demand that “theory is not enough” and that ideas must not only be discussed but translated into art to create a “visceral”, instinctual understanding (qtd. in Wood 8), these concepts became the core of Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea (1968). This is an exemplary tale of how an individual becomes haunted by his own Shadow, and only after a long journey can end living a life in fear by accepting it as an integral part of himself. When the protagonist Ged at the end of the novel stops running and turns around to confront his Shadow, an archetypal, mythological scene ensues: In silence, man and shadow met face to face, and stopped. Aloud and clearly, breaking that old silence, Ged spoke the shadow’s name, and in the same moment the shadow spoke without lips or tongue, saying the same word: ‘Ged.’ And the two voices were one voice. Ged reached out his hands, dropping his staff, and took hold of his shadow, of the black self that reached out to him. Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one. (Earthsea 164)

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Returning after this to a waiting friend he exclaims: “The wound is healed. […] I am whole, I am free.” (165) Le Guin creates a powerful scene of an individual’s return to reality and wholeness through self-knowledge gained from the acceptance of the Shadow. Between despair and false security the thus strengthened ego can negotiate its own way, living in Keats’ “negative capability”. That such an act of emancipation and empowerment resounded most strongly with a generation in open rebellion against the traditions of their fathers is understandable. Fantasy offered something to everyone: of escapism those too weak to break with the system could withdraw to the false security and childlike wish-fulfilment, those strong enough to try were inspired by the powerful examples to turn around and face themselves and others. Addressing the socio-cultural functions of Fantasy in his essay “Nameless Things and Thingless Names,” Lance Olsen sets Postmodernism in clear continuity to Modernism that preceded it: both react to the dominant assumptions of the 19th century (materialism, the scientific method, bourgeois mentality, optimistic belief in progress) with the “recognition that all common terms of reference have been lost” (279). While Modernism tried to give coherent and ordered responses to this dilemma, Postmodernism accepts the impossibility of doing so. It refuses binary choice and prefers ambiguity and randomness to the illusion of clarity and order. Yet the Postmodern mind also paradoxically “yearns for the stability that it has dismembered” (281). Olsen describes this as symptomatic of a “‘culture’ in crisis” (283): In other words, postmodern art faces the problem of responding to a situation that is, literally, fantastic. No wonder, then, that fantasy becomes the vehicle for the postmodern consciousness. The fantastic becomes the realism our culture understands. (284)

In his introduction to The American Fantasy Tradition Brian M. Thomsen explains why US society is especially fond of the genre. After defining various motifs of American literary tradition that by their dominant position set it apart from European counterparts, “religion and reform”, “western expansionism”, “manifest destiny”, “man vs. nature” and the “metaphoric second chance” (21), he identifies the core concept behind them all as “wildness”, a term he borrows from Henry David Thoreau and which he traces back to the experience of the frontier and the first European settlers in their daily confrontation with the unknown (23). When he closes his introduction with a description of the American Dream as the urge to “deny the Fall”, to “create a place of total freedom” and to live together in a new belief in the possibility of innocence (26), the stage for the emergence of Fantasy in time and place is finally set.

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During the 1960s the rising level of discontent especially among the younger generation of well-educated US-Americans created social pressure and the need for change. Institutionalised religion, tradition, the capitalist subordination of all other spheres of life to the necessities of the economy, these were the main targets of critique. Postmodern disenchantment with former repositories of meaning created revolutionary energies that forged their path in youth counter-cultures. The US with their founding myth of establishing a place of total freedom was the logical starting point for change. Peter S. Beagle identifies high school and college students as the main pressure groups (xvi), and he also offers an explanation: “Young people in general sense the difference between the real and the phony. […] They can be misled by fools or madmen, but they sense the preacher who doesn’t feel a word of his sermon, […] the society that does not believe in itself.” (ibid.) The strength and truthfulness of the (Secondary) Belief present in Fantasy made it attractive to a generation disappointed in the weak and hypocritical (Primary) Belief society imposed on them. The reaction to Fantasy by the system was predictably negative: It was seen as a danger to the morality and sanity of young people, rarely found in public libraries and certainly not appreciated by academics. If anything, it was seen as escapist entertainment. Ursula K. Le Guin reacted to this judgemental attitude with an essay posing the simple question: “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” For her, the moralistic censorship Fantasy faced was a sign of fear, not strength. The US was still largely controlled by white, male, profit-minded Puritans and Le Guin explains why they could not accept Fantasy: First of all it was read for pleasure, and for a Puritan pleasure is sin; secondly, the creation of fictional worlds provides no tangible profit; and lastly, fiction and imagination were largely perceiveed as unmanly, only fit for women and children. What it boils down to for Le Guin is that “they are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom” (36). Ironically, this is an utter perversion of the American Dream as defined by Thomsen perpetuated by exactly the social groups promoting it most fervently. The powerful association between Fantasy and freedom is the last piece of the puzzle necessary to understand the adoption of a heretofore minor genre by an entire generation as a central part of their world-view. The youth counter-cultures of the 1960s were on a quest for individual and collective freedom, and they found the promise of this freedom in Fantasy, the same freedom its critics were afraid of. On the other side of the creative process, authors of Fantasy gained enormous influence over people’s lives, a fact that urges Le Guin to remind her fellow authors of the power they wield, warning that “absolute freedom is absolute responsibility” (“Talking About Writing” 174). Reacting to the mass-appeal the

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genre gained within only a couple of years she warns against the dangers of giving in to the lure of the cheap and simplistic. Even when “all art is entertainment”, she demands that “experimentation, innovation, irreverence, complexity, and passion should make the reader rejoice” (“Stone Axe” 206). Aware of the powerful social force Fantasy had become, it is her hope that the genre remains aware of its responsibility and lives up to the expectations of its audiences. 4. The Nightmares of Politicians – Conclusions Fantasy, originally a genre from the fringes of literature, in the span of only a decade rose to the status of counter-cultural icon and eventually reached mass-market acceptability. Its indeterminacy and openness, refusing the need for mimetical reproductions of reality and dogmatic monological readings while promising deeper meaning, is a crucial factor in its appeal. It can also be a powerful tool to achieve self-knowledge and freedom as an aware, self-sufficient subject ready to engage in successful social relationships. The genre that is by definition indefinable, negotiating its position between freedom and convention, originated in the breaking of the illusion of universal, objective Truth by the Romantic turn towards a subjective universe. An expression of the Postmodern individual’s search for meaning and unwillingness to find it, it becomes a literature of emancipation. Yet questions about the emergence of Fantasy and especially its later mass-cultural success remain. What if the very openness and subjective quality of Fantasy was one reason why it was allowed to become a counter-cultural focus in the first place? After all, if readers project their own private meanings into these texts, there is no unified front to oppose the system. Dissenting energies would be fractured and directed towards private Secondary Creations instead of into a collective revolutionary impulse. This interpretation is supported by the enormous financial success Fantasy has become for those ‘producing’ it: The affective power it generates can just as well be abused for advertising purposes. Those that once were afraid of dragons are now breeding them for profit, and authors submit all too easily to the implicit censorship of the market to be published. Le Guin explains the rules for this formulaic, mass-produced Fantasy: “[It] must be safe. It mustn’t hurt the consumers. It mustn’t change the consumers” (“Stalin” 189). Against this empty, sellable Fantasy, she sets her concept of what a work of art should incorporate: solidity, community, and a real experience of time in order not to get lost in “the seemingly so familiar external dimension of space” (“Stone Axe” 207).

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Experienced readers of Fantasy know that dragons are among the wisest and oldest creatures, so naturally you would go and talk to them on your quest to avoid living the nightmares of politicians. But experienced readers of Fantasy also know that dragons never say anything innocently and always have plans of their own… Works Cited Alpers, Hans Joachim, Werner Fuchs and Ronald M. Hahn, eds. Lexikon der Fantasy-Literatur. Erkrath: Fantasy Productions, 2005. Attebery, Brian. “Fantasy as Mode, Genre, Formula.” Sandner, Fantastic Literature 293-309. Beagle, Peter S. “Tolkien’s Magic Ring.” The Tolkien Reader. J.R.R. Tolkien. New York: Del Rey, 1966. ix-xvii. Bloom, Harold. “Clinamen: Towards a Theory of Fantasy.” Sandner, Fantastic Literature 236-54. Calvino, Italo. “Definitions of Territory: Fantasy.” Sandner, Fantastic Literature 133-34. “Fantasy.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Child and the Shadow.” Language of the Night 49-60. —. “A Citizen of Mondath.” Language of the Night 19-23. —. The Earthsea Quartet. London: Penguin, 1993. —. “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie.” Language of the Night 70-82. —. “Introduction to The Word for World is Forest.” Language of the Night 125-29. —. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ed. and introduction Susan Wood. London: Women’s Press, 1989. —. “The Stalin in the Soul.” Language of the Night 187-97. —. “The Staring Eye.” Language of the Night 148-51. —. “The Stone Axe and the Muskoxen.” Language of the Night 198-210. —. “Talking About Writing.” Language of the Night 170-75. —. “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” Language of the Night 31-36. Manlove, Colin. “Introduction to Modern Fantasy.” Sandner, Fantastic Literature 156-66. Marzin, Florian F. “Quellen der Fantasy-Literatur.” Alpers, Fuchs und Hahn, Lexikon 10-16. Moorcock, Michael. “Introduction.” Ill Met in Lankhmar. Fritz Leiber. Clarkston: White Wolf, 1995. vii-xi. Nagel, Rainer. “Die Geschichte der Fantasy-Literatur.” Aplers, Fuchs und Hahn, Lexikon 17-21. Olsen, Lance. “Prelude: Nameless Things and Thingless Names.” Sandner, Fantastic Literature 274-92.

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Prickett, Stephen. “The Evolution of a Word.” Sandner, Fantastic Literature 172-79. Sandner, David. Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader. Westport: Praeger, 2004. —. “Joseph Addison: The First Critic of the Fantastic.” Sandner, Fantastic Literature 316-25. von Soden, Wolfram. Einleitung. Das Gilgamesch-Epos. 1958. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003. 3-14. Thomsen, Brian M. “Introduction: An Approach to an American Fantasy Tradition.” The American Fantasy Tradition. Ed. Brian M. Thomsen. New York: Tor, 2002. 21-6. Tolkien, J.R.R. “Mythopoeia.” Tree and Leaf. London: HarperCollins, 2001. 85-90. —. “On Fairy-Stories.” Tree and Leaf. London: HarperCollins, 2001. 3-81. Wolfe, Gary. “The Encounter With Fantasy.” Sandner, Fantastic Literature 222-35. Wood, Susan. “Introduction.” Le Guin, Language of the Night 5-12. Zima, Peter V. Die Dekonstruktion. Tübingen: Francke, 1994.

Fantastic Liminality A Theory Sketch CLEMENS RUTHNER “the fantastic text is essentially preoccupied with limits” (Jackson 1)

Around the millenium, research into the Fantastic1 slowly made its way out of its academic limbo in the German-speaking world and grew into an area which is more or less taken seriously nowadays. The endeavours of various scholars have contributed to conceiving the occult irritation by the genre as a productive challenge for literary and cultural theory. From my vantage point as an observer and fellow traveller of these theoretical discussions over the last two decades, there are currently at least two prolific – and potentially complementary – ways of conceptualizing the Fantastic beyond Todorov (cf. Ruthner, Reber and May): • as a visualisation or literalisation of rhetoric; 2 • as a staging of liminality or as the liminality of representation.3 With regard to the second point, and in connection with my other work (cf. Am Rande; “Grenzwertigkeit”), I would now like to present, specify and further develop the hypotheses introduced in those studies regarding the “marginality” of the Fantastic, including further research literature. In this enterprise I will attempt a compromise – albeit not unproblematic, though in my opinion, necessary – between positions in (literary) anthropology (cf. Riedel), constructivism and post/structuralism for a conceptualisation of the Fantastic, which is much indebted to the works of Jacques Derrida, Victor Turner, and Hans Richard Brittnacher.4 Naturally this is to be un1 2 3 4

The term ‘Fantastic’ is capitalized whenever it is used in my text as a technical term to designate a literary genre/mode (in order to make a clear distinction from its use in daily language). Cf. Todorov 52, 70f.; Meister; Lachmann; Ruthner, Am Rande 94ff. Cf. Aguirre; Figatowski and Grande; Garcia “Aesthetics” and “Transgressing”; Ruthner “Grenzwertigkeit”; Simonis. I would also like to thank Jürgen Barkhoff and Patricia García (Dublin) as well as Mario Grizelj (Munich) and Wolfgang Müller-Funk (Vienna) for critical feedback and suggestions, and, last but not least, Helen O’Sullivan (Dublin) for her linguistic assistance.

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derstood as a (patch)work in progress, which must excuse the sketchy nature of the hypotheses at the centre of which lies a broadened concept of liminality revised by cultural studies: an endeavour that awaits further elaboration.5 1. Fiction Broadly speaking, I understand fiction 6 to be the ludic creation of a symbolic world which is not (completely) subject to the truth criteria of that cognitive and social construction7 we commonly call ‘reality’. With fictional media such as the literary text or the feature film, a demarcated virtual 8 space of simulacra is supplied in culture for the simulation of events: “Im Kenntlichmachen des Fingierens”, writes Wolfgang Iser with reference to Hans Vaihinger, “wird alle Welt, die im literarischen Text organisiert ist, zu einem Als-Ob” (37). The Fantastic then represents the extremes of fiction, its outskirts as it were, and the Platonic accusation of lying directed against it; even more so than other fictional genres it is “the same but not quite” – to misuse Homi Bhabha’s (cf. 86) formula for the impossible colonial identification with the hegemon here for the construction of alternative worlds9. Within the term ‘Fantastic’ I subsume diverse forms of speculative fiction from horror literature to science fiction (cf. Ruthner, Reber and May 12f.); these without doubt produce alternative or even dissident worlds (cf. Ryan; Lachmann), which are excluded from the hegemonic knowledge system of our life-world or, in the case of fairy-tales and fantasy, are only possible at all in a cultural mode of representation such as literature or the visual arts. Like this, the Fantastic reacts against the principle of mimesis as a leading aesthetic discourse of Western cultures from Aristotle up to the Early Modern period (cf. Doležel) by perverting it somehow: insofar as it, in the broadest terms, applies realistic procedures to imaginary models of the world that have no possible verifiable correlate in our everyday life, such as ghosts or time travel. Thus the Fantastic, as much radically as creatively, makes the most of the virtual potential of language or other symbolic systems of signification 5 6 7 8 9

In doing so, it would above all be necessary to include more of the theorists named below and to consider the Anglophone discourse surrounding liminality in more depth. Reasons of space make closer specification impossible at this point; reference is simply given here to the works by Vaihinger and Iser, although I do not share all of their assumptions. Cf. for example, the quintessential Berger and Luckman. On the ontology of the virtual and its cultural formations cf. Shields. Cf. Ryan; this is also the point in the theory of the Fantastic at which system-theoretical considerations can begin.

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and problematizes their hypothetical reference to the ‘outside world’, i.e. to which extent language can ‘depict’ it. Instead, the Fantastic, in a more radical way than any other fiction, lays claim to creating artificial worlds, and questions or rather, in its own way, relativises the paradigm of reality/ realism (Simonis 53f.). Thus speculative fiction stands in a creative if not aggressive tension towards contemporary common-sense concepts of the ‘real’, the ‘possible’ and the ‘probable’ (cf. Ruthner, Am Rande 80ff.; Simonis 28-41) and opens up again and again the cultural – and aesthetic – back door to discourses which historically have been devalued and marginalized such as, for example, so-called superstition and “arcane knowledge” (Lachmann 153ff.; cf. Simonis 43). This is occurring in the phase of rationalist Modernity which is characterised by processes of secularisation as a consequence of Enlightenment. In this context, the Fantastic is emerging as a medium for the (post-religious) experience of alterity,10 the (hegemonially undesired) return of what is culturally repressed, pre-modern knowledge, and discontent in civilization – a cathartic ritual that I will come to speak of later. By means of its central rhetorical devices (reification, literalisation or illustration; cf. Ruthner, Reber and May 135-144), the Fantastic can of course further weave and extrapolate existing discourses or anticipate possible future systems of hyper-modern knowledge, as can be seen in the speculative genre of science fiction which stands in constant competition with the creative and innovative capacities of science and technology. In contrast to the grotesque (cf. Kayer; Ost et al.), the Fantastic plays less with aesthetic than, above all, with epistemological standards, thus with our culture’s apparently secure knowledge concerning ‘reality’ and the relationship of language to the world, its supposed representational function (Ruthner, Am Rande 100). In the element of transgression, on the other hand, also lies the proximity to the grotesque, with which it often appears as a kind of Siamese twin (e.g. in E.T.A. Hoffmann). Both transgressive genres participate in the cultural economy (ibid. chapter 1) of Modernity, that is to say, in its aesthetic of outdoing itself, its permanent innovation which acts as a “Spiegel für die Plastizität des Menschen” and “für [s]ein ständiges Sich-selbst-Überschreiten” (Iser 11; 12). Wolfgang Iser has also pointed out the transgressive nature of fiction in general which contributes to the ambiguity of its meaning; it is not what it

10

Cf. Simonis 14: “Im Bereich der phantastischen Fiktionen begegnen die Leser neben den auch in anderen Textsorten auftretenden Momenten des Fremdkulturellen häufig einer eigentümlichen Radikalisierung und Steigerung des Anderen, einer Transdisposition der wahrgenommenen Alteritätsmomente ins Außermenschliche, wenn nicht gar ins Extramundane.” Cf. also especially Lachmann 81 et passim.

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is; and it means more than it is. The act of feigning which is called fiction is thus always an act of exceedance as well (ibid. 21): So wird zwar Wirklichkeit im fiktionalen Text wiederholt, doch durch die Ein11 klammerung wird ihr Wiederholtwerden überragt. [...] [D]ie dargestellte Welt gilt es sich so vorzustellen, als ob sie eine Welt sei. Daraus folgt zunächst, dass die im Text dargestellte Welt sich selbst nicht meint und folglich durch ihren Verweischarakter etwas anzeigt, das sie selbst nicht ist. Hier zeigt sich wiederum der charakteristische Modus des Fiktiven, Grenzüberschreitung zu sein, wobei allerdings die Tatsache unterstrichen werden muß, daß mit dem AlsOb eine Überschreitung dessen erfolgt, was seinerseits als dargestellte Welt des Textes aus Akten des Fingierens hervorgegangen ist. (ibid. 38; 40)

Here the factor of the limen (or Limes) and its transgression comes into play, a transgression which is as much constitutive of the Fantastic as of fiction in general, as will be demonstrated in what follows. 2. Transgression In general terms I understand transgression as the crossing of an ontological, social, cultural or symbolic boundary – thus not necessarily always in the scandalous criminal, blasphemous or immoral sense that is often associated with the term. Not every crossing is an act of violation of borders and boundaries, since there are also transitions and other ritualized forms of transgression, which seem not so much to damage as to strengthen the existing limes; after their effectively staged apparition, literary ghosts, for example, can be exorcized again by means of reason and thus declared to be the manipulative products of madness. Models of the conceptualization of transgression from cultural philosophy can for instance be found in Georges Bataille (in his aesthetics of eroticism and violence as well as in his economy of excess) (cf. Schumacher 55ff.), in Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari (in their concepts of deand reterritorialisation) and in Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject; in addition, in the narratological models by the Russian Formalists (cf. Ruthner, Am Rande 37f.) and Juri Lotman (according to whom the transgression of a prevailing situation is generally inscribed into modern culture as well as into narrative12) as in Wolfgang Iser (18-51); likewise a concept of transgression can be found in a formulation by Boris Groys, whose theory of ‘new’ art also permits modern artefacts to effect a border crossing be11 12

This means that fiction announces itself as such, by revealing its different ontological status through its ‘contract with the reader’ to be ‘the same, but not quite’ (cf. ibid. 36). Lotman e.g. conceives of plot as the transgression of a semantic field by (an) actant(s) (cf. 342ff.); Cf. also Iser 29.

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tween a mundane and a quasi-sacred space. Of course, for reasons of space we must concentrate on just a few central remarks here. As an entry point, I am using Foucault who, drawing on Bataille’s concepts, pointed out the dynamic relationship between the boundary and its transgression; the latter does not just violate a limit, it also revises, shifts and readjusts it, even if every Limes in fact seems to insinuate stability: Transgression is an action which involves the limit, that narrow zone of a line where it displays the flash of its passage, […] The play of limits and transgression seems to be regulated by a simple obstinacy: transgression incessantly crosses and recrosses a line which closes up behind it in a wave of extremely short duration, and thus it is made to return once more right to the horizon of the uncrossable. […] The limit and transgression depend on each other […] (Foucault 33f.)

From a vantage point influenced by Derrida,13 one might adduce the evidence of how unstable and contradictory our culture’s central forms of representation ultimately are. Is it then this ambiguity and inconclusiveness of symbolic worlds which triggers that transgression which proliferates at their boundaries and aporias as an expression of différance (cf. Derrida, “Die différance”; esp. 82)? In any case, a definition of the Fantastic departing from post/structuralist theories of transgression, culture and representation proves to be prolific. As already indicated, yet a further figure of thought deriving from anthropology may now be combined with that initial network of thoughts. 3. Liminality The model to be introduced was developed in the 1960s by the anthropologist Victor W. Turner in connection with Arnold van Genneps seminal work Rites des passages (The Rites of Passage, 1909). Here liminality describes a threshold state in which individuals or groups find themselves after they have ritually dissociated themselves from the reigning social order; in Turner, examples of this are the initiation rites of pre-industrial cultures, but also the revolutions of Modernity which he tries to describe using his predecessor’s process model: Van Gennep has shown that all rites of passage or “transition” are marked by three phases: separation, margin (or limen, signifying “threshold” in Latin), and aggregation. The first phase (of separation) comprises symbolic behavior signify13

Cf. Alexander and Smith 10: “Derrida developed a systematic method of reading culture that contextualized structures of discourse and opened them up to creative reconfiguration. Even while affirming the binding influence of already existing representational forms, Derrida insisted on their instability and inevitable productive excess at the margins of meaning. For Derrida, transgression was the shadow of the code, just as for Foucault the cogito must produce and depend upon the ‘unthought’ […].”

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ing the detachment of the individual or group either from an earlier fixed point in the social structure, from a set of cultural conditions (a “state”), or from both. During the intervening “liminal” period, the characteristics of the ritual subject (the “passenger”) are ambiguous; he passes through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state. In the third phase (reaggregation or reincorporation), the passage is consummated. The ritual subject, individual or corporate, is in relatively stable state once more and, by virtue of this, has rights and obligations vis-à-vis others of a clearly defined and “structural” type. (Turner, Ritual Process 94f.)

In a narrow sense, liminality belongs to the second phase, the threshold state, in which much seems possible, when individuals find themselves in a condition of ambiguity: socio-cultural and even ontological affiliations appear to be lifted for a while, the subjects are “betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial” (Turner, Ritual Process 95); they are displaced into a state of ‘no more and not yet’.14 In this liminal phase of passage symbols and rituals are applied in order to produce a degree of certainty to face the uncertainty that predominates there. This creates a sense of community for the participants who together are traversing the threshold stage, a communitas which is supposed to produce a new collective identity (Turner, Ritual Process 95f.). Subsequently the initiates are incorporated back into the social order, or there is even an ultimate breakup possible. Turner later developed Van Gennep’s three stage process model further into the four-part scheme known as Social Drama (cf. “Social Dramas” 149): • Breech with social norms • Crisis and conflict • Redressive action to resolve conflict (Ritual) • Reintegration or irreparable schism Without being able here to go any further into the fundamental problems with Turner’s scheme (for instance in the emphatic element of communitas), this cursory sketch makes clear that a revised concept of liminality enriched by other theoretical elements could prove quite fruitful for a theory of the Fantastic. This has already been highlighted by some of Hans Richard Brittnacher’s works (cf. “Initiationen”); one might also mention the quest model that Marianne Wünsch developed for the novels of Gustav Meyrink (cf. 227ff.). To summarise, Annette Simonis has ascertained that from Turner’s considerations 14

Here one might wonder to what extent Bhabha’s theory of the “third space” owes itself to Turner. Garcia has already briefly indicated the fruitfulness of the liminality concept in conceiving of the life circumstances of immigrants between two cultures (“Transgressing the Transgressed” 2).

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die zentrale Bedeutung der vorgestellten Ritualform, insbesondere der Schwellenphase, für eine Ästhetik des Phantastischen unmittelbar evident [werde], da der ritualistische Moment des Übergangs eine Öffnung gegenüber dem Imaginären bewirkt und die Schwellensituation aufgrund der ihr eigenen Labilität einen vorübergehenden Eindruck des Phantastischen in die bisherige, symbolisch aufgehobene Wirklichkeitserfahrung herbeiführen kann. (56)15

Going further than Simonis, Manuel Aguirre, in his list of the “major features observed in these liminal entities and territories of Gothic fiction”, lays stress on the epistemological potential of these texts as a literary construction: First, they display properties different from those characterizing the domains on either side. In the second place, they challenge the Law of the Excluded Middle. In the third place, they exhibit a particular vulnerability in that they are exposed. At the same time, they are associated with a concentration of meaning; they are therefore sites of numinosity, of power and, a forteriori, of danger. Furthermore, they open up, or constitute, new universes. Finally, the postulation or creation of such entities evinces a degree of what Lévi-Strauss called mythical thought. (231)

4. Example As briefly sketched beforehand: liminality means that the passage leads in actu to a temporary state of bordering or betweenness which hovers, as it were, on the demarcation line between the two fields separated by the boundary. Liminality may deconstruct the opposition of the two; within the transition, the excluded middle also takes shape: tertium datur, as it were. In the narratives of the Fantastic as a literary genre, this is almost prototypically expressed by the character of the vampire who, as all ‘undead’, removes the biological and cultural border between death and life (coming from the ‘wrong’ direction) (Aguirre 242); moreover, as a living corpse s/he (or it?) problematises the Cartesian gulf between mind and body. Symbolically – at least in Victorian thought, this creatures often breeches also the moral border between sexuality and violence as well as the cultural separation of nuitrition and procreation: The vampire has a body and it is his own body. He is neither dead nor alive; but living in death. He is an abnormality; the androgyne in the phantom world; [...] The object of the vampire is to suck blood. (Summers 6)

15

Translation: "the central importance of the proposed ritual form, and particularly of the threshold phase, for an aesthetics of the Fantastic becomes immediately evident, since the ritualistic moment of transition causes an opening vis-à-vis the imaginary; the emerging situation, by its own instability, brings about the temporary impression of the Fantastic in the previous, symbolically stored experience of reality." (C.R.)

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This ontological indeterminacy, interestingly cloaked in a cross-gender metaphor by the independent English private scholar Montague Summers in the 1920s,16 corresponds with the characteristic of the vampire as a floating signifier, as formulated by H.R. Brittnacher: Da Gewalttätigkeit und Blutdurst im Vampirmotiv buchstäblich aus dem Nichts kommen, dient sich seine literarische Adaption grundsätzlich jeder beliebigen Kritik an: Der Vampir erscheint mal als Sinnbild einer entmachteten und rachsüchtigen Aristokratie, mal als Symbol nymphomanischer Weiblichkeit, mal als das eines maßlosen Don-Juanismus, mal wird mit ihm der Stalinismus gebrandmarkt, mal das Franco-Regime, mal die Jesuiten, dann wieder sind es Bürokratie, venerische Krankheiten oder die Furcht vor neueren wissenschaftlichen Entdeckungen wie Hypnose und Magnetismus, die im Vampir ihr Bild gefunden haben. 17 Eben diese Elastizität verbietet eine [...] simple Deutung. (Ästhetik 125)

In my interpretation, the vampire’s ‘openness’ to a variety of interpretations is caused precisely by its ontological – as well as its narrative – liminality. It causes indeterminacy and forces authors and readers to semantically fill those gaps that the undead bloodsucker, non-existent in their life-world, opens up. However, other cultural lines of demarcation, such as the boundary between “inside” and “outside”, are also removed in the vampire figure – and in the reifications of the Fantastic in general. The monster appears as an eversion – i.e. turning an unconscious organisation of fears and desires inside out – as their allegory, as noted by the literary scholar (and vampire author) Adolf Muschg; one may consider here the liminal metaphor of the threshold that interweaves itself with the suspension of identity: Trivial ist der Vampir nur als literarische Figur. Als reales Bedürfnis überwältigt er alle Hüter der Schwelle und holt sich im Dunkeln, was er braucht. Wir selbst wollen’s dann nicht gewesen sein. (Muschg 439)18

16 17

18

In Summers’ book title the vampire is still designated with the pronoun “it”. Translation: “Since violence and blood thirst of the vampire motif literally come out of nowhere, its literary adaptation basically serves any criticism: the vampire appears sometimes as the emblem of a disenfranchised and vengeful aristocracy, sometimes as the symbol of a nymphomaniac femininity, sometimes as that of an excessive Don-Juanism, at times it is identified with Stalinism, at others with the Franco regime and at still others with the Jesuits, then again it is bureaucracy, venereal disease or the fear of newer scientific discoveries such as hypnosis and magnetism which find their likeness in the image of the vampire. Precisely this elasticity prohibits a simple interpretation” (C.R.). Translation: "The vampire is trivial only as a literary figure. As real need he overpowers all gatekeepers and takes in the dark what he needs. We ourselves do not want to admit to it. Indeed, that's what we have him for: as the blind spot in our perception." (C.R.)

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5. Incident & Interstice It is significant to recognise that liminality in Fantastic literature as the “threshold genre” (Aguirre 232) operates in several ways: on the level of themes, characters and plot as well as structurally, as an semantic / narrative / epistemological process, in the domain of genre constitution and the literary field in general as well as on the level of reception and historical context (ibid. 233-9). First and foremost, liminality appears to be that state of affairs in which the human protagonists of the literary Fantastic (and with them the readers) are displaced in the face of an ‘unheard-of’ event, that is, a potentially supernatural or ‘un-’natural occurrence (cf. Simonis 18) – even if initially this is not so much within the framework of a regulated ritual (of passage), but rather within that of an incident. The Fantastic thus represents a phenomenology of the incidental, which Roger Caillos, for example, with his metaphor of the rupture (“Riss in der Welt”; 45f.) described as a narrative process model, with which he nolens volens converges with Goethe’s definition of the novella as an “unerhörte Begebenheit”.19 Liminality is the habitat for the monstrosities (cf. Cohen) of the Fantastic; likewise, it is a dis-location, which is realised through the incident; the threshold upon which, in a shocking way, apparitions and metamorphoses (cf. Reber; Simonis 41) take place. With this aesthetic of incident and interstice, it is quite obvious that the concept of liminality can be connected with the terminologies of Caillois and also with Tzvetan Todorov’s “hésitation”: In a world which is indeed our world, […] a world without devils, slyphides, or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination – and the laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality – but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us. […] The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. (25)

If one reads this famous quote from Todorov in conjunction with Foucault, the theoretical refocusing is evident, which not only emphasizes the literary status of Fantastic phenomena, but also their cognitive processing, i.e. the system of knowledge and it classificatory order which is shattered by an “un-heard of occurrence”. “Uncertainty” is the epistemological form of 19

Conversation Goethe with Eckermann from 18.01.1827, quoted from Goethes Werke, Vol. V, p.726.

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liminality as it were (cf. Simonis 52); in the Fantastic transgression, this simulated crisis of knowledge is then mostly presented in the literary text as something to be overcome, for which various remedia are supplied. At this point, the anthropological coping strategies (rituals and symbols) mentioned by Turner could also serve for a better conceptualisation of the Fantastic from within cultural studies: one that is in a position to operate on several levels and not only focuses on the text. This may well be synthesized with (post-)structuralist models in the sense indicated above, which see the Fantastic as space of simulation for the de(con)struction of leading cultural differences – living/dead, self/other etc. – and beyond this ultimately for the engagement with alterity and différance. Liminal phenomena in culture that are thematised in the Fantastic are among others: • illness/dying; • violence/crime; • sexuality; • drugs/intoxication; • mysticism/rapture; • madness; • the universe; • artificial life (nature - technology); • the numinous, monstrosities20, and ghosts. In Fantastic texts and images often appears to be a more or less invisible border running between, for example, the monster and his human victim, likewise a border of cognitive appropriateness which the protagonists – and with him/her the reader – transgress or linger upon, and thus participate in the liminal state; I leave undecided whether or not here a communitas necessarily arises. Even the direction of the transgression is significant, since it is not always the other who comes to the self (Beauty and the Beast: the fascination of the monster repels the maiden as much as it works to attract her). And it can only briefly be pointed out that the hypothesis of the threshold state is compatible with and fruitful for a description of constructions of space (or spacings of psychological processes) that are eminently important for the Fantastic, as undertaken, for instance, by Markus May in his article Die Zeit aus den Fugen with reference to Foucault’s heterotopias or Bakhtin’s Chronotopos. A similar liminality applies to the trope of metalepsis, whose importance has been suggested by Debra Malina not only for Fantastic writing (also see Ruthner “Grenzwertigkeit”). 20

Cf. Haraway’s summary: “monsters seem always have defined the limits of community in Western imaginations” (180). Cf. also Herrmann.

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6. Fantastic Liminality In conclusion it will be claimed that the Fantastic is in many ways a genre of border crossing and liminality: 1. with its supernatural incidents it questions epistemological standards; 2. for this reason it is often also aesthetically excluded from the literary canon as “trashy” and so culturally becomes a kind of liminal reading;21 3. the Fantastic as a genre itself escapes definition through its aesthetic liminality, frequently becoming something which takes a stand against conceptual determination and epistemological certainty; 4. in exemplary fashion, it leads its protagonists into a liminal state that they must overcome or alternatively die in the attempt. For this reason it can be understood as 5. a cultural ritual (cf. Braungart), which confronts readers with the blindspots of their knowledge system and its anxieties, coupled with desire; the Fantastic aspires to drive out these demons through cathartic reading, by marking liminality as fiction and thus supplying a further social ritual of exclusion/inclusion into a culturally consensual “reality” (subversion /affirmation of the existing order).22 6. With points 4 and 5, the Fantastic also culturally fulfils a quasimythological function after secularisation (Aguirre 241), insofar as it is a (liminal) “compromise between literature and folklore” (ibid. 240). 7. Transgression and liminality also have potential for the innovation of products on a capitalized literary market that has organised its transformation as a cultural economy of transgressing and surpassing. So the Fantastic functions as the cultural space for simulation of a “productive unrest”, as we once called it elsewhere23; or, to follow Brittnacher, as a shrunken form of (failed?) initiation. Thus, as a kind of post-religious substitute mythology, the Fantastic exorcises the cultural demons of an epoch by allowing them into its narrative and permitting their work of corrosion – a paradoxical motion, to which it owes its emergence as a genre of late and post-enlightenment. Reassured, the reader can sit back: there are no ghosts in ‘his’/’her’ reality, no aliens – or are there? 21 22 23

Cf. Aguirre 226: “in Gothic fiction thresholds play a fundamental role which is related to the non-canonical status of the genre”. Cf. Simonis 57. Simonis also justifies the popularity of the genre in children’s and young adult’s literature on the basis of this element of initiation and rite of passage (57f.). "Produktive Beunruhigung" was the title of a symposium on the occasion of a large exhibition of the Fantastic in the arts in Linz, 2004. Cf. the catalogue publication: Andererseits – die Phantastik.

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Behind the liminality of the Fantastic, which is difficult to ignore, there is also the question of its importance for literature in general – and so we connect and conclude with the thoughts from the beginning of this article. Invoking the model of defamiliarisation (остранение) by Viktor Shklovsky, Manuel Aguirre emphatically asserts that the defamiliarisation of the everyday through literary language would also displace the reader, generally, into a kind of liminality, whose threshold was literary language itself: [I]n fiction the world becomes unfamiliar, alien, Other, and to reach it, we must negotitiate our way through a language which has become opaque and an object of attention in its own right: language functions here as a barrier and a threshold: a special use of the medium both creates distance and bridges it, introducing us to the Other domain. Literary language thus creates a threshold and at the same time allows us to cross it. (Aguirre 232)

Thus literature becomes not only the occasional medium of simulation for diverse transgressions and liminal states, but is even itself a threshold, which demonstrates in further consequence that the boundaries between ‘language’ and the ‘world’ cannot be overcome. Representation as a construction of ‘reality’ (or: realities?) shows itself in the end to be just the potential convergence with a hypothetical world ‘out there’ at a threshold – a convergence that must always remain asymptotic. Works Cited Aguirre, Manuel. “Narrative Structure, Liminality, Self-Similarity: The Case of Gothic Fiction.” Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers. Ed. Clive Bloom. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 2007. 226-47. Alexander, Jeffrey C. and Philip Smith, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Andererseits: die Phantastik: Imaginäre Welten in Kunst und Altagskultur. Ed. Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum. Weitra: Bibliothek der Provinz, 2004. Bataille, George. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939. Ed. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985. —. The Accursed Share: An Essay On General Economy. 3 Vols. Ed. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone, 1988-1991. —. The Tears of Eros. Ed. Peter Connor. New York: City Lights, 1989. Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckman. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge,1994.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. Die Regeln der Kunst: Genese und Struktur des literarischen Feldes. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1999. Braungart, Wolfgang. Ritual und Literatur. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996. Brittnacher, Hans Richard. Ästhetik des Horrors: Gespenster, Vampire, Monster, Teufel und künstliche Menschen in der phantastischen Literatur. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1994. —. “Gescheiterte Initiationen: Anthropologische Dimensionen der literarischen Phantastik”. Ruthner, Reber and May 15-30. Caillois, Roger. “Das Bild des Phantastischen: Vom Märchen zur Science Fiction.” 1966. Phaicon 1. Ed. Rein A. Zondergeld. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1974. 44-83. Chilewska, Anna and Sheena Wilson, ed. Writing after the Gaze: The Rupture of the Historical. Edmonton: Dimic Research Institute, 2007. 81-96. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 3-25. Derrida, Jacques. “Die différance.” Postmoderne und Dekonstruktion: Texte französischer Philosophen der Gegenwart. Ed. Peter Engelmann. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2004. Doležel, Lubomir. “Mimesis and Possible Worlds.” Poetics Today 9 (1988): 475-96. Figatowski, Bartholomäus, and Jasmin Grande, eds. Grenzen und Grenzgänger des Phantastischen. Wetzlar: Phantastische Bibliothek, 2009. Foucault, Michel. “A Preface to Transgression.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca, Cornell UP, 1977. 29-52. Garcia, Patricia. “The Aesthetics of Dislocation: Liminality in José M. Merino’s ‘Las palabras del mundo’ and J.J. Milla’s ‘La casa vacia’.” Proceedings of the First International Postgraduate Symposium. Ed. Bevin Doyle and Brigitte Le Kuez. Dublin City UP, 2008. Web. 25 Feb 2011.

—. “Transgressing the Transgressed: The Territories of the Contemporary Fantastic.” Dublin, n.d. [unpublished]. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Goethes Werke. Bd. 5: Dramatische Dichtungen. Ed. Erich Trunz. Hamburg: Wegner, 1960. Groys, Boris. Über das Neue: Versuch einer Kulturökonomie. München: Hanser 1992. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Herrmann, Britta. “Monströse Verbindungen: Experimentelle Wissenschaft und poetische Kombination um 1800.” Netzwerke: Eine Kulturtechnik der Moderne. Ed. Jürgen Barkhoff et al. Köln: Böhlau, 2004. 87-106.

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Iser, Wolfgang. Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre: Perspektiven Literarischer Anthropologie. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1991. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen, 1981. Kayser, Wolfgang. Das Groteske: Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung. 1957. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2004. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. Lachmann, Renate. Erzählte Phantastik: Zur Phantasiegeschichte und Semantik phantastischer Texte. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2002. Lotman, Juri. Die Struktur literarischer Texte. München: Fink, 1972. Malina, Debra. Breaking the Frame: Metalepsis and the Construction of the Subject. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2002. May, Markus. “Die Zeit aus den Fugen: Chronotopen der phantastischen Literatur.” Ruthner, Reber and May 173-87. Meister, Jan Christoph. “Die mythische Semiotik der Phantastik: Zum Diskurs der phantastischen Literatur am Beispiel der Novelle ‘Das Grillenspiel’ von Gustav Meyrink.” Acta Germanica 19 (1988): 28-48. Muschg, Adolf. “Der Vampir als Versucher der Literaturwissenschaft.” Physiognomie und Pathognomie: Zur literarischen Darstellung von Individualität. Ed. Wolfgang Groddeck and Ulrich Stadler. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994. 437-50. Ost, Isabelle, Pierre Piret, and Laurent Van Eynde, eds. Le grotesque: théorie, généalogie, figures. Brussels: Facultés St. Louis, 2004. Reber, Ursula. Formenverschleifung. Zu einer Theorie der Metamorphose. München: Fink, 2009. Riedel, Wolfgang. “Literarische Anthropologie. Eine Unterscheidung.” Wahrnehmen und Handeln: Perspektiven einer Literaturanthropologie. Ed. Wolfgang Braungart, Klaus Ridder and Friedmar Apel. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2004. 337-66. Roas, David, ed. Teorías de lo fantastico. Intr. Jaime Alazraki. Madrid: Arco, 2001. Ruthner, Clemens. Am Rande: Kanon, Kulturökomonie und Intertextualität des Marginalen am Beispiel der (österreichischen) Phantastik im 20. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Francke 2004. —. “Why Literature is a Monster: The Canon as a Tool of Literary Innovation.” Chilewska and Wilson 81-96. —. “Zur Theorie der Liminalität, oder: Die Grenzwertigkeit der Fantastik.” Der Schauer(roman): Formen – Diskurszusammenhänge – Funktionen. Ed. Mario Grizelj. Würzburg: K&N, 2010. 77-90.

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Ruthner, Clemens, Ursula Reber and Markus May, eds. Nach Todorov: Neuere Zugänge zu einer Definition des Phantastischen in der Literatur. Tübingen: Francke, 2006. Ryan, Marie Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. Schumacher, Florian. Das Ich und der andere Körper: Eine Kulturgeschichte des Monsters und des künstlichen Menschen. Marburg: Tectum, 2008 Shields, Rob. The Virtual. London: Routledge, 2003. Simonis, Annette. Grenzüberschreitungen in der phantastischen Literatur: Einführung in die Theorie und Geschichte eines narrativen Genres. Heidelberg: Winter, 2005. Summers, Montague. The Vampire: Its Kith and Kin. 1928. New York: Dorset, 1991. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. 1970. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. 1969. New Brunswick: Aldine, 2008. —."Social Dramas and Stories about Them." Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 141-168. Vaihinger, Hans. Die Philosophie des Als Ob: System der theoretischen, praktischen und religiösen Fiktionen der Menschheit auf Grund eines idealistischen Positivismus. Mit einem Anhang über Kant und Nietzsche. Berlin: Reuter, 1911. Werber, Niels, ed. Systemtheoretische Literaturwissenschaft: Begriffe - Methoden – Anwendungen. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011. Wünsch, Marianne. Die fantastische Literatur der Frühmoderne. München: Fink, 1991.

VISUALIZING THE FANTASTIC IN OUR CULTURE

Fantastic Language/Political Reporting The Postcolonial SF Illocutionary Force is with us MARLEEN S. BARR We have been approaching this presidential race the wrong way. It’s not political science. It’s science fiction. Something is amiss in the space-time continuum. The candidates running now are not the same ones we started out with. It’s ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ all over again. We’re watching the clash of the pod people. The first hint that things were not what they seemed came when Barack Obama turned into Hillary Clinton. We believe this was engineered by Hillary fans who had seen that early ‘Star Trek’ episode about the woman who wanted to be a starship commander so bad that she figured out a way to switch brains with Captain Kirk. Gail Collins, “Cloned Candidates” Have the worlds of science fiction and presidential politics ever been more closely aligned than they were in 2007? This was the year when Rudolph Giuliani told a young questioner on the campaign trail that ‘we’ll be prepared’ if the United States is attacked by aliens from another planet; when Dennis Kucinich blithely confessed during a Democratic debate that he’d seen a U.F.O.; and when Mitt Romney revealed in an interview that L. Ron Hubbard’s ‘Battlefield Earth’ was one of his favorite novels. But really, is it all that remarkable that Romney would identify with the story of a virtuous hero who saves Earth from a foreign invasion force? Or that several candidates have embraced science fiction when so many of them could benefit from its lessons? Dave Itzkoff, “Planetary Politics”

Dave Itzkoff notes that science fiction and presidential politics are closely aligned worlds. Gail Collins’ piece, which is replete with science fiction contexts and references to science fiction texts, exemplifies how science fiction parlance permeates New York Times op-ed page columnists’ prose. In order fully to understand her, readers must be fluent in fantastic language and cognizant of the science fiction canon. They must immediately recognize “space-time continuum” and “pod people”; they must be familiar with The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Star Trek. Itzkoff complements Collins’ content, which indicates that SF language is a political presence by

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stressing its political communicative effectiveness. He points to how Giuliani, Kucinich, and Romney use SF tropes to describe their individual agendas. My purpose is to apply Samuel R. Delany’s notion of “the language of science fiction” to current political reporting parlance’s pervasive use of SF’s linguistic presence and resonance. I will closely read New York Times political opinion writers with an eye toward showing that the language of science fiction has become a post colonial illocutionary force that exemplifies how to do political things with SF words. Delany’s discussion of “the language of science fiction” emphasizes that SF language is a distinct communicative system and, in order to understand SF, SF readers must be fluent in this system. In the manner of Creole and American black dialect, SF language has been positioned as a linguistic Other – a silenced, colonized, and marginalized discourse practice. Collins and Itzkoff indicate that this is no longer true. SF language, in the manner of postcolonial discourse, now speaks as a major force at the nexus of current debates about national politics; it serves an instantaneously recognizable metaphor which challenges, normalizes, and contests political debates. Postcolonial SF language has become the United States’ new national language for navigating the political landscape. I will explain the affective value of the new postcolonial language of SF and its connotation in the context of national and, by implication, global politics. I will accomplish this objective by analyzing how postcolonial SF language functions as a major communicative force used by New York Times political opinion writers (between 2006 and 2010). Maureen Dowd’s following description of George W. Bush’s last departure from the White House via presidential helicopter exemplifies what I mean by the political presence of SF language as text: “It was the Instant the Earth Stood Still. Not since Klaatu landed in a flying saucer on the Ellipse has Washington been so mesmerized by an object whirring through the sky” (“Exit” A31). In order best to understand Dowd, readers must comprehend her science fiction language. Klaatu has joined, say, such household word names as Kleenex, Khrushchev, and King Cheops as garden variety Times readers’ expected immediately recognizable lexicon. Itzkoff’s suggested reading for Hillary and Barack exemplifies what I mean by the political resonance of science fiction language as context. For Hillary, Itzkoff says that Frank Herbert’s Dune is appropriate: “Left adrift to wander in a desert wasteland, the scion of a deposed dynasty retakes the family’s lost throne in thrilling and violent fashion” (16). For Barack, Itzkoff says that Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man is appropriate: “Obsessed with Messianic ideas, a man with issues about his lineage travels back in time to discover he is actually the Messiah” (16). In order to get Itzkoff’s joke – in order to respond to the sheer hilarity he generates and laugh out loud –

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readers must instantaneously understand SF culture – the fact that Herbert’s and Moorcock’s SF scenarios absolutely do describe the political reality of the two Democratic Party presidential nomination front runners. I have briefly cited Collins, Dowd, and Itzkoff to ground my primary argument: no longer a linguistic subaltern, the postcolonial force of science fiction language (and imagery) is with us as the lingua franca of twenty first century America’s political terrain. In what follows, I substantiate this claim in the following three sections: 1) “Beyond BEMS and Boobs”: Samuel Delany’s “The Language of Science Fiction”, 2) “Learning From Other Worlds”: SF Language’s Political Presence, and 3) “Storming the Reality Studio”: SF Language’s Political Resonance. I will explain the importance of associating President Barack Obama with Mr. Spock and picturing him attired in a Star Fleet uniform with Vulcan ears extending from his head. I will, in short, argue that it is necessary to be fluent in the language of science fiction to comprehend political reporting discourse. In the science fiction world Americans currently inhabit, ‘science fiction’ is becoming ever more synonymous with ‘political science.’ 1. “Beyond BEMS and Boobs”: Samuel Delany’s “The Language of Science Fiction” James Gunn states that “the way we read science fiction differs from the way we read other genres or categories” (160). He concurs with Delany’s point and describes it. Three decades ago […] Samuel R. Delany gave a talk at a Modern Language Association meeting in which he said that he had visited many universities and had discovered that people who said they didn’t read science fiction or didn’t like science fiction actually couldn’t read science fiction. [...] To the question of whether science fiction works in the same way as other categories of writing, he answers: “No. Science fiction works differently from other written categories, particularly those categories traditionally called literary. It works the same way only in that, like all categories of writing, it has its specific conventions, unique focuses, areas of interest and excellence, as well as its own particular ways of making sense out of language. To ignore any of these constitutes a major misreading – an obliviousness to the play of meanings that makes up the SF text.” (ibid.)

Gunn continues: Earlier in the essay, Delany writes that “the conventions of poetry or drama or mundane fiction – or science fiction – are in themselves separate languages,” and in other essays, he called the process by which one approaches and reads those languages “protocols.” (ibid)

Reading science fiction, then, involves engaging in a specific reading practice, which necessitates learning particular language protocols. Delany and

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Gunn focus on reading science fiction genre texts. To my mind, the language of SF has broken out of its generic boundaries and invaded political reporting prose. In order to be fully cognizant of this prose’s meanings – to avoid misreading – it is necessary to understand science fiction’s separate language protocols. Delany and Gunn list many representative texts to explain their points. Following in their wake, I include specific examples of how diverse New York Times political commentators pervasively use the same science fiction language: Gail Collins: “Hillary now lives in a Golden alternative universe” (“Misery” A25). David Brooks: “I went […] in the White House to hear President Bush answer questions on the same subject [Iraq]. It was like entering a different universe” (“Heroes” A21). Bob Herbert: “I find myself speculating on what might have been if the man who got the most votes in 2000 had actually become president. It’s like imagining an alternative universe” (“Passion” A23). Maureen Dowd: “While W. […] conjured an alternative reality about Iraq, our avaricious bankers created an alternative reality about our financial system” (“Dark” 11). Unsigned editorial: “Watching the [Republican presidential] debate, it felt as if these candidates […] were living in an alternative universe” (“Worry” A26). Frank Rich: “But the brazenness of Bush’s alternative-reality history is itself revelatory” (“Forgotten” 8). Bob Herbert, article title: “Palin’s Alternate Universe” (A19). Frank Rich: “What was the most striking about the Obama speech in Berlin was not anything he said so much as the alternative reality it fostered” (“Obama” 12).

Any Times reader who does not understand the SF genre protocols of “alternative reality” and “alternative universe” comes from another planet in relation to reading the Times. The Times’ political writers turn to science fiction language to comment upon a political reality which is ever more unreal. Science fiction language is the best parlance to address, for instance, Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the unreal reality which constituted George W. Bush’s pretext for going to war. For example, Dennis Kucinich’s science fiction language utterance aptly described Washington: “Around Washington, the truth is an unidentified flying object” (Solomon, “Wild” 13). No wonder political writers use science fiction language to comment upon political truth cast as a U.F.O. Here is how Jay Leno describes the science fictionesque juxtaposition of the real and unreal: “Dick Cheney had an awkward moment tonight at the White House Halloween party. He went dressed as Darth Vader. And at the party, he ran into the real Darth Vader, who was dressed as Dick Cheney” (“Laugh lines” 2). Dowd, who has also characterized Dick as Darth, stands corrected by a stellar science fiction community practitioner:

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[George] Lucas […] had told me that I had gotten Dick Cheney completely wrong, that Cheney was no Darth Vader […] Lucas explained […] Anakin Skywalker is the promising young man who is turned to the dark side by an older politician and becomes Darth Vader. “George Bush is Darth Vader,” he said. “Cheney is the emperor.” I was relieved. In ‘Star Wars’ terms, Dick Cheney was more evil than Darth Vader. (“Aura” 11)

In the days of mundane political old speak, in that 1988 galaxy far far away when political reality and unreality were distinct genres, Lloyd Bentsen famously told Dan Quayle that he was “no Jack Kennedy.” In today’s real/ unreal political universe, Lucas exemplifies the new science fiction language political lexicon when he authoritatively states that Cheney was no Darth Vader. “Star Wars terms” – and all science fiction terms of its ilk – are the definitive political descriptors of our time. Science fiction language has drastically morphed in that it has gone from marginalized colonized language to postcolonial postmodern political parlance par excellence. Dan Quayle never became a John F. Kennedy clone. But Dick Cheney as Darth Vader White House denizen has been superseded by a political force that is not part of the dark side: the young man who has fulfilled his promise, the new American leader who makes ‘Mr. President’ synonymous with ‘Mr. Spock.’ Washington’s political truth is an unidentified flying object; the old vice president and president-as-Vader has given way to the new presidentas-Vulcan. Science fiction language has become politically important to the extent that Obama, during his inauguration speech, could have lifted his hand from the bible, spread his fingers, and told the nation to ‘live long and prosper.’ This science fiction language scenario did not happen. Obama is not really a Vulcan; Dowd explains that he merely plays one on TV. But the frightening fact is that Sarah Palin really does speak a science fictional version of Standard English: Sometimes, her sentences have a Yoda-like – “When 900 years old you reach, look as good you will not – splendor” […] Then she uttered yet another sentence that defies diagramming: “It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there.” (“Sarah’s Pompom” 11).

Sarah uses language that is fantastic to the extent that comprehending its protocols is beyond the powers and abilities of SF scholars. Her sentences are linguistically science fictional to the extent that, like the unearthly language invented for James Cameron’s Na’avi, the humans who encounter it need to resort to subtitles. Before further applying Delany’s terms to the complexity that is science fiction language’s representation of the real/ unreal contemporary political world, I want briefly to go back to the future – to a close reading of his description of the language of science fiction.

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Matthew Cheney, in his introduction to Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, concurs with Gunn’s observation that the language of science fiction works differently from other language and uses its own protocols. According to Cheney, Delany says that science fiction “was special because of its language, and the assumptions and techniques readers used to interpret that language, and the ways writers’ knowledge of those assumptions and techniques affected the stories they wrote” (xv). He seems to address Palin’s “Yoda-like” failure correctly to parse when he emphasizes that “science fiction is another language” (xix). He explains Delany’s “protocol” when he states that though science fiction “uses many of the same words that mundane fiction uses, it uses them differently. To be able to understand science fiction, you must be able to crack its codes” (xix). Science fiction using words “differently” grounds my understanding of science fiction language as a predominant cultural code for understanding political reporting discourse. In order to read the Times op-ed page most effectively, it is necessary to use science fiction reading practices, to be able to crack science fiction cultural codes. Delany situates communicating via science fiction language in terms of Marshall McLuhan and states that science fiction influenced McLuhan. His comments about McLuhan point to why political reporters adopt science fiction language. Delany states: McLuhan explains that any manmade object, and a good many natural ones, as they express or reflect aspects of our inner consciousness, become factors in the equations governing communication as soon as they come into our perception. But well before McLuhan had put this so succinctly – indeed, SF was to prompt McLuhan to this statement, another example of influence across boundaries – American SF writers, freed from the strictures of the probable […] sat contemplating marvelous objects in the theater of the mind […] Editor Campbell was astute enough to see that this was perhaps the most powerful tool in the realization of these marvelous inventions […] As the writers followed Campbell, SF began to grow up. (24)

Grown up science fiction language – or, postcolonial science fiction language that progressed to childhood’s end – came into the perception of political reporting commentators. These commentators intuited that science fiction language most efficiently expresses and reflects the nation’s inner conscious understanding of the at once real and unreal political environment. The commentators, then, speak in terms of a juxtaposition between postcolonial science fiction language and media ecology. Iraq’s supposed ability to generate a ‘mushroom cloud’ exemplifies one reason why this juxtaposition became necessary. The mushroom cloud was nothing more than a marvelous object which existed solely in the theater of the minds of Bush, Cheney and Condoleezza Rice. Political opinion writers use science fiction writers’ powerful linguistic tools to communicate their ideas re-

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garding the mushroom cloud and other fictions of its ilk. The pervasive presence of science fiction language in the Times shows that it has matured into a communicative force of universal perception. Science fiction influenced McLuhan’s statement, and McLuhan’s statement, combined with Delany’s “protocol,” explains why science fiction language has become such an important factor in the media ecology equations governing how political opinion writers communicate. Grown up science fiction language came to political commentators; they saw its communicative prowess; it conquered in terms of its usefulness across generic boundaries. The revelations about John Edwards’ relationship with Rielle Hunter indicate why science fiction language is such a potent communicative means for political writers. We now know that his forthright family values persona was as unreal as the stage set of the human zoo cage located on Kurt Vonnegut’s planet Tralfamadore. Together with his wife, the entire electorate learned that there was no such thing as the John Edwards they thought they knew. Like the protagonists of Avatar, this simultaneous husband and philanderer lived in two separate cultural spheres. Elizabeth Edwards abruptly learned that her marriage was a close encounter with an androiddesque fake human whose dual roles as loyal husband and honest politician were constructed forgeries; he tried to hide Hunter from his wife in general and from the world in particular. Delany’s description of SF language can describe John Edwards. Delany says; “Mundane fiction can get by with a clear and accurate portrayal of behavior that occurs merely because it occurs. Science fiction can not” (128). Edwards’ behavior was not something that occurs because it occurs. It was, from the point of view of observers, a fake, a forgery, a story. In other words, to again call upon the term “alternative universe,” from his wife’s and the media’s persepective, his relationship with Hunter was an alternative universe. No one believes in Tralfamadorians; everyone (with the exception of a few confidantes) believed that Edwards was not the father of Hunter’s daughter. Edwards was not mundane; he was unreal, alien. He existed in what Delany calls an “alien culture”: “In an alien culture […] we are obliged to speculate on the reason behind any behavior; and this speculation, whether implicit or explicit, must leave signs on the texts” (128). It has become necessary to reread Edwards, to go back and ask what did this presidential candidate know about Hunter’s daughter’s paternity and when did he know it. When political writers describe the unreality Edwards created they will speculate and this speculation will leave signs on their texts. Thus, we can answer the question of what is a nice discourse like political journalism doing in a communicative place like this – one filled with “warp drive,” “zap gun,” and “Klingon.” Delany’s definition of the language of science fiction addresses the answer. Delany says:

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The particular manner in which the inmixing of syntagm and signifier occurs in science fiction, whether at the level of term, sentence, or plot to create something more than and different from what those syntagms and signifiers yield separately is what makes science fiction [...] The language with which SF accomplishes its particular mode of inmixing must frequently use unusual verbal juxtapositions, by which certain words are estranged from their more usual, extrageneric contexts. But the process we are trying to fix is that by which we recognize these new and different images, rather than how we later recognize them as structures. (144, emphasis in original)

Lying politicians confront the electorate with signifiers gone awry. A rose is a rose is a rose; the Bush team’s mushroom cloud, is not a mushroom cloud, is not a mushroom cloud. Mundane language fails vis-à-vis political reporting because politicians who eschew the reality based world place their words within a system of unreal contexts. If, as Saussure tells us, language is a system and words derive their meaning from other components in the system, meaning in the mundane sense fails in the face of ‘truthiness.’ “I did not have sex with that woman Monica Lewinsky” tells us nothing because, in a world made as a false construction, we do not know what the meaning of ‘is’ is. Or, to turn to Darko Suvin’s terms, we cannot achieve accurate cognition in a political world which represents itself in terms of ‘untruth.’ People are not estranged from the language of science fiction; it is the best language to use when reporting on our brave new real/unreal political world. Or, in Delany’s words about why supposedly inadequate science fiction langue has the “analytic energy” – or illocutionary force to write the present political world: As a genre, it [SF] so frequently begins as a discourse that appears inadequate to discourse on anything at all, but which, by auctorial application to it of a certain analytic energy among its visions, ends up writing much more of the world than, certainly, any description of the discourse can say. (144)

In the present real/unreal political environment, science fiction has the right media ecology stuff. The illuctionary force is with science fiction language. 2. “Learning From Other Worlds”: SF Language’s Political Presence My epigram quotes Gail Collins saying that the 2008 presidential election is “not political science. It’s science fiction” (“Cloned Candidates” A19). In this election that is described as being science fiction, the candidates are positioned as science fiction characters. Pamela Sargent turned Hillary Clinton into a science fiction hero par excellence when she wrote “Hillary Orbits Venus.” Political columnists act in kind when describing Hillary. For example, Ann Kornblut, in Notes from the Cracked Ceiling argues that women candidates are alien in relation to the presidential election process. Col-

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lins wonders if Hillary is secretly an extraterrestrial: “What if she has a secret life as a French undercover agent or a space alien?” (“Unwelcome” A25). Although Hillary might act outside the traditional femininity rubric, unlike Collins, I would not describe her in a science fiction manner, but rather position her as a speculative fiction character, which makes it appropriate to apply my title Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory to her. New York’s post-Hillary senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, who Collins calls the “New Hillary”, is as science fiction to her as the old Hillary. Collins implies that she could be appropriately discussed by a science fiction film critic such as Scott Bukatman or Vivian Sobchack. New York’s old and new female senate legislators are described as science fiction Super Senators. Dowd imbues Hillary with super powers: “Hillary has created a regal force field that can be breached only with permission” (Dowd, “There Will Be Blood” 17). Hillary’s force field really works. The science fiction illocutionary force is with Hillary. Powers and abilities beyond the normal are attributed to other politicians as well. Collins opines that “[m]aybe Rudy [Giuliani] has a secret grip, like the Vulcan mind-meld” (“Pat Loves Rudy” A33). Dick Cheney, who Dowd often calls Dr. No, could take on the fictitious 007 even as he still has the power to cast aspersions at president number 44, even though he no longer holds elected office. Dowd imagines that he is evil and powerful to the extent that even science fiction accoutrements cannot prevail against him. Immersing Cheney within J. K. Rowling’s world, she imagines that he could whack Harry Potter: “It’s hard to imagine how Dick Cheney could get more dastardly, unless J. K. Rowling has him knock off Harry Potter […] Harry’s cloak of invisibility would be no match for Vice’s culture of invisibility” (Dowd, “A Vice President” 15). Paul Krugman believes that the entire Republican party culture is dastardly to the extent that he too must turn to science fiction to describe it. He asks if vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin can really portray herself as running against the Washington elite if the Republicans, “borg-like, assimilated much of the D.C. lobbying industry into itself” (Krugman, “Resentment” A27). As for Palin herself, well she is beyond the range of a discussion of politics and science fiction language; her discourse cannot be assimilated into Standard English. John McCain inhabits the reality community to the extent that science fiction imagery can be fruitfully applied to him. Nevertheless Collins notes that when the economy began to consist of things falling apart, “McCain appeared to be a loopy visitor from the Planet of the Overwrought” (“Grievance” A31). When she is not describing McCain as John in orbit, Collins speculates that “he’s an android” who is opposite to Mitt Romney to the extent that “you always worry that when they appear in the same place, there’ll be a rift in the space-time continuum” (“Voter’s Guide” A19).

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Could Obama be an android too? Only the political writers know for sure and they are aligning themselves with the superhero option. Dowd, when she calls her piece “Less Spocky, More Rocky”, announces that Obama should eschew the extraterrestrial emotional law professor guise in favor of an earthly hero’s boxing ring prowess. Leonard Nimoy famously contemplated whether or not he is Spock. Dowd says that Obama should be less Spocky. Whether or not Obama chooses to adopt a Rocky-esque persona, he is not immune to the implications of geology. A specific science fiction rock acts as the hero president’s Achilles heel: “The legislative process is like Kryptonite to the existential hero; it is designed, somewhat ingeniously, to expose even the most powerful president for the mortal that he is” (Bai 44). Even though Obama is not channeling his inner Sylvester Stallone and we know he is mortal, his base elevates him to superhero status. In a piece called “Can He Unleash the Force?” Dowd states that in “mythic tales from ‘Superman’ to ‘Star Wars’ to ‘Spider-Man,’ there comes a moment when the young superhero has to learn to harness his powers. That’s the challenge Barack Obama faces now” (A23). Obama proclaims that the science fiction illocutionary force is with him. In a revelation that should cause The Birthers’ heads to explode, Obama in truth stated that he was born on another planet. “Obama joked that he was not the messiah but Superman: ‘Contrary to the rumors you’ve heard, I was not born in a manager. I was actually born on Krypton’“ (Blow A23). Charles M. Blow responds to this news by concurring with Dowd’s “less spocky, more rocky” point: [O]ur mild mannered president is in desperate need of a telephone booth. He needs to summon his inner superman who knows how to pair optimism with force when responding to a crisis, a Man of Steel who’s more than a silver tongue with a tin ear. (A23)

Blow tells us that Obama needs less linguistic force and more science fiction superhero mode. Obama’s illuctutionary force, his ‘spocky’ ability to do legislative things with his silver tongue, is rendered impotent in the presence of the literally rocky – the red, green, blue or gold legislative kryptonite the Republican Party uses against him. Read together, Dowd, Blow and political humorist Andy Borowitz describe Obama’s legislative effectiveness quandaries by positioning him in terms of two science fiction creators. Reluctant to act in terms of Jerry Siegel’s man of steel, Obama, according to Borowitz, steels himself against Republicans who gleefully enact an H. G. Wells plot. Or, according to Borowitz’s title: “GOP Launch Time Travel Machine to Disagree with Obama in Future”, a scenario that would do Wells proud: [K]ey congressional Republicans launched themselves in a state-of-the-art time machine today to complete an important mission: traveling to the future to disa-

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gree with President Barack Obama […] “My colleagues and I have traveled four days into the future and listened to everything the President will say,” he [House Minority Leader John Boehner] told reporters at the Capitol. “And it will suck.” (n.pag.)

No matter that the great recession precludes financing time machine construction and available funds would be more fruitfully directed toward tackling present infrastructure problems. Borowitz here epitomizes a Vulcan mind meld between political commentary and classic SF scenario. His text is science fiction; he, when creating it, is a science fiction writer. His turn toward science fiction provides the perfect point to move from noting the presence of SF terms within political commentary to discussing the implications of how SF scenarios resonate when the commentators incorporate them as a stylistic component. 3. “Storming the Reality Studio”: SF Language’s Political Resonance Multi-media journalist Farai Chideya, when she quotes China Miéville’s science fiction novel, illustrates that, in addition to specific science fiction terms, entire science fiction texts resonate politically. Chideya quotes from The Scar: “For every factual attack, there are a thousand possibilities – and all of them strike down together.” She explains that “[i]t’s a line from China Miéville’s speculative novel The Scar, but it could easily describe today’s politics” (no pag.). The line is exceedingly applicable to the Bush administration’s attacks against facts, its strike down of what it disparagingly called the reality based community. As I have written elsewhere, George W. Bush authored alternative reality science fiction (cf. Barr, “Science Fiction”). Science fiction language then does more than describe politics. Science fiction language becomes politics in that, especially during the Bush years, science fiction is positioned as a substitute for real world truth. A citizen observer’s letter to the New York Times compares watching the Republican National Convention to reading a science fiction text: [W]ith all its [the Convention’s] sarcastic references to the Washington elite, I thought I had entered some kind of alternative universe. In this universe, John McCain isn’t a four-term senator, and there hasn’t been a Republican in the White House for almost eight years. Just because the name George W. Bush was conspicuously absent from the evening’s oratory does not mean that he does not exist in our universe. Nor is it like that the voters […] are going to forget that they live in the real world. (Weiss A26)

This writer can differentiate between fact and science fiction as surely as David Lindsay’s readers are absolutely aware that they are not voyaging to Arcturus. Conservatives routinely substitute science fictional versions of reality for reality. Hence, voters have difficulty distinguishing between what

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is real and the alternative reality politicians author. Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction, no part of reality, are akin to a Harry Turtledove alternative reality science fiction novel. Bush responded to adversity by digging his heels ever more firmly within science fiction terrain: “With the American public in despair over the Iraq war and key members of his own party deserting him, Bush is still trying to twist reality to claim that his failed effort is worth sticking with” (Unsigned Editorial, “No Progress” A18). Bush dug himself into a science fiction hole that has turned out to be no more secure than the real hole that served as Saddam Hussein’s hiding place. Despite the power of Bush Speak, he could not talk himself into being able to follow Alice down the rabbit hole. The now widespread understanding of Bush’s failures is due in no small part to the efforts of political satirist John Stewart. Stewart fought Bush’s science fiction language with science fiction language. Like a 21st century male incarnation of Betty Friedan defining sexism as the problem that had no name, Stewart is able “to name things that don’t seem to have a name” (Kakutani 18f.). Stewart’s particular language successfully nullified Bush’s science fiction based locutionary obfuscations. He made it increasingly difficult for Bush to do science fiction things with science fiction words via his “ferocious exposes of the administration’s Orwellian manipulations: [… such as] its efforts to redefine the meaning of the word ‘torture’’ (ibid. 19). Stewart articulated a verbal force field, which repelled Bush’s science fiction language from the lexicon. He was most effective when he repositioned Bush from science fiction writer to science fiction character. While political commentators have merely compared Obama to a superhero, Stewart literally recast Bush as a superhero. He positioned him as a superhero character replete with spandex suit, cape, and single letter emblazoned on his chest when he created the cartoon strip called “The Decider.” When Stewart decided to televise a cartoon comic strip superhero Bush, he outed Bush’s science fiction agenda by out-science-fictioning him. Unreal news demystified politics rooted in the unreal. Stewart has television news science fiction language powers and abilities that out-foxed bush – and Fox. Stewart, someone who inhabits a “truthiness” world located in a universe far far away from Walter Cronkite’s reality, is the most trusted political commentator in America. This is appropriate in that we now inhabit a political world which deviates from reality to an almost unbelievable extent. Krugman notes that “reality has a clear liberal bias.” (“Desperately Seeking” 15). For Thomas L. Friedman both sides of the aisle are not realistic: “the various gradual, partial withdrawal [from Iraq] proposals by many Democrats and dissident Republicans are not realistic either” (A19). Perhaps Judith Warner most startlingly shows the extent of just how far the

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unreal pervades politics. “[T]he dividing line between what’s believable and what’s not, between fantasy and reality, has become utterly permeable” (A19). Warner refers to such reality as the destruction of the World Trade Center and Saddam Hussein’s hole. The Times calls an editorial which argues that alleged illegal enemy combatants should not be subjected to abuses of United States federal government power “Rules for the Real World” (Editorial A26). Bob Herbert emphasizes that Republicans do not think that these rules apply to them. He asserts that Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind’-Law was written during “an era in which reality was left behind” (“High-Stakes” A31). Further decrying the Republican flight from real world rules, in a piece called “Running from Reality,” Herbert positions “deception” as “the pre-eminent characteristic of the Republican convention”: “Words completely lost their meaning. Reality was turned upside down” (“Running” A17). He describes Republican verbiage as an Orwellian non-amusing amusement park ride, a decidedly unfunny political version of John Barth’s description of postmodern language as “lost in the funhouse.” Democrats are not innocent of being lost in unreal political verbiage space. David Brooks points out that Democratic political candidates sometimes run from reality when running for office. Quoting Harvard Law Professor William J. Stuntz, in a piece called “When Reality Bites,” Brooks notes that Democrats “have conducted their races amid unconstrained ‘Yes We Can!’ unreality” (A21). Yes, the despite the fact that Democrats are not innocent of resorting to unreal speak, Bush and Cheney are by far the most egregious practitioners of authoring their own reality which does not conform to the usual rules of the real world. In an editorial called “The World According to Cheney” the Times, of course evoking John Irving’s novel, positions Cheney as a fiction writer who constructs a reality all his own, a world according to the alternative reality science fiction he authors: “[I]t must be exhausting to rewrite history as much as Mr. Cheney has done” (A28). Cheney as alternative reality author must be tired from spewing verbiage that is dead in relation to describing reality to the extent that it is akin to Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion.” But it is Bush who is the alternative reality science fiction writer and sometimes science fiction character extraordinaire. Bush should have won the Nebula and Hugo Awards. Krugman proclaims that Bush “has lost touch with reality. Actually, it is not clear that he ever was in touch with reality” (“Enablers” A23). Bush creates and inhabits a world of his own. In the manner of Arthur C. Clarke, Bush also authored a science fiction space odyssey about 2001. Dowd takes him to task for this science fiction writerly penchant and throws the rules of real world book at him. Bush’s “conflation [of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda] is contradicted by the fact that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, as the Sunni ter-

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rorist group is known, did not exist before 9/11” (“Hey W” A19). Dowd’s reality check demonstrates that “Bushworld” (Dowd’s term and the title of her book) history exists in an alternative universe. Jacob Weisberg is so vehement about positioning Bush as a fictional character, he calls his very existence into question: Bush “remains an appealing character, but a largely fictional one. I wonder how the last seven years would have turned out if he had actually existed” (A23). Unfortunately, according to the rules for the real world, the Bush presidency did in fact exist. What planet were Bush and Cheney on? Not the Earth we know. Perhaps they are akin to the replicants Philip K. Dick imagined. After all, their Iraq war, in the words of Timothy Egan, resembles “a postapocalyptic sci-fi film like ‘Blade Runner.’ Here is a troubled super-power headed by a pair of delusional men, with a rag-tag army fighting a constant low-grade insurgency” (A17). At least Bush greeted the Obama era by ceasing and desisting from inflicting his delusions upon us. Not so for his cronies’ rewritten history, which still assaults reality. Frank Rich describes this continuing alternative reality tall tale telling by pointing out in a piece called “The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality” that members of the Bush coterie wish to go back to the future: This gang’s rewriting of history knows few bounds. To hear them tell it, 9/11 was so completely Bill Clinton’s fault that it retroactively happened while he was still in office. The Bush White House is equally blameless for the post 9/11 resurgence of the Taliban. (8)

If Bush is the master of what Rich calls “this non-reality based shtick stick,” then Rich is the master of using science fiction language to point this out, to stick it to Bush. “History will be repeated not only if we forget it, but also if we let it be rewritten by those whose ideological zealotry and boneheaded decisions have made America less safe to this day” (ibid.). I will close this section by looking back to Rich’s efforts to protect our future, how he used science fiction language to counter the Bush speak science fiction language which described rewritten alternative reality history. Rich, like the members of Star Fleet command who authored the Prime directive against tampering with reality, routinely warns against the Bush Team’s retelling of history penchant. In the same warning tone which characterized the piece I quote above, in “Truthiness Stages a Comeback,” Rich admonishes us that “[a]s truthiness repeats itself, so may history, and not as farce” (9). He continually positions Bush and his cronies as fiction writers and rails against the science fiction alternative reality scenarios they author. He turns to none other than Marshall McLuhan when he stands up and uses other words to shout “you lie” to the Bush team, he accuses them of authoring propagandistic genre fiction fables:

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The medium is the message. This administration just loves to beguile us with a rollicking good story, truth be damned. The propagandistic fable exposed by the [Valerie Wilson] leak case – the apocalyptic imminence of Saddam’s mushroom clouds – was only the first of its genre. (“Mysterious Death” 12)

In this article which discusses Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals football player who volunteered for the army, gave up a multimillion dollar football contract, and, counter to the Bush’ team fiction that he died as a hero, in truth was killed by friendly fire, Rich cites this story as one of “the official fictions that have corrupted every stage of this war” (ibid.). Two years after making these comments about Tillman, Rich revisits the case and accuses Iraq war hacks of the “rewriting of history.” Pointing specifically to the Congressional hearings on the friendly-fire death of Tillman, Rich writes that “we still don’t know who rewrote the witness statements of Tillman’s cohort so that Pentagon propagandists could trumpet a fictionalized battle death to the public and his family” (“Patriots” 10). This particular rewritten history is viciously venal to the extreme; it turns the spirit of one individual’s altruistic personal sacrifice into a propaganda lie. Science fiction writers benignly fantasize about firing fictitious rockets; Bush team fabulists fantasize about lying about the existence of friendly fire – such lies lead to the firing of very real rockets, which really kill people. Or, in Rich’s words: “Mr. Bush has become so reckless in his own denials of reality that he seems to think he can get away with saying anything” (“Colonoscopy” 10). Bush thought right. He got away with denying reality to the extent of causing the real deaths of real people. While no one has prosecuted Bush for the consequences of his fictions, with McLuhanesque prescience Rich adroitly described their implications. He equates the Bush team lies to Steven King horror fiction: “like the hand that suddenly pops out of the grave at the end of ‘Carrie,’ the past keeps coming back to haunt the Bush White House” (“Thousand Days” 15). Specifically referring to the “discredited fictions” about the weapons of mass destruction, Rich continues: The demons that keep rising up from the past to grab Mr. Bush are the fictional W.M.D. he wielded to take us into Iraq. They stalk him as relentlessly as Banquo’s ghost did Macbeth. From that original sin, all else flows […] Mr. Bush’s poll numbers wouldn’t be in the toilet if American blood was not being spilled daily because of his fictions. (ibid.)

Rich describes Bush as being in an epic genre fiction mess. Horror fiction characters in the form of the fictional weapons of mass destruction cast as demons routinely grab him. Aligning him with science fiction writers does not stop with the exalted ranks of a figure like Clarke. In “Why are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” Ursula Le Guin reminds us that Shakespeare, the author of the fantasy described in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The

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Tempest, is a genre fiction writer. According to Rich, Bush’s genre fictions are epic to the extent that they are Shakespearian in proportion. The implication of Rich’s text replete with grabbing hands, “flows” and “American blood”: like Lady Macbeth, Bush has blood on his hands, which he can’t wash away. No amount of “out of brief spot” – no amount of alternative history writing – can remove the blot on American history, which the lies he authored constitute. “The [Bush] White House’s most accomplished artificial-reality Imagineers,” “Orwellian incantation,” and “a fresh round of White House fictions” cannot render “the reality-based world that our president [Bush] disdains” (Rich, “Shuffling” 11) unreal. Rich is not subtle when he describes the Bush administration’s untruths, fictionalizing, and rewritten history: The untruths are flying so fast that untangling them can be a full-time job […] Ms. Rice rose to a whole new level of fictionalizing by wrapping a fresh layer of untruth around her most notorious previous fiction [about Saddam Hussein’s ability to create a mushroom cloud] […] She also rewrote history to imply that she had been talking broadly about the nexus between “terrorism and a nuclear device” back then – a rather deft verbal sleight-of-hand. Ms. Rice sets a high bar, but Mr. Bush, competitive as always, was not to be outdone in his Oval Office address. Even the billing of his appearance was fiction. (Rich, “Longer” 14)

Rich is storming the unreality studio the Bush administration positioned as alternative history science fiction writer constructs as fictitious American reality. Works Cited Bai, Matt. “The Edge of Mystery.” New York Times Magazine 18 Jan 2009: 44. Barr, Marleen S. Alien to Feminity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory. Westport: Greenwood, 1987. —. “Science Fiction and the Cultural Logic of Early Post Postmodernism.” Socialism and Democracy November (2003): 167-86. Barth, John. The Literature of Exhaustion and the Literature of Replenishment. Northridge: Lord John, 1982. —. Lost In the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Blow, Charles M. “Crucible of Change.” New York Times 13 Feb 2010: A23. Borowitz, Andy. “GOP Launch Time Travel Machine to Disagree with Obama in Future.” Huffington Post. 22 Feb 2010. Web. 06. Mar 2011. . Brooks, David. “Heroes and Histories.” New York Times 17 Jul 2007: A21. —. “When Reality Bites.” New York Times 12 Feb 2008: A21.

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Cheney, Matthew. “Ethical Aesthetics: An Introduction to The Jewel-Hinged Jaw.” Delany xv-xxx. Chideya, Farai. “The Black President Trap.” Huffington Post. 21 Feb 2010. Web. 06 Mar 2011. . Collins, Gail. “The Grievance Committee.” New York Times 18 Mar 2009: A31. —, “Misery Loves Democrats.” New York Times 10 Sep 2008: A25. —. “The New Hillary.” New York Times 24 Jan 2009: A21. —. “Pat Loves Rudy.” New York Times 08 Nov 2007: A33. —. “Unwelcome Surprises.” New York Times 13 Mar 2008: A25. —. “A Voter’s Guide.” New York Times. 02 Feb 2008: A19. —. “The Year of the Cloned Candidates.” New York Times 13 Sep 2008: A19. Delany, Samuel R. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2009. Dowd, Maureen. Bushworld: Enter at your own Risk. New York: Penguin, 2004. —. “The Aura of Arugulance.” New York Times 18 Apr 2009: 11. —. “Can He Unleash the Force?” New York Times 06 Jun 2007: A23. —. “Dark Dark Dark.” New York Times 21 Feb 2009: 11. —. “Exit the Boy King.” New York Times 21 Jan 2009: A31. —. “Hey W! Bin Laden (Still) determined to Strike in U. S.” New York Times 18 Jul 2007: A19. —. “Less Spocky, More Rocky.” New York Times 09 Sep 2009: A29. —. “Sarah’s Pompom Palaver.” New York Times 04 Oct 2008: 11. —. “There Will Be Blood” New York Times 03 Feb 2008: 17. —. “A Vice President Without Borders, Bordering on Lunacy.” New York Times 24 Jun 2007: 15. Egan, Timothy. “Courage Without the Uniform.” New York Times 30 Jun 2007: A17. Friedman, Thomas L. “In Or Out.” New York Times 11 Jul 2007: A19. Gunn, James. “Reading Science Fiction As Science Fiction.” Reading Science Fiction. Ed. James Gunn, Marleen S. Barr, and Matthew Candelaria. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. 159-67. Gunn, James, Marleen S. Barr, and Matthew Candelaria, eds. Reading Science Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. Herbert, Bob. “High-Stakes Flimflam.” New York Times 09 Oct 2007: A31. —. “Palin’s Alternate Universe.” New York Times 03 Oct 2008: A19. —. “The Passion of Al Gore.” New York Times 05 Jun 2007: A23. —. “Running From Reality.” New York Times 06 Sep 2008: A17. Itzkoff, Dave. “Planetary Politics.” New York Times 16 Dec 2007: Section 7, 16.

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Kakutani, Michiko. “Is Jon Steward the Most Trusted Man in America?” New York Times 15 Aug 2008: Section 1, 18f. Kornblut, Ann. Notes from the Cracked Ceiling: Hilary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and What it will Take for a Woman to Win. New York: Crown, 2009. Krugman, Paul. “All the President’s Enablers.” New York Times 20 Jul 2007: A23 —. .”Desperately Seeking Seriousness.” New York Times 26 Oct 2008: 15. —. “The Resentment Strategy.” New York Times 04 Sep 2008: A27. Le Guin, Ursula. “Why are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. New York: Putnam, 1979. 39-56. Leno, Jay. “‘I Sing Gooder Than Him.” Laugh Lines. New York Times 01 Nov. 2007: 2. “No Progress Report.” Editorial. New York Times 13 Jul 2007: A18. Rich, Frank. “Bush of a Thousand Days.” New York Times 30 Apr 2006: 15. —. “How Obama Became Acting President.” New York Times 27 Jul 2008: 12. —. “The Mysterious Death of Pat Tillman.” New York Times 06 Nov 2005: 12. —. “The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality.” New York Times 14 Mar 2010: 8. —. “The Longer the War, the Larger the Lies.” New York Times 17 Sep 2006: 14. —. “Patriots Who Love the Troops to Death.” New York Times 05 Aug 2007: 10. —. “A President Forgotten but not Gone.” New York Times 03 Jan 2009: 8. —. “Shuffling Off to Crawford, 2007 Edition.” New York Times 12 Aug 2007: 11. —. “Truthiness Stages a Comeback.” New York Times 21 Sep. 2008: 9. —. “Who Really Took Over During that Colonoscopy.” New York Times 29 Jul 2007: 10. “Rules for the Real World.” Editorial. New York Times 20 Sep 2006: A26. Sargent, Pamela. “Hillary Orbits Venus” Amazing Stories 71.1 (2000): 28-39. Solomon, Deborah. “The Wild Card”. Interview with Dennis Kucinich. New York Times 22 Aug 2008: 13. Warner, Judith. “‘24’ As Reality Show.” New York Times 31 Jul 2007: A19. Weisberg, Jacob. “The Bush Who Got Away.” New York Times 28 Jan 2008: A23. Weiss, Russ. “Letter to the Editor.” New York Times 05 Sep 2008: A26. “What, me Worry?” Editorial. New York Times 12 Oct 2007: A26. “The World According to Cheney.” Editorial. New York Times 23 Dec 2008: A28.

Visualising the Fantastic in Strange Embrace MARKUS OPPOLZER David Hine’s Strange Embrace, first published in 1993, is one of the most outstanding British graphic novels of our times.1 It was collected into trade in its original black-and-white expressionistic style by Active Images in 2003, resulting in an immediate critical and commercial success.2 In his introduction to Strange Embrace, Irish comics artist and screenwriter Peter Milligan acknowledges the literary merits of the book: In part psychological horror, in part an existentialist study of the classic ‘Outsider’, this ‘graphic novel’, unlike most of them, really does warrant the term ‘novel’. It has the emotional, thematic and historic sweep of a novel, but manages to retain the immediacy and cerebral impact of the best comic. (3)

Over the next few years Rob Steen meticulously coloured the entire book which, despite Hine’s complete approval (cf. Richards, n.pag.; Rogers, n.pag.), necessarily represents a particular interpretation of the novel, especially in terms of the emotional quality and impact of several key scenes. This fullcolour hardback edition was finally released by Image Comics in 2008. Leaving aside its accomplishments as a comic for a moment, Strange Embrace is also one of the more interesting Gothic narratives of the 20th century that deserves far wider recognition, especially among scholars of the fantastic. It is the purpose of this paper to introduce new readers to David Hine’s Strange Embrace and to demonstrate the unique ways in which Gothic and, more broadly, the fantastic can be narrated in this medium. Before engaging with the visual strategies of the novel, I would like to provide a short summary, thus highlighting important links to Gothic classics of the 19th century. 1

2

The term ‘graphic novel’ is used here as a particular form of publication for a comic that offers a complex, self-contained narrative of considerable length that warrants close study to grasp the full range of its intricate patterns. Cf. Danny Fingeroth’s “What Is a Graphic Novel?” for a pertinent discussion of terms. Within the industry, Strange Embrace is a modern classic. Paul Gravett praises it as one of thirty “Stories to Change Your Life” (16; 106f.) and Gene Kannenberg, Jr. counts it among the major works in the horror genre (266f.). Images in this article taken from the 2003 edition with express permission of the author.

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The book is divided into four chapters of roughly 50 pages, focusing on four of the main characters: Alex, Anthony, Sarah, and Agnes. In Chapter 1 we meet Sukumar Kanita, an Indian teenager who regularly helps out in his father’s corner shop after school. Every Friday, for the past two months, he has been delivering supplies to an antique shop in a derelict part of town owned by a Mr Corbeau. What he has not told his parents is that this errand has cast a shadow over his life. First of all, the shop houses a collection of eerie-looking sculpted demons.

Image 1: The collection of demon sculptures and masks

Secondly, the back room seems to hide an awful secret. Thirdly, the owner, Anthony Corbeau, haunts the place like a ghost and, finally, Alex, the central character of Chapter 1, has used his psychic abilities to reach out to young Sukumar, eager to gain control over him. He waits for the boy outside the shop and offers him shelter from a fierce snowstorm. When Sukumar finally enters Alex’s underground domain, both the background and the frame of the last panel are gone, signalling a dissolution of order and stability and a descent into darkness – both literally and figuratively.

Image 2: Sukumar’s descent into darkness

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Down in the underground storeroom he feeds the boy some mushrooms which enhance the psychic link between them and allow Sukumar to expand his perception. Understandably, this casts serious doubt on the tale that Alex is about to unfold and makes the reader hesitate concerning some of the more extraordinary occurrences in the tale. Strange Embrace perfectly complements Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as the “hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” (25). Alex introduces Sukumar to his library of undead narrators, whose existence remains an unsolved mystery for the rest of the novel. David Hine explains the concept in the following way: People are a curiosity to him [Alex]. He sets out to discover what makes them tick by uncovering their histories as an act of psychic detection. By knowing them, he possesses them and they become part of his collection of stories. He literally keeps his collection of people in an abandoned café, like a human library. (Richards, n.pag.)

Paul Gravett characterises Alex as “a sadistic ‘psychic vampire’ with a greedy appetite, not for other people’s blood but for their thoughts” (106). Alex is a perverse detective who probes into people’s minds to learn their dark secrets. Due to his psychic abilities, he suffers from the confusion of other people’s lives, thoughts, and memories and chooses to preserve them as coherent stories. Thus, he rewrites the lives of those close to him and imposes his own patterns. Towards the end of the novel Alex argues that “[n]o-one’s story is ever finished while they still live. […] All the best stories end in the grave.” (196/5-6)3 And indeed, all his narrators are dead, victims of Alex’s desire to have their physical existence end as soon as he has come up with a fitting narrative for them. Sukumar’s life will equally be written into Alex’s grand narrative, but first we read how his own parents fell victim to his sense of order and, suspicions mounting, how he had to leave his home and find a new place to hide. At the beginning of Chapter 2, entitled “Anthony”, Alex rents a room in an old Victorian house which happens to belong to a Mr Corbeau. There we are reintroduced to the statues and Anthony Corbeau’s ghostlike presence. Alex immediately enters his mind and catches a first glimpse of his landlord’s well-guarded secrets. While most people are easy to read, Corbeau’s repressed thoughts, guilts, and secrets present a real challenge and quickly become Alex’s sole obsession. Mrs Pilger, the housekeeper, functions as a first source of information. She reveals that Mr Corbeau was an antiques dealer and that his wife committed suicide. Alex immediately starts to write a portrait of Corbeau which he calls “the opening chapter 3

Both editions of the book (2003/2008) use the same system of pagination. The first number indicates the page, the second the panel. All unmarked references are to these editions.

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of a novel” (61/1). Next, a long flashback presents Alex’s version of Anthony’s past life as a young adult in 1911. We learn that his mother died some years before and that his patriarchal father Edward hates his idleness and forces him to manage one of his shops. What Anthony finds amidst the “flotsam and jetsam of other people’s lives” (69/3) is an African mask that changes his life forever. He buys the whole collection and starts to create a shrine in the back room of the shop. In the meantime, his father has been looking for a suitable bride to turn him into a proper man. When he arrives with Sarah Windsor and her mother at the shop, they find Anthony in an awkward situation, worshipping his African demons. His father and Mrs Windsor are shocked, but Sarah is intrigued by Anthony’s passion for art. However, their marriage is doomed from the start. Alex finds out that, in Anthony’s mind, the disastrous honeymoon is directly linked to a childhood memory that reveals his mother’s problematic attitude towards sexuality. Soon, his father confronts him about his complete failure as a husband and businessman, but he cannot elicit a satisfying answer. Nevertheless, they agree on a new deal: Edward guarantees Anthony’s financial security and, in exchange, receives Anthony’s permission to let his young wife accompany him on a business trip to Italy. He promises to take her mother along as a chaperone, but Mrs Windsor quickly falls ill and has to return home. After six weeks Edward and Sarah finally return and we find them completely changed. When Edward dies soon after, Anthony learns that his mother is not dead, but locked away in a lunatic asylum. Sarah wants to talk to Anthony, takes a spare key, and lets herself into the shop, where she finds him performing a disturbing ritual. In Chapter 3 we witness in a flashback how the maid discovered Sarah’s dead body. We learn that she mutilated herself and especially her face, but we are not allowed to see for ourselves. One particular night, an apparition of Sarah guides Alex to a chest of drawers where he finds her diary. In a retelling of Chapter 2 from Sarah’s perspective, we now find out about Anthony’s brutal rejection of his wife’s advances during their honeymoon. He openly confesses that he only agreed to the marriage to have peace with his father. Her trip to Italy starts as a dream come true. Sarah lets herself be swept away and sleeps with Edward. Unfortunately, his true nature is soon revealed. She finds him bragging about his sexual conquest and treating her as a common whore. Back in the hotel he even rapes her, which she allows to happen, commenting that it was like “watching the violation of a doll, a puppet, a corpse, which resembled me, but was not me” (153/5). Chapter 4 has Mrs Windsor confront Edward with rumours she has heard about his illicit relationship with her daughter. In a fit of anger Edward spills out the truth: Sarah is indeed his mistress and his deranged

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wife Agnes is kept under surveillance in a lunatic asylum. This revelation comes as a shock to Sarah, but more so the fact that she is carrying Edward’s child. Out of curiosity she visits her mother-in-law in the asylum. Not only does Agnes confirm Edward’s obsession with young women, but she also explains how she cured her son of any sexual desire. Sarah leaves in disgust, but steals Agnes’s medical file in which she discovers that the reason for her madness is syphilis, which she can only have contracted from Edward. Completely devastated, Sarah starts to poison Edward’s food to finally make him pay for his crimes. The horror image of a syphilitic child begins to haunt her dreams. Edward soon dies and when she finds Anthony performing his masochistic ritual, she is willing to end her own life and that of the unborn child. When Alex has the opportunity to read the medical file on Sarah’s suicide, the last piece of the puzzle is revealed. Alex tried so hard to see Sarah’s dead face in Anthony’s mind, but all he could detect was the mask. Now he knows that Sarah carved its features into her own face. I am not going to reveal the very end of the book. Suffice it to say that Alex needs Sukumar to finally trick Anthony into becoming the last narrator missing from his collection. The most striking aspect of the book is its frame structure: Sukumar only provides an entrance into Alex’s world and reappears intermittently to ask questions and comment on what he learns. Apart from that we have four chapters that focus on four of the main characters. However, there are only three major narrators: a neutral 3rd person narrator at the beginning (7-17), Alex’s 1st person narrative (23-35; 49-65; 111-22; 189-204), which includes his ‘novel’ on Corbeau (65-110), and Sarah’s diary (122-88). There are also three minor narrators: Alex’s mother (20-22), Sebastian, a fellow student (39-45), and Agnes (168-73). The two central characters, Anthony and Edward, do not get a voice and can only be studied from the outside. Furthermore, the same narrative is told twice from two different perspectives. Having said that, Alex is the only source of information and he rarely provides physical evidence. Even when he shows an image of Sarah’s mutilated face to the frightened Sukumar (194f.), we cannot tell if this document is in any way authentic. The same holds true for his collection of undead eye-witnesses and storytellers, who are no more than ghostly presences, conjured up by the all-powerful puppet master to testify and prove his points. There is every reason to suspect that Alex belongs to the long tradition of unreliable narrators that frequent so many Gothic tales. This narrative strategy, a complex Chinese puzzle of frames within frames, harks back to the early wave of Gothic fiction (1764-1820). It casts serious doubt on the ontological status of the characters and the various life narratives presented in the book.

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It should be clear from this general introduction alone that Strange Embrace is a Gothic novel in the tradition of literary classics from the Victorian period and even from the genre’s early wave. David Hine explicitly stresses these intertextual links, saying that the book “takes on a lot of the trappings of nineteenth century novels, particularly the mad relatives packed off to the lunatic asylum and the dark family secrets. My biggest influences were probably Dickens, Wilkie Collins, the Brontes [sic], Thomas Hardy, and Edgar Allen Poe” (Rogers, n.pag.). Like most Gothic tales, Strange Embrace is predominantly about a dysfunctional family and how the younger generation is manipulated and victimised by their elders. Another staple feature of the genre is the book’s focus on obsession. Every one of the main characters is obsessed with or haunted by one thing or another, be it religious fundamentalism in Agnes’s case, Edward’s infatuation with young women, Sarah’s fear of sharing Agnes’s fate, Anthony’s weird attraction to his demonic statues, or Alex’s lust for control over other people’s lives and their stories. Most of them are also collectors, unable to control themselves until they possess whatever they desire. These mad pursuits are made vicariously available to the reader, who is drawn into the narrative, both disgusted and fascinated by it. However, this is only half the truth. Since Strange Embrace is, first and foremost, a graphic novel, the visual dimension is of equal, if not of greater importance. Despite the fact that comics have been around longer than film and have matured enormously over the past thirty years, a significant impact on the academic world has only been noticeable for the last decade.4 Of these publications, Andy W. Smith’s article “Gothic and the graphic novel”, published in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, is most relevant to the present discussion. He convincingly argues that the drawings are not illustrations of what one can read in the various text boxes, but integral parts of the language of comics: “One way in which the Gothic can be reevaluated through the medium of graphic novels is through exploring various narrative and visual strategies that comic art uses to retell old stories in new ways.” (252) This is precisely my focus for the second half of this paper, using Strange Embrace as a particular example to illustrate Smith’s general claim. David Hine developed a unique aesthetic for his book that perfectly complements its generic aspirations. The visual strategies are closely tied to the overall concept for the novel, since they reveal as much as they obscure, serving both the basic structure of crime fiction, but also 4

See, for example, the special issue of Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006) on graphic narrative (guest editors: Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven), the special issue of Biography 31.1 (2008) on ‘autographics’ (guest editors: Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti), or the wide range of publications by the University Press of Mississippi (www.upress.state.ms.us/category/ comics_popular_culture).

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the fantastic dimension of the text. As readers we frequently hesitate and have to ask ourselves which aspects we are willing to accept as factual truth. I will particularly focus on wordless sequences, foreshadowing, mirroring, symbols, and the use of colours for increased readability, but before going into any details, the overall design of the novel has first to be discussed. Hine’s drawing style is obviously modelled on German Expressionism, on paintings, woodcuts, and films, such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), and thus resembles the look of various Hollywood movies of the 1920s and 1930s, whose directors were equally inspired by that style, such as James Whale for his Frankenstein films (1931/5). However, Hine’s expressionistic approach can also be found in exaggerations that serve to illustrate the emotional state and the impact of certain experiences on the main characters, especially in terms of facial expressions and body parts that appear distorted and twisted into abnormal shapes. This is strikingly evident in the close-ups on Agnes’ face when she sees the copulating dogs (81/2-4), Sarah’s view of the lecherous old men (148), Mrs Windsor’s moral outrage (159/2), or Edward’s response to her allegations (160/3).

Image 3: Agnes and the copulating dogs

Gene Kannenberg Jr. speaks of “jagged and spiky inks” which help to create a “brooding, gothic mood” (267), a view shared by Gravett, who argues that the book frequently relies on “a distorted, angular perspective” (106). This is how David Hine explains his technique: The style was deliberately modelled on Expressionist woodcuts and the lighting style of Expressionist movies. I didn’t use woodcuts of course – the drawing is produced with quill pen on watercolour paper. I used watercolour paper because the surface is fairly rough and the tip of the pen dug into the surface so that the ink spread out from the pen as I drew. Normally pen-and-ink requires a firmer surface but I wanted the line to be slightly out of my control. I tried to enter the

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atmosphere of each scene so that when the characters are going through particularly traumatic experiences I pressed harder with the pen, the surface of the paper was torn and the ink spread out almost randomly so that the lines often look like scars or cuts on the flesh. (Oppolzer, n.pag.)

Since the artist’s choice of black and white was a deliberate decision and not a necessity dictated by budgetary considerations, it has to be seen as an integral part of the overall design. To match the emotional impact of the scenes, the physical creation of the drawings literally became a disruptive process that intentionally provoked unexpected results. This monochromatic approach also reinforces the stark contrasts within the narrative itself by categorically excluding shades of grey or the softening impact of colours. It is particularly well suited to the mise-en-scène of the book, which is decidedly Gothic, not only in terms of the allusions to silent or early sound films, with their necessary reliance on stage design, dramatic lighting effects and larger-than-life acting, but also in terms of the locations depicted, such as the asylum, whose architecture and representation is most clearly indebted to German Expressionism. Having established the style of the novel, it seems now pertinent to focus on those parts that foreground visual storytelling. The book starts with a highly symbolic, mostly non-verbal sequence that anticipates Sukumar’s ultimate fate: he is shown drowning in the sea, his voice useless in this watery grave, then choosing to dive even deeper into the abyss, and finally meeting Alex at the bottom calling out his name and asking where he is. This strikes the reader as very odd, considering that Alex is looking directly at the boy. Suddenly his face dissolves into a school of fish and we find Sukumar staring into his aquarium, slightly bewildered. We now learn that it was his mother’s call that forced him out of his reverie. This reveals the previous scene to be internally focalised, showing Sukumar’s vision rather than objective reality. However, it also becomes clear, although only in retrospect again, that Alex is already breaking through the boy’s mental barriers and starting to manipulate him. That the familiar words of Sukumar’s mother calling out to him are actually emanating from Alex’s mouth, anticipates his later use of Sukumar’s particularly fond memory of his father and the complete trust this evokes to lure the boy into his underground realm (17). This opening sequence teaches the reader never to take anything at face value, as it consists of several layers of overlapping perspectives and interests: Sukumar’s subjective point of view, Alex’s attempt to gain control over the boy, his mother’s disruptive verbal appearance in word balloons, and, finally, the artist’s particular way of accentuating various aspects of the sequence so that they resonate with a number of later scenes, especially Sukumar’s death (199), which is staged in exactly the same terms. The artist’s deliberate choices tie the book together on a level

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that goes far beyond the necessities of the individual scenes and thus create a unified work of art, even if one exclusively focused on the visuals. A more elaborate use of a wordless sequence can be found at the end of Chapter Two. A graphic novel is particularly apt to narrate scenes that are fundamentally about a loss for words or the breakdown of communication, since the artist does not have to resort to language to express himself. Though early Gothic novelists frequently claimed that words were insufficient or even unsuitable to describe the horror of a scene,5 they had no choice but to continue nevertheless, since prose narratives have no existence or meaning outside words. David Hine, however, lets the drama of certain key scenes play out in visual terms only. The final breakdown of communication between Anthony and Sarah, her complete isolation and shocking discovery of to what end Anthony has pursued his perverse cult, are rendered as a wordless sequence of two-and-a-half pages (102-4). Without the distraction of language, it becomes clearer that the compositional structure of music can be found in the visual design of comics (cf. Eisner 28; Raeburn 23ff.). A simple analogy may help to clarify the point. If each panel is seen as a note and each tier as a bar, then the number of panels in a tier, or their relative width and size, indicate their weight or importance in the overall composition. Strange Embrace is built on a consistent 3-tier structure with 2-3 panels each. Thus, deviations from this pattern either signal important revelations, such as one panel per tier or page, or hectic movement and growing tension, such as four or more panels per tier. On page 102 Anthony’s emotional outbreak and flight in the middle tier get one panel each for emphasis. This is followed by Sarah’s silent pursuit. In the three panels of the third tier we quickly move through accelerated cutting from their Victorian home to Anthony’s shop. Page 103 speeds up the pursuit with a four-panel tier which takes us from the front door into Anthony’s secret room at the back. Since we do not have to read written text, wordless sequences tend to create a faster flow of images. This growing momentum is instantly arrested by an oversized panel that takes the space of two tiers. In filmic terms, we move from a zoom-in on Sarah’s face to a medium long shot that serves to establish the scene – a sudden revelation. Since the complexity of the sequence is not created through language, it has to be mediated through a concentration and density of symbolically loaded images that belong to various narrative threads running through the novel and forming visual nodes or knots in certain key parts of the book. Thus the particular iconography of Strange Embrace

5

See, for example, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: “Words cannot paint the horror of the princess’s situation” (28).

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is not mere decoration or illustration, but a constituent part of the book’s overall design. First of all, the couple’s relationship has come full circle. Anthony and Sarah met in this room for the first time, when, together with her mother and Edward, Sarah caught Anthony kneeling in front of his statues. What seemed like an incidental pose is here revealed as the first step towards a full-blown masochistic cult. Visual foreshadowing and mirroring have prepared us for this discovery, though we did not know exactly how the pieces would fit together. We saw the sculptures and masks early on (12), penetrated Anthony’s mind for a split second (58/5), subconsciously noticed the pierced statue, when Alex begins his novel (61/3), we saw a close-up of Anthony’s face while worshipping the African demons (64/1), witnessed the beginnings of his cult (73/5), and noticed that Anthony was bleeding through his shirt (93/6-94/6), till we finally arrive at this pivotal revelation (103/5) which, interestingly enough, was also chosen for the cover of the latest edition. At the same time, the sequence points towards future revelations, such as the chastity belt that fused sexuality and pain in Anthony’s experience (170f.). The reunification of the ill-fated lovers separates them forever. Sarah’s visit to Anthony’s mother has provided her with the missing pieces of the puzzle, but, like most Gothic heroines, she is not the happy detective but the devastated victim. While in the first panel of the pursuit sequence she raised her hand to symbolically reach out to him, now, there is no more to be said or done. Page 104 is very important in this respect. The linear sequence of the previous panels is broken up. The first tier presents three close-ups that have no linear sequence. They tie the scene into the powerful iconography of the book and remind us that we have indeed reached a point of no return. Anthony and Sarah are not shown in the same panels, which signals the permanence of the breach. By holding on to one of the statues she pricks her hand and thus becomes implicated in Anthony’s cult. She is symbolically sacrificed to his demons, which soon becomes a sad reality through her gruesome suicide. Hine’s extensive use of visual foreshadowing can be found not only in terms of the major plot developments, such as the various visual clues that hint at the revelation at the end of Chapter Two, but also in the subtle handling of focalisation. Consistently, he sacrifices the detached outsider’s point of view to a subjective, sometimes ironic, commentary on the narrative and its future development. When Sukumar’s father reads out Anthony Corbeau’s initial letter asking for the delivery of goods, the ‘camera’ suddenly moves past the right shoulder of Mr Kanita, who is presented in a medium close-up (11/7), only to focus on a beetle crawling across the floor, the dustbin in the corner, a bowl of cat food, and an enormous crack in the

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wall (11/8). We know already that Sukumar has visions of drowning (7/4) and is greatly worried about his weekly errand (10/8), so these symbolic indicators of decay increase our suspicion that something terrible is going to happen to the frightened boy. Something similar can be detected during Edward and Sarah’s exploration of Venice. Sarah is the narrator of this sequence and the first image, a high-angle establishing shot, perfectly complements her diary entry: “We have arrived in Venice.” (143/1) This is quickly followed by a low-angle shot that already shifts our attention from the romanticism of the setting to the sewer-like canal that the lovers are about to cross: “Edward is showing me everything.” (143/2) While this panel’s meaning remains ambiguous, the next image is clearly ironic. While Sarah rhapsodises about the city, stating that “[t]his must be the most wonderful place in the world” (143/3), the ‘camera’ shifts its focus from the couple to a drowning cat, three rats, and a grimy stone wall. Again, the visuals run counter to the main narrative and, in this case, ironically comment on the situation and foreshadow the tragic end of Chapter Three, the rape scene. Mirroring and doubling are stock features of practically all Gothic texts. This is evident in their structural set-up, such as the frequent parallels between two narrative strands or frames, but also in terms of characterization, when two or more protagonists appear to be strangely alike. This has obvious repercussions on questions of identity construction and the characters’ ontological uncertainty. Hence, it is important to analyse how these concepts translate to visual media whose languages allow for a more diversified implementation. In short, Strange Embrace features all of these various forms. Leaving aside those that can be equally well achieved in other media, or a literal use, when, for example, Sarah looks into a mirror after the rape (154/6) and before her suicide (188/8), I want to highlight a few scenes whose effect relies on the co-presence of several time frames and locations on a comic page which are all visible and present at the same time – the single most important difference between comics and other narrative media. When Alex probes into Anthony’s mind for the first time, they begin to visually resemble each other (64/9-10):

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Image 4: Probing Anthony Corbeau’s mind

Like a profiler, Alex has to become Anthony to fully understand his experience, which includes the painful and exhausting retrieval of old memories.

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When Alex forces Anthony to remember his disastrous wedding night, his old and young selves also suddenly match through posture and facial expression (79). This is the exact moment when Anthony remembers a walk with his mother during which they come across a pair of copulating dogs. Agnes explodes in a fit of moral indignation which is an important early sign that she may be directly responsible for the boy’s abnormal sexual development. At the end of this flashback, we see Anthony’s face again in the final panel (81/8), an exact mirror image of the last panel on page 79. Thus, it becomes apparent that all these memories are not random, but closely linked and as fresh and powerfully present in Anthony’s mind as ever. Anthony is doubly haunted in these instances: while the demonic Alex violates the privacy of his thoughts, he is forced to relive the past over and over again. However, one could also detect an ironic reversal of this power structure, if one realised that through Alex’s obsession with Anthony’s past life he is equally haunted by him and his memories. This unusual visual correspondence between and interdependence of the obsessed and their foci of attention can also be found in several other contexts. Agnes is shown to resemble Jesus Christ on the cross (172/3-4), and when Sarah becomes fixated on Agnes’s medical file, believing she is going to suffer exactly the same fate, she begins to resemble her motherin-law (180/5, 181/2). We know that one of the final revelations of the book is the visual correspondence between Sarah and the mask. This is cleverly anticipated when Anthony and his wife return from their disastrous honeymoon in Chapter Two (83). Through the previous two pages on the right-hand side (79, 81), which foreground the mirroring of the older Anthony in his younger self, we are prepared to look for correspondences. What we find in tiers two and three of page 83 is an exact mirroring of Sarah in the mask. In the first two panels, Hine uses a long shot each to establish Sarah and Anthony, holding his beloved demon mask, separated in two different rooms. However, the second panel of each tier presents a medium close-up on Sarah’s face and the object of Anthony’s desire, respectively. The third panel stresses the correspondence even more through two close-ups. The caption of the last panel reads: “Within a year, Sarah would be dead.” (83/8) At this point we believe that Sarah and the mask are exact opposites in Anthony’s mind, the rejected wife and the coveted artwork. However, through the panel layout, the proximity to the previous sequence, and the overall importance of masks in the novel, Hine invites us to detect more in this mirroring than the superficial contrast between the two, even if we cannot anticipate the exact link. Since Sarah and the mask are fused as mirror images in Anthony’s mind, this scene illustrates and foreshadows a central paradox and mystery of the novel, that Alex is able to unravel only very late in his investigation. Thus, several of the narra-

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tive techniques in the book, including mirroring, reveal as much about the characters as they obscure, which keeps the readers constantly on their toes. The same could be said about the iconography and the various symbols, of which I want to pick out just two. One of the visual leitmotifs of the novel is the cross, which is almost ubiquitous as a design element, but mostly kept in the background in the first three chapters. In Chapter 4, however, the cross becomes loaded with additional meanings and references when it is explicitly associated with Agnes, Anthony’s mother, and her religious fundamentalism. This retrospectively activates most of the previous appearances of the cross as reminders of Agnes’s physical absence and the overpowering presence of her legacy – the sacrifice of Anthony’s natural development to her perverted Christianity. This becomes evident in the various depictions of the marital bed. What first seemed to be cruciform shadows of the window can now be read as Anthony’s mother symbolically coming between the young couple (79/3, 130/3). Anthony looks like a mental patient who has been strapped to his bed. Not only is he separated from his wife, but his own body is segmented. The chastity belt estranged him from women forever, which was, after all, his mother’s intention, but the more important dividing lines – or let us say fault lines – symbolically run right through him. The image is so striking that the readers know that there is more to Anthony’s failure to consummate his marriage, but we are left in the dark about the details.

Image 5: Anthony’s marital bed

When Alex suffocates his grandfather under whose guardianship he has been placed, he leaves the body unattended for a week, so his parents find the corpse swarming with flies. From this point onwards, Alex is frequently

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associated with flies: in the café (47, 107, 195/1, 198, 204), his room at his parents’ house (51ff.), and the horrific vision he creates for the Pilgers (114f.). Repeatedly, flies stand for death and decay and are present in the asylum (163/4), as a part of Agnes’s malaria therapy (179/4-6), and at Sarah’s intended abortion (184/1-4). Beelzebub, literally ‘Lord of the Flies’, is one of the princes of hell and Alex has enough devilish qualities to warrant a brief comparison. He toys with mortals and their souls, capturing and incarcerating them after their deaths, and relishes his complete control over his victims. At one stage he demonstrates his power by remodelling Mrs Pilger’s face with his bare hands as if she were made of clay (116/4-6). Anthony’s former housekeeper survives the attack, which makes the situation even more confusing: who is Alex and what is it that we are witnessing? Could it be Sukumar’s worst nightmare, Alex’s perverse inner life, hell itself, or some fantastic place outside space and time? Similar questions are raised by the book’s markers of transitions. In comics, the beginning and the end of new temporal or ontological frames are marked by signposts, such as captions, a radical change in mise-enscène, including the look of characters, a suspension of the laws of physics, a new colour palette, or a markedly different style. Rob Steen’s consistent colour coding is extremely helpful in highlighting important transitions in Strange Embrace: a brief flashback is kept in black-and-white (11/5-8) and Sukumar’s memory of the complete trust he has in his father stands out through Steen’s use of light green and blue (17/3-6) in contrast to the black, brown, and violet of the cold winter evening (16/7-17/2). Sukumar’s transition into Alex’s world is emphasised by the transparency and lack of colour of the undead narrators (19/3-5), till they suddenly ‘materialise’ (20/1) in natural colours and with solid bodies, when the mushrooms begin to take effect. Alex himself now appears to be strangely colourless (20/2-3), which was not evident outside in the street. He remains so for the rest of the novel. This shift in the ontological status of the main characters is clearly marked, but it does not reveal what exactly has happened. The same can be said about the dreams, visions, and nightmares that Alex experiences at his grandfather’s house. They are, again, clearly marked (25/5, 30/5) through Alex’s narration and the sudden introduction of the colour green, but it is unclear what exactly we are witnessing. When Alex wakes up from his nightmare (33/4), in which a demon took possession of his grandfather (33/1), he runs upstairs to see for himself. Using his telepathic link, he finds the demon inside him (34/8), which makes him smother the old man with a pillow to drive the monster out, which, in turn, causes his grandfather to suffocate. What is important to note here is that, despite the clear signposting of the nightmare, there is no difference between the world of dreams and ‘reality’. This is further substantiated by the neutral third-

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person narrator’s comment that Sukumar “knows with the certainty of a nightmare that terror would root him to the spot” (14/1). We are repeatedly reminded that the characters of the novel cannot or will not distinguish between their dreams, visions, memories, and their present lives. What they are haunted by is more material and of greater consequence to them than so-called reality. The ghost of Sarah appears in Alex’s dream and guides him to a chest of drawers in the attic, where he encounters her unborn syphilitic child (120/7). When he wakes up with a start, he goes upstairs to exactly the same spot and finds her diary in the place she indicated. We are made to believe that it was a dream that revealed the decisive piece of evidence and not his telepathic or physical probing. In this context, one should not forget that the novel represents Alex’s grand narrative, reality as filtered through the eyes of a perverse detective. He has become transformed by his mind-reading much in the same way as his violent intrusions into other people’s minds have transformed them. From his obsession with Anthony’s memories we know that he is more interested in his victims’ desires, dreams, dirty secrets, and fears than in a well-rounded character portrait. Maybe the melodramatic intensity of the scenes we witness should be attributed to Alex’s taste as a storyteller rather than to the truth behind his fantasies. That is why the original black-and-white edition is more in accordance with this aspect of the novel, as it signals a correspondence across seemingly heterogeneous elements. Steen’s colour-coding is beautifully done, substantially increases the readability of the text, and highlights the various transitions through the use of easily distinguishable colour palettes. However, these forms of reader guidance also insinuate essential differences that are neither intended nor in any way substantiated by the narrative. This is to say that Steen’s carefully executed, low-key colouring still dramatically changes the overall impression of the book since it keys the reader into particular moods or perceptions. More generally, it undermines the important visual link to German Expressionism and the Gothic classics of Hollywood’s silent era and among the early sound films. All the stark contrasts and the disruptive process of the production itself become balanced by the softening effect of the colours. This makes the novel more palatable to a wider audience, but it also means that Steen’s approach to Hine’s original black-and-white novel has to be seen as a successful interpretation, but an interpretation nevertheless. Hine himself fully embraced Steen’s work: “Rob has a very European sensibility and the low-key coloring works fantastically well to enhance the mood of the book” (Richards, n.pag.). There are, of course, certain moments which profit substantially from Steen’s careful nuances, such as Su-

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kumar’s fond memories of his father (17/3-6), for which light greens and blues are used to create an almost pastoral landscape, or the sun setting over Paris in gorgeous reds (136/3-137/5), when Sarah is swept away by the romantic atmosphere and kisses Edward. Other interesting choices of colours leave Alex in black-and-white, which makes him stand out as an odd character, or the consistent use of red for the statues (11/3, 61/3, 103/5), Anthony’s thoughts (58/5, 64/1-8, 194/1-12), and Agnes’s room in the asylum (164-175) to highlight the obvious links between them. The two editions of Strange Embrace showcase what a strong influence colours can have on the reception of a comic, making it hard to favour one over the other, since both have their merits. These visual strategies, of which I could only present a few, are central to the sophisticated design of the book which distinguishes David Hine’s Strange Embrace not only as a fascinating Gothic novel, but also as a masterpiece of storytelling in the comics medium. Despite strong influences from Victorian fiction, German Expressionism, and the language of film, this graphic novel is a unique work of art that challenges the reader to solve its complex narrative puzzle, but never reveals all its secrets. Works Cited Chute, Hillary and Marianne DeKoven, eds. Graphic Narrative. Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006). Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Paramus: Poorhouse, 2006. Fingeroth, Danny. “What Is a Graphic Novel?” The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels. London: Rough Guides, 2008. 1-7. Gravett, Paul. Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know. New York: Collins, 2005. Hine, David. Strange Embrace. Los Angeles: Active Images, 2003. Hine, David with Rob Steen. “Strange Embrace.” Strange Embrace and Other Nightmares. Berkeley: Image, 2008. 5-204. Kannenberg, Gene, Jr. 500 Essential Graphic Novels: The Ultimate Guide. New York: Collins, 2008. Milligan, Peter. “Introduction.” Strange Embrace. David Hine. Los Angeles: Active Images, 2003. 3-4. Oppolzer, Markus. “E-mail interview with David Hine.” 15 July 2009. Interview. Raeburn, Daniel. Chris Ware. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004. Richards, Dave. “David Hine wants to lock you in his ‘Strange Embrace’.” Comic Book Resources. 28 Mar 2007. Web. 10 Jun 2011. .

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Rogers, Vaneta. “David Hine wants to hold you in his ‘Strange Embrace’.” Newsarama.com. 11 May 2007. Web. 10. Jun 2011. . Smith, Andy W. “Gothic and the graphic novel.” The Routledge Companion to Gothic. Eds. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy. London: Routledge, 2007. 251-59. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. Ed. W. S. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Whitlock, Gillian and Anna Poletti, eds. Autographics. Biography 31.1 (2008).

Love your Zombie Romancing the Undead CHRISTIAN LENZ Remember how zombies used to shuffle and moan? You could easily outrun them, if not, however, for long. Today’s menacing zombies run, they jump, they truly hunt – as in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) or the remake of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (2004). Whatever happened to the slow zombie? He’s fallen in love or is matchmaking. That’s what happened. Thus, this paper is going to concentrate on giving a genre-defining categorisation for the new phenomenon of the romantic zombie comedy, or for short: rom-zom-com. The first film to actually acknowledge this new trend and thus pave the way for other films to follow is 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, subtitled “A Romantic Comedy. With Zombies.” Yet this genre, as this paper is going to show, is not as homogenous as it might appear. In fact, one can distinguish between three varieties of the rom-zom-com. But, in order to understand this new genre, one has to have a look at the two constituting components first: the history of the zombie and the defining features of the romantic comedy, which will be followed by analyses of examples of the three respective varieties that comprise the canon of the rom-zom-com. 1. Zombie Evolution The zombie has undergone a tremendous change during its relatively short medial appearance: “Zombie culture is a phenomenon […] which merits a holistic examination as it has shifted in a correlation to societal changes. […] It is possible to see the shift of ideas and values from the end of the 20th century through the first decade of the 21st” as Jasie Stokes writes (3). Yet there was even a shift in zombie narratives before Romero thought up and directed one of the most famous and influential zombie movies of all times – The Night of the Living Dead – in 1969.

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Originally, “the term zombie stems from the Kimbundu term nzúmbe meaning ‘ghost’ or ‘spirit of a dead person’“ (Davis XII). Brought to the West Indies via the slave trade, the African word has changed first to the creole term zõbi, and then finally to the word we all use today: zombie (cf. Bishop 198). But not only the word has undergone a change; the concept itself has too. In the Haitian Vodoun1 tradition, “a number of powerful and unorthodox Vodoun priests, called bokors [sic]2, possess a keen knowledge of natural drugs and sedatives and have created a ‘zombie powder’ – called coup poudre – that renders its victims clinically dead” (ibid; cf. Davis 90). This zombie powder is a strong neurotoxin which affects the bodily functions of the victim and makes him or her appear dead to the untrained eye, leaving the person in “a state of profound paralysis” (Davis 142). Once the effect of the substance wears off, the person believed to have been dead is ‘resurrected’ by the bokor. Yet the lack of oxygen to the brain has left its traces: the victims are now visibly slower – both in movement and intellectual activities (cf. ibid. 21), but they “are still capable of all normal human feelings. They smile, cry, even growl with anger if hurt or otherwise provoked (something real zombies [i.e. the Romero zombie3] would never do)” (Brooks 20)4. Although the Vodoun zombie entered cultural heritage in the early 20th century5, it was George A. Romero who has shaped our ‘knowledge’ and perception of the living dead tremendously: “Romero liberated the zombie from the shackles of a master [the bokor], and invested his zombies not with a function [that of a slave …] but rather a drive” (Dendle qtd. in Bishop 200). The zombies’ only incentive is now the hunger for flesh. Interestingly enough, one has to wonder why an undead being has to eat anyway – as the body cannot gain any nutritious effect from it. Kim Paffenroth says 1

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Although spelled and pronounced differently, is it anthropologically more accurate to speak of Vodoun (alternatively: Vodun or Voudou) instead of the more westernised voodoo when one refers to the actual religion of Africa or Haiti (Davis XI). This paper will acknowledge this cultural heritage. According to Christopher Moreman, bokor refers to sorcerers only. Vodoun “priests and priestesses [are] respectively termed houngans and manbo” (267). This paper will therefore use the term bokor, as this implies the person who “resurrects” the body from the dead and who is not necessarily a priest. The term Romero zombie is not limited to the creatures from Romero’s movies alone. They will be referred to this way, however, as he was the first movie director to actually create this new variety of zombies. Cf. Stokes and Bishop for more information on the origin of the Romero zombie. Although Max Brooks’s book is a fictious account and therefore belongs to the genre of science fiction, the observations he makes prove to be rather correct as the following examples will show. The Vodoun zombie was first acknowledged in the following texts: William Seabrook, The Magic Island (1929), travel narrative; Kenneth Webb, Zombie (1932), play; Victor Halperin, White Zombie (1932), film (cf. Bishop 198).

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that it is “added for its symbolism, showing what humans would generate into their more primitive, zombie state” (4). Substituting the bokor by the hunger and thus the compulsion, the Romero zombie is far more dangerous, but also empty as a signifier for current social and societal problems6. After this radical re-interpretation of the zombie, the next big leap was made in the last decade of the 20th and the first years of the 21st century. Following the Vodoun zombie and the Romero zombie, a double evolution has taken place: on the one side, there is the Zombie as Companion, and on the other side, there are the Afflicted and Infected. Already the plural of the latter category implies that the zombie is not alone but rather a nameless face amongst countless others, blurring into a crowd of bodies. The Infected, the name of which is taken from Boyle’s 28 Days Later, are driven creatures like Romero zombies, but the eating of flesh fades into the background. It is about being a symptom rather than a cause of societies’ upheavals and inexorable collapses: they might devour flesh, they might spread rage, but the Infected surely want to end society the way it is now. The Afflicted are zombies at a stage prior to the Infected: they are dead whilst living. Having the same repetitive daily routine – e.g. getting up, going to work, doing the same work as yesterday (and the day before that), going home, sleeping – renders them dead although they still have all the bodily functions and needs the Romero zombies or the Infected no longer experience. When they are eventually zombified – which will happen inevitably – their behaviour and demeanour hardly changes, their inner death merely surfaces. An example of the Afflicted would be Shaun’s flatmate Pete in Shaun of the Dead, who badgers Shaun and Ed about their non-conformist behaviour concerning work. The Zombie as Companion has the lust for flesh but the hunger takes a back seat – as it does with the Infected. He or she has a master, as did the Vodoun zombie, but although that master or mistress might have started out in the form of a bokor, the relationship will change and something entirely different will develop: an equality between the two – they profit from each other and might even fall in love. 2. Love and Laugh In her study of the romantic comedy (rom-com), Tamar Jeffers McDonald characterises the genre as having “as its central narrative motor a quest for love, which portrays this quest in a light-hearted way and almost always to a successful conclusion” (9). The quest is played out in very standardised 6

For further references of the symbolism in Romero’s Living Dead Trilogy, see for example Schmidt.

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plots. Mark Rubinfeld identifies four of which two will usually occur together: the pursuit plot, the redemption plot, the foil plot and the permission plot (4). In the pursuit plot, “the hero woos [the female lead], wows her, and wins her” (ibid.), in the redemption plotline, the hero is either “coldhearted and bitter” or “brokenhearted and lonely” (ibid. 13, 27). Either way, he needs a caring, mother-like female figure who teaches him the value of love. These storylines basically characterise each rom-com. The foil plot introduces additional characters to add problems to the formulaic mixture: either the hero gets competition from stock characters Rubinfeld dubs – rather self-explanatorily – “the prick” or “the dweeb” or the heroine has to stand up to and out against “the bitch” or “the temptress” (ibid. 33). The last plot is rather out of script-writing fashion as it sees the love-bound couple faced with tremendous problems so that their only options are separating or eloping (ibid. 62)7. Rubinfeld claims that inherent in these four possible plots is the fact that in the Hollywood rom-com “the romantic elements [outweigh the] comedic elements” (ibid. 70). Rom-coms therefore enforce stock elements and key concepts which are essentials of such a movie: the iconography (urban setting, costumes, and props usually associated with weddings [Jeffers McDonald 11]), narrative patterns (“boy meets, loses, regains girl”8 [ibid. 12; cf. Glitre 12; Maier 15]) and ideology (the happy end only awaits the white, heterosexual and attractive couple [cf. Jeffers McDonald 13, 17]). For the following categorisation it is understandably important to recognise the structures that underlie these romantic comedies and which have shaped the general recognition by audiences worldwide. 3. The Romantic Zombie Comedy 3.1 My Heart (Still) Beats for you: the Human-Human Rom-Zom-Com Once the two components – zombies and romantic comedies – are combined, one can distinguish between three sub-categories of the rom-zomcom and they are characterised by their love couples: the first deals with human and human couples, the second sees a relationship blossoming between human and zombie and the final pairing is between zombie and zombie.

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Since social institutions – such as parents or communities – have undergone changes in terms of their values, these plots hardly ever feature in contemporary rom-coms. However, if the story is set in distant times, for example 1998’s Shakespeare in Love, this plot line is re-activated. Also known as “meet-lose-get formula”.

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The first sub-category seems to be the most logical and hardly surprising. Two humans fall in love in times of zombie plagues. It is not unheard of for crises to bring people (closer) together, from estranged siblings, over reluctant ex-spouses to whole nations9, but zombie plagues hardly ever were a reason for blissful togetherness before – mainly because at least one part of the couple got devoured before the credits rolled. With regard to the popular formula “meet-lose-regain”, the human-human couples often have met already but find themselves in a crisis – even without zombies. In Dance of the Dead (2008), the main protagonists Jimmy and Lindsay are a couple, but they quickly terminate their relationship. The high school sweethearts are presented without the famous “meet cute,” which is defined as the point in the narrative at which “the lovers encounter each other in a way which forecasts their eventual union” (Jeffers McDonald 12). When the audience first sees them, Jimmy takes a dead frog, which is to be dissected during biology class, and uses it as a hand puppet. Afterwards, whilst talking about tonight’s prom, Lindsay tells him that “It would be really nice, if [he] were romantic for once.” Jimmy’s reply, “I’m romantic”, is opposed by her “Is everything a laugh for you? […] I’m a woman, and like a corsage instead of a dead frog”. This dialogue characterises Jimmy as the underachieving loser who does not care about his social status not being satisfying enough to his girlfriend. On the other hand, it also makes Lindsay’s romantic notion rather clear. The corsage stands metonymically for her girly wish for a perfect prom, an event of which it is said that it is the “timeless apotheosis of teen love” (Leitch qtd. in Abbott 53). The prom signifies a happily ever after in each and every teenager rom-com10. Therefore, it becomes paramount to have the best prom possible. This escapist notion of inflating the prom to signify the ultimate happily ever after is in tune with traditional romances: as long as the epitome of romance happens and goes smoothly – in this case the prom – everything else will fall into place, too. This is also the reason why Lindsay and Jimmy eventually have their slow prom-dance – amidst a horde of zombies11. They can dance and thus the end is not nigh and romance will triumph. The frog on the other hand is of course linked to the fairy tale of The Frog Prince, the most fa9

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A case in point is any Roland Emmerich movie: it does not matter whether the crisis is a mutated lizard (Godzilla) or the prophesied end of the world (2012). Of course not everyone survives – but those who do form (usually) white, heterosexual and attractive couples. Zombie movies also deal with such “meta-apocalypses” (cf. Pagano qtd. in Stokes 38) – something from “outside” threatens society. Most famously in Pretty in Pink (1986), She’s All That or 10 Things I Hate About You (both 1999). During Jimmy and Lindsay’s prom dance, the zombies in Dance do not attack if music is played. This new addition to the zombie myth clearly shows that the concept of the zombie can be adapted to new rules – thereby proving the zombie to be quite an interesting creature for filmmakers and scholars alike.

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mous redemption plot. Jimmy is not ready yet to be the man Lindsay so desperately wants and needs – just as in the fairy tale the prince’s true qualities are hidden behind the frog disguise. That is, until the dead return to the world of the living. In human-human rom-zom-coms, the zombies are imperative to the story’s further unfolding, for the hero loses the heroine – usually by her dumping him – and it is only during the fight with and against the zombies that they finally reunite again – this time for good: “the couple […] will form a lasting relationship, and […] their story will end as soon as they do so” (Jeffers McDonald 86). As the first ‘meet cute’ has happened offstage, the audience is treated to another one – here the dance at the prom –, which has the heroine marvel at the decisiveness and assertiveness of the male, a feature he has shunned and/or ridiculed beforehand. It is interesting to note that the human-human rom-zom-com still enforces gender stereotypes: the male is the active part and the female is to be rescued. This pursuit plot denies the female an empowering turn as the “Final Girl”, which has become the standard or rather stock character in contemporary slasher movies (cf. Clover 132). However, in one scene, after Lindsay has escaped some zombies, she rescues three geeky boys from the sci-fi-club and tells the boys what to do in order to remain alive. She establishes her superiority and thus feminises the girlfriendless geeks even more – whilst wearing a bright pink, sparkling prom dress. But even as she is bossing the boys around, she desperately tries to call Jimmy on his mobile and wants him to rescue her. In a split second, she demonstrates power, only to reduce herself to the damsel in distress immediately afterwards. Catherine Belsey writes in her book on desire that in the traditional romance – and the redemption plot – the heroine teaches the cold-hearted hero her ways and thus feminises him as she remodels him to her likeness (cf. 30). This can also be said for Dance with the Dead: Lindsay is a strong character, an achiever, and she wants Jimmy to be just like her – so that she can relax into the role of the helpless female once she has taught Jimmy the manly ways. Eventually, Jimmy manages to regain Lindsay and turn her from exinto current girlfriend. Realising she is in danger, he awakes from his underachieving status and rescues and protects his beloved12. Thus, the new structure of the standard formula becomes “boy already has but loses girl, faces zombies, gets girl back”. The zombies present an important plot device, yet they are not the focus: they are the means but nothing else. However, in the films they are the source for much of the comedy. As the zombies are presented as slow, and dim-witted and behaving like the living 12

The same also happens in the film Zombies of Mass Destruction (2009), which is interesting as this movie depicts a gay couple who have to face zombies and settle their differences (one of the men does not want to come out to his mother).

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– pointing towards the general status of the Afflicted – the confrontation with and destruction of the undead plague raise the most laughs. They guarantee that the tone of the movie does not become too dark or scary. In the human-human rom-zom-com, the zombie and the comedy are wellnigh synonymous. The movie Zombieland (2009) actually treats its audiences to a proper meet-lose-regain story and is in line with the neo-traditional rom-com (cf. Jeffers McDonald 86). Main protagonist Columbus longs “to find a girl and fall in love, bring her home to meet the folks” and thus sets the stage for a ‘brokenhearted redemption plot’. One sees the dominant ideology of rom-coms at work that enforces heteronormative relationships because at the core of the movie is his wish to belong to a family unit. Enter Wichita, the white, attractive woman he instantly falls in love with. She is presented as standing in front of a sign which reads “Priced to feed the whole family”, both referencing the connection of flesh-eating zombies and consumerism13 as well as the concept of family, which is a constant motif in the movie. Shy Columbus, who can be considered as belonging to the group of the Afflicted, tries to pursue Wichita, but she always escapes him – literally. Only when the rather feisty and trigger-happy heroine finds herself with her sister on top of a freefall tower with zombies trying to climb up to them – evoking the fairy tale connotation of the princess in the tower14 – does Columbus overcome his shyness (read: his underachieving-ness), break his own rule of “Don’t be a Hero” and rescue the women. The movie ends with Columbus’ résumé that “Without other people, well, you might as well be a zombie”, swapping his status of Afflicted for that of a member of a family unit. The same character constellation, the pursuit plot (this time with added foil plot employing pricks and bitches) and the ‘meet cute’ (heroine marvelling at previously underachieving loser) have been used in the French movie Hellphone (2007), in which a devilish mobile seizes command over countless people via phoning them – establishing itself as the bokor of an army of zombies.

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See also George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (and Zack Snyder’s remake) which establishes the connection zombie – consumerism as the movie sees its survivors holing up in a shopping mall. Interestingly enough, the women in human-human rom-zom-coms usually manage to position and/or barricade themselves either in a tower or castle-like building (Shaun of the Dead’s Liz in a flat on a high level floor and Dance with the Dead’s Lindsay in a mansion), thus evoking even more the princess who has to be saved from evil.

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3.2 Going (for the) Zombie: the Human-Zombie Rom-Zom-Com Turning away from the interhuman relationship towards that between human and zombie, the movie to be discussed in greater detail is Fido (2006). Here, due to radiation from outer space, the dead come to life. But one cunning scientist has invented the Collar, turning the flesh-eating, shuffling zombies into moaning household slaves. In the film’s 1950s American suburb, everyone can become the master of a zombie. Helen Robinson wants such a zombie slave because hers is the only household without one, which makes her feel inferior, left out and poor. It becomes apparent very quickly that this can also be applied to her love life: her husband Bill is obsessed with funerals but does not care about his own family15. All she has got and does is to care about appearances and what the neighbours might think. This changes when she buys a zombie to help around the house. Her friendless, rather lonely son Timmy instantly takes to him and christens him Fido. Here, the first relationship is established. Fido becomes a companion to Timmy, who does not fit in because he questions other people’s behaviour towards the undead. Paffenroth writes that “the fact that a loved one who dies will immediately rise up and try to kill you means that […] saying goodbye […] must be discarded, or […] replaced with a new expedient of shooting the loved one between the eyes” (12)16. Timmy cannot accept that for he realises a kindness in Fido and his humanity even despite the Collar. Yet he is aware of the flesh-eating nature of his friend and asks his mother about it. Helen answers that zombies “kill because it’s in their nature. It’s not their fault” (Fido). They decide not to have a funeral like Bill, but to “go zombie”. The zombie, thus, stands for not wanting to be limited to the corset of values of that time or the fake morality and facadeobsessed society. The Collar is society’s way of sedating those unruly people who will not behave compliantly and controlling them. Helen has also taken to Fido, but cannot admit to herself that it is an attraction rather than a friendship. Additional to Timmy’s christening, she puts Fido in Bill’s clothes and thus provides him with more individualised attire than the customary jumpsuit the zombies get delivered in. This is also

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Bill Robinson can be read as closet homosexual as he is clearly not happy to be a father and (conventional) family man – he neither cares for his son nor realises his wife’s rather advanced pregnancy – but opts to spend Sunday afternoons, which are traditionally associated with family outings, golfing with a ‘friend’. Thus his wish for a funeral which prevents him from being resurrected and therefore from a return to a conformist life clearly dreaded by him is understandable. He wants a life free from heteronormative restrictions – paradoxically in a ‘closet’ in the (burial) ground. In Fido, everybody just accepts that your own grandfather poses a risk and thus the retirement home is located in a remodelled high security prison.

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when the ‘meet cute’ happens17: seeing Fido for the first time not in his slave-clothing but in those of his ‘master’, Helen realises that the undead man is more ‘human’ than her own husband. Tellingly, this scene is shot in an iconographic way, common to rom-coms – with both characters standing in front of a mirror, which now displays the hidden nature of the subject. Just like Jimmy, the frog prince, Fido disposes of his ugly, here impersonalised clothing and becomes ‘human’ – though dead. To put it in the words of Sigmund Freud: the “uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression” (100). Helen recognises the familiar in the un-familiar body – her attraction to Fido which is so much more intense than her feelings for Bill – and during this process she also recognises herself as being Afflicted and thus wants to go zombie, shed all the restrictions and ‘morals’ of the community and be freed. From now on, she defies her husband when he tries to interpellate her into the inferior position of wife – and thus to pretend to be a happy couple. When Bill dies, Helen and Fido, together with other humans living in their suburb who prefer zombified company, establish a new, different space in their backyard, one in which the zombie is not a slave but a companion and where everyone can “go zombie” – if only for a limited time. Another notion should be addressed here: Belsey writes that “[t]rue love, which is resolutely heterosexual, issues, of course, marriage” (22). Helen is anything but happy, yet she is married. Fido therefore re-evaluates and empties marriage of its position as signified of true love. All the couples in the movie that are shown to be truly happy consist of a human and a zombie, but they are not married. Also, as true love means and produces marriage, it in turn means and produces happy children (cf. ibid. 24). It has been shown that Timmy has no real father to speak of – though physically present, if only at times, he is always thinking about how to avoid his family and life in general. The rom-zom-com shows that the triad true love-marriage-happy children can only be correct if one erases marriage and substitutes it by a zombie: true love can only be found with a zombie, as there are no ulterior motives. The Vodoun zombie’s “nature” of serving can be read in terms of being there only to provide bliss and happiness for his/her mistress/master, which will result in a relationship. In Boy Eats Girl (2005), the love struck hero Nathan wants to confess his love to his friend Jessica. However, due to various misunderstandings, he ends up dead and his mother resurrects him with the help of a voodoo spell. As a zombie, he is able to communicate, perceive and feel his love 17

There is also a ‘meet cute’ between Timmy and Cindy, his next-door neighbour – when she displays expertise in killing zombies during P.E. class at school.

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for Jessica. Experiencing an ever-growing hunger for flesh, he finally attacks the school bully. This is one of only two times when he gives into his urges18. The attacked bully is transformed and the plague spreads. Interestingly enough, all consecutive zombies do not share Nathan’s abilities. Nearly all the other characters are unknown to the audience or are former classmates of Nathan’s who are characterised via their two-timing deceit of their girlfriends and/or their lack of empathy for all others. Thus, it can be said that only true love allows a zombie to not cross over completely into the state of the Romero zombie, as Nathan shares more character traits with the Vodoun zombie, although he has no bokor. But just as in Fido, only with more conservative gender roles, he also loses the girl and has to rescue her (from the impending plague) and finally regains her – establishing a connection to the human-human variety of the genre as he is also re-transformed into a human being by the end. 3.3 Shuffling Happily Ever After: the Zombie-Zombie Rom-Zom-Com The last category is that of the relationship between zombies. So far, only one film has truly played this out and that is Wasting Away (2007)19. It focuses on four friends who get transformed into the living dead after they have eaten radioactive ice cream. The movie is shot in colour when it depicts the zombified friends interacting, and in black and white from the outsiders’ perspective. The crucial difference is that during the black and white scenes they only moan and shuffle, whilst the coloured scenes have the friends wondering why everybody is moving and talking so fast. Strikingly, the fact that the four have been turned into zombies does not affect the romantic plot very much. Their zombification is only the outward sign of their status of being Afflicted. The romantic notion is also played out for laughs, usually by transgressing the border into grossing-out territory. The zombies shuffle, moan, lose body parts, they kill other people – yet mostly without devouring them – and there is that one kiss. The coloured version shows two of the four, Tim and Cindy, kissing passionately. The black and white version shows a gross licking and biting sequence which has the non-zombified audience watching Tim and Cindy – solely comprised of Rubinfeld’s “pricks” – retching and the cinema audi18 19

The other time is when he fights this bully. Afterwards, he also loses his ability to speak and feel but is saved by a re-transforming snakebite which reverses the zombification. There is, however, a short story called “I’m a Zombie Filled With Love” by Isaac Marion. It also addresses the issue of zombie – zombie relationships. He recently even published a human-zombie romance called Warm Bodies, which – rather untypically – has the zombified man becoming human again through his love to the living woman.

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ence is supposed to be disgusted and amused equally20. This is also manifest in the viewing experience that is doubled: as part of the film’s audience one watches both the couple and the non-zombified humans watching Tim and Cindy. Through the reaction of the in-film audience, the real audience is guided and interpellated into a similar position as to find the kiss disgusting and/or comical. But one should look at the metaphor of the body here. Julia Kristeva writes about the abject that it “has only one quality of the object – that of being opposed to the I” (1, emphasis in original). This means that the zombie body is disgusting to us “because it is both us and not us” (Stokes 51). We recognise the body as being human but also as being something other, something dead, and we are scared that we might become such an abject body whose mind is reduced to the urge to devour flesh (like a Romero zombie) and which is decaying and thus disgusting. In romances, true love intends to unify mind and body. But the “commonest impediment to happiness in romance is uncertainty about whether the protagonists are really in love or simply subject to an overwhelming erotic imperative, whether, in other words, the whole person is involved” (Belsey 29). The kiss in the black and white scene is now seen as abject because it is being performed by abject bodies: romance and the enactment of love as disgusting. The non-zombified audience is grossed out because they do not perceive the kiss as sexy or romantic. To Tim and Cindy this kiss is romantic and passionate, as the coloured version reveals. Moreover, as they cannot have sex – Tim’s penis has fallen off – their love is freed from sexual desire or in Belsey’s words from the “erotic imperative”. Theirs is a love that is rooted solely in the person, as well in life as in their second zombified life. Additionally, they do not perceive themselves as abject: Tim’s scalp and penis fall off and Cindy at least puts his scalp back on affectionately. They claim the abject and free it from its negative connotations. A connection between the seemingly abject and true love is thus made, which only from the outside looks disgusting but to the involved is the most beautiful thing. A brief scene in Dance with the Dead also depicts a zombie-zombie relationship. When one of the cheerleaders gets bitten and thus infected she does not want to be alone. She asks another boy, who is in love with her, to keep her company in the toilets. When they begin kissing, she transforms and starts to devour him. What starts out as another doomed relationship progresses rather differently. After a short interlude we see that the boy has also been transformed and they continue kissing, biting and devouring each other, similar to the black and white kiss of Tim and Cin20

For the connection between horror and humour, one can refer to Noël Carroll’s essay by the same title.

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dy. Here, however, another factor comes into play: puberty and sexual awakening. Both teens have been previously shown to be rather inexperienced when it comes to relationships, love and sex. The transformation from human to Other or in this case zombie frees them from the shackles of society, just as Helen has realised her status as Afflicted in Fido. They are now able to give in to their desire and take in the other person wholly – literally. This time, the consumption of the two teenagers is not freed from the erotic imperative as the biting is quite graphic and alludes to both intimate kissing and oral sex. Yet, as opposed to the other depiction of sex in the movie – Lindsay is almost raped by a prick-character – their sexual experience is connoted positively instead of associated with dirtiness as the devouring is mutual. The zombie-zombie relationship shares many trademarks with the human-zombie relationship as both unions are looked upon suspiciously by society, and thus they have to establish their own realm where they can live happily ever after. As with Fido, the “surviving” characters in Wasting Away establish a zombie community outside the human realm where they can be themselves according to their own rules without the interference of humans, and in the very last shot one sees Tim and Cindy shuffling about this wasteland hand in hand. It becomes apparent that the zombie in zombie-zombie rom-zom-coms is not a flesh-eating menace – only one actually eats brains and that by accident – but rather a misunderstood creature and could not be any further from the Romero zombie. One could argue that the Zombie as Companion trait has been developed even further in Wasting Away: here the zombies are their own companions, not caring for humanity anymore but living their own life resembling that of humans and also doing away with the pointless flesh-eating. The zombies are the better people as opposed to the foil plot humans who are all “pricks”. The zombie is a better companion (to other zombies) than any human could ever be. 4. Zombies Lead the Way Concluding, one can say that there is a perfect man or woman out there, but there is a good chance that he or she is dead or rather un-dead. Concerning relationships involving a zombie, there is an affection, an interpersonal relationship that could be envied by all the human-human couples. As the rom-com is structured in such a way that audiences are assured of the perfect ‘happily ever after’, we know that in the rom-zom-com they will be happy, too. Yet, in the human-human variety there is always an initial crisis that the zombies have to ‘solve’ – by being a distraction from the relationship problems – even though the problem is never initiated by

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the zombies. They are the putty that mends and unifies couples. These romzom-coms are generally fashioned with a redemption plot in which the underachieving hero has to be turned into a compassionate and caring lover. Whereas in rom-coms this task is fulfilled by the heroine, here the zombies are the means which make him realise his wrong ways and man up. In human-zombie rom-zom-coms, the zombie is the instrument that solves the redemption plot and the human heroine or hero becomes happy again and is no longer cold-hearted, bitter and lonely. Of course, the zombie itself is also affected by this process and sheds the Romero zombie characteristics in favour of being a companion. Whereas lately rom-coms have retorted to more traditional, reactionary values (cf. Jeffers McDonald 86), they have not taken into consideration new social developments such as short-term relationships, homosexual pairings or cohabitations, despite all their superficially cunning and dazzling postmodern traits. The rom-zom-com uses the zombie as the Other to show that there are other forms of companionship and relationship. The undead functions as a devise that is mouldable in such a way that audiences realise that other forms of ‘couples’ are possible and through the genre of horror/fantasy are introduced to ideas which otherwise would be rather obvious and thus easier to dismiss. It is possible to see the rom-zomcom as a first step in a new direction for the otherwise retrograde romantic comedy, which merely enforces heteronormative ideology and hegemony, and which points towards new possibilities and concepts. So, next time you see some zombies or Infected run, so should you. But keep looking for their slow-moving cousins, because they are delivering love letters – or they might even be the one for you! Works Cited Abbott, Stacey. “Prom-Coms: Reliving the Dreams and Nightmares of the High-School Romance.” Falling in Love Again: Romantic Comedy in Contemporary Cinema. Ed. Stacey Abott and Deborah Jermyn. London: Taurisk, 2009. 52-64. Belsey, Catherine. Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Bishop, Kyle. “Raising the Dead.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 33.4 (2006): 196-205. Brooks, Max. The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead. London: Duckworth, 2004. Carroll, Noël. “Horror and Humor.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57.2 (1999): 145-60.

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Clover, Carol J. Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Davis, Wade. The Serpent and the Rainbow. New York: Werner, 1985. Freud, Sigmund. “Extract from The Uncanny.” 1919. Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers. Ed. Clive Bloom. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. 100. Glitre, Katharina. Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union 1934-65. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2006. Jeffers McDonald, Tamar. Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre. London: Wallflower, 2007. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Maier, Magdalena. Zur Dramaturgie von populären Romantic Comedies: Über den Aufbau des Filmgenres “Romantic Comedy” bis zum Vergleich internationaler Produktionen in deren filmischer Umsetzung. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009. Moreman, Christopher. “Dharma of the Living Dead: A Meditation on the Meaning of the Hollywood Zombie.” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 39.2 (2010): 263-81. Mortimer, Claire. Romantic Comedy. New York: Routledge, 2010. Paffenroth, Kim. Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Vision of Hell on Earth. Waco: Baylor UP, 2006. Rubinfeld, Mark D. Bound to Bond: Gender, Genre, and the Hollywood Romantic Comedy. Westport: Praeger, 2001. Schmidt, Jakob. “Vom Entsetzen einen Körper zu haben. Das bedrohte Ich in George A. Romeros Zombiefilmen”. On Rules and Monsters: Essays zu Horror, Film und Gesellschaft. Ed. Benjamin Moldenhauer et al. Hamburg: Argument, 2008. 84-99. Stokes, Jasie. “Ghouls, Hell and Transcendence: the Zombie in Popular Culture from Night of the Living Dead to Shaun of the Dead.” MA thesis. Ebookbrowse.com. 12 Nov 2010. Web. 12 Dec 2010. Films Boy Eats Girl. Dir. Stephen Bradley. Scr. Derek Landy. Perf. Samantha Mumba, David Leon, Laurence Murphy. Element Film, 2005. Film. Dance of the Dead. Dir. Gregg Bishop. Scr. Joe Ballarini. Perf. Jared Kusnitz, Greyson Chadwick, Chandler Darby. Splendid Film, 2008. DVD. Fido. Dir. Andrew Currie. Scr. Robert Chomiak, Andrew Currie and Dennis Heaton. Perf. Carrie-Anne Moss, Billy Connolly, Dylan Baker. Lionsgate, 2006. Film.

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Hellphone. Dir. James Huth. Scr. Sonja Shillito, Jean-Baptiste Andrea and James Huth. Perf. Jean-Baptiste Maunier, Jennifer Decker, Benjamin Jungers. Sunfilm, 2008. DVD. Shaun of the Dead. Dir. Edgar Wright. Scr. Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright. Perf. Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Kate Ashfield. Universal, 2004. Film. Wasting Away. Dir. Matthew Kohnen. Scr. Matthew Kohnen and Sean Kohnen. Perf. Matt Davis, Colby French, Julianna Robinson. MIG Film, 2009. DVD. Zombies of Mass Destruction. Dir. Kevin Hamedani. Scr. Kevin Hamedani and Ramon Isao. Perf. Janette Armand, Doug Fahl, Cooper Hopkins. I-ON New Media, 2010. DVD. Zombieland. Dir. Ruben Fleischer, Scr. Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, Perf. Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone. Columbia Pictures, 2009. Film.

God Hates Fangs? Morality, Ideology, and the Domesticated Vampire in American Culture SIMONE KNEWITZ The vampires populating contemporary novels, films, and TV series are strange creatures. With their 19th century ancestors, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), they have only very little in common. Vampires, in their most recent incarnations, are the opposite of vicious, lusting creatures. They are tormented by their own natures as predators; they hardly suck any blood; and what they want, more than anything else, is to be part of human society. In Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach suggests that each age gets the vampires it deserves. Representations of vampires, according to this argument, are tropes employed to negotiate social and political problems. As vampires are now once again ubiquitous in popular culture, they provoke the question: which social concerns are currently being negotiated? In my following reading of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga as well as the HBO series True Blood, created by Alan Ball, I want to explore some of the issues at stake. Both the four books of the Twilight series (as well as the movie versions of the first three novels) and the TV show True Blood, which ran its fourth season in 2011,1 have been tremendously successful with American as well as with international audiences. As the editors of the essay collection Bitten by Twilight note, as of November 2009, more than 85 million copies of the books of the Twilight series had been sold worldwide and translated into 37 languages. The release of the first movie Twilight grossed 350 million dollars at the box office (Click, Aubrey, and Behm-Morawitz 3f.). According to the New York Times, True Blood’s average audience in its first two seasons was around 12 million viewers, making it the second most watched series after The Sopranos (Toff, n.pag.). The series is also widely distributed internationally. Despite this apparent globality of the vampire hype, however, I

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Season 5 is currently scheduled to be aired in the summer of 2012.

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am especially interested in how the trope of the vampire is currently used within US-American culture to negotiate issues of social power and ideology. The fantastic needs to be conceptualized not as an escape from culture, but as a mode to negotiate social issues. As Rosemary Jackson observes, the fantastic “traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made ‘absent’” (4). How, then, does the trope of the vampire fit into the contemporary sociopolitical American landscape? The thesis I want to advocate here is that Twilight and True Blood position themselves at opposite ends of the current ideological conflicts about alternate lifestyles, religion, and conceptions of morality. Both series under investigation here deal precisely with questions of morality, ideology, and Otherness, employing the trope of what I call the “domesticated vampire.” While Meyer thoroughly reappropriates the figure of the vampire for conservative ends, True Blood is more ambivalent and actually calls into question whether the Other can ever be fully domesticated. 1. The Domestication of the Vampire, or: Negotiations of Alterity The trope of the vampire, having circulated in Western cultures during the last two centuries, has proved extremely malleable. At the same time, cultural representations have consistently turned to the figure of the vampire to negotiate Otherness. A central feature of vampire iconography since the late 18th century has been the way vampires link racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. Being neither alive nor dead, vampires are transgressive; they cross boundaries; they pollute. Shannon Winnubst explains: The vampire […] sucks blood, transferring an illegitimate and disavowed substance, transforming his ‘victims’ from the living to the undead, giving birth without sex, trafficking in the strange and unruly logics of fluids, mixing and spilling and infecting blood. […] The vampire pollutes all systems of kinship, pollutes all systems of blood, pollutes all systems of race and sex and desire that must be straight. (7f.)

As Winnubst argues, the vampire, as a representation of the abject Other, is constitutive of the white male subject and simultaneously represents the threat of its subversion. In that respect, Bram Stoker’s Dracula has become the paradigmatic example. Auerbach calls Stoker’s novel “a compendium of fin-de-siècle phobias” (7). She suggests that Dracula departs from an earlier 19th century tradition of intimate friendship between vampires and humans (such as the homoerotic relationship between Clara and Carmilla in Le Fanu’s novel), instead erecting barriers against the unknown, asserting the dominance of an ethnocentric, homophobic patriarchy which comes under threat at the beginning of the 20th century (67).

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Vampire representations within popular culture, however, began to change in the 1970s, as social perceptions of Otherness changed. As women, African Americans, and queers started to become recognized subjectivities, the vampire iconography adapted. Vampires have become sympathetic characters who are attractive to the reader. As Ingrid Thaler notes, the revival of the vampire in Anglophone popular culture and subcultures since the 1970s was “primarily characterized by a shift in perspective from an external representation of the vampire as a threat to and intrusion into the Western fictional world to the vampire and his or her perspective on the human world” (53). Contemporary vampire representations explicitly reject some of the myths which accompany the trope traditionally: they no longer burst into flames or turn into dust if exposed to sunlight; garlic and crucifixes cannot scare them. If, traditionally, the vampire does not possess a mirror reflection – which can be read as the lack of a soul –, contemporary vampires appear in mirrors and on photographs, suggesting that they are now recognized as subjects.2 The vampire has been claimed as a figure of subversion by the social movements starting in the 1970s. Jewelle Gomez’s novel The Gilda Stories (1991) is one example of an African American feminist appropriation of the vampire trope. Gomez’s main protagonist is not a European aristocrat, but a black lesbian woman. Having escaped slavery, Gilda lives in a vampire family by choice, made up of voluntary kinship relations which cross racial boundaries and encompass multiple sexual desires. Gilda and her family are bloodsuckers; but they do not kill their victims, instead exchanging blood for pleasant dreams. Gomez employs the vampire as a figure which destabilizes hierarchies and which questions essences, thereby consciously working on undoing the boundaries erected by Stoker’s Dracula and similar texts.3 Gomez’s novel can be tied to the recent poststructuralist and postmodern attempts to claim the vampire as a figure of destabilization. Veronica Hollinger has suggested that the vampire has become “a monster-of-choice” in postmodernity because it engages in the deconstruction of boundaries (201). Therefore, vampires have also entered cultural theory. Feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway, in her explorations of contemporary technoscience, uses the vampire in exactly this sense to call into question 2

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Jules Zanger describes the shift in vampire representations as a shift from a metaphorical to a metonymic vampire: “The ‘new’ vampire possesses very little of that metaphysical, antiChristian dimension, and his or her evil acts are expressions of individual personality and condition, not of any cosmic conflict between God and Satan. Consequently, the vampire’s absolutely evil nature as objectified in Dracula becomes increasingly compromised, permitting the existence of ‘good’ vampires as well as bad ones” (18f.). For more extensive readings of the subversiveness of vampires in The Gilda Stories, see Thaler, Winnubst, and Jones.

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naturalized ideas about race and gender and their links to the historical national consciousness in the United States. Haraway writes: For better and for worse, vampires are vectors of category transformation in a racialized, historical, national unconscious. A figure that both promises and threatens racial and sexual mixing, the vampire feeds off the normalized human, and the monster finds such contaminated food to be nutritious. The vampire also insists on the nightmare of racial violence behind the fantasy of purity in the rituals of kinship. (214)

For Haraway, the vampire becomes a positive signifier questioning the underlying assumptions of essences in Western culture, the racism, sexism, and homophobia at the heart of patriarchy: Because the vampire’s antecedent is another vampire, and because passing the Dark Gift illustrates the power of blood, the vampire refigures the categories of identity, family, and race. It works because it confronts our pervasive societal and cultural fetish of blood – the purity of blood (read: race) and therefore fears of miscegenation. (Bartsch, DiPalma and Sells 147)

Haraway wants to identify with the vampire, not with its victims, in order to rethink human relationships “as a set of open-ended affections, affinities, and possibilities, rather than a predetermined, closed set of (often incompatible) organic bonds” (Winnubst 14). I am drawing attention to Haraway in this context because she most forcefully points at the fact that vampires are linked to national conceptions of identity, family, and race, and that invocations of family, sexuality and race never happen innocuously in vampire narratives. As I will outline in the following sections of this essay, the way Meyer’s Twilight saga and True Blood position themselves within their social context is intensely bound up with the trajectory of vampire iconography I have briefly sketched here. If we now look at the Twilight series, we can see that Meyer also works in the mode of the sympathetic vampire and even, in a way, radicalizes it. In contrast to Jewelle Gomez’s or Donna Haraway’s texts, however, the way the novels engage issues of race, sexuality, and gender is, in effect, reactionary. 2. Guardian Angels with Fangs: Stephenie Meyer’s Domesticated Vampires Meyer’s vampire bestsellers, which comprise a series of four novels entitled Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, hardly need any introduction. When the first book in the series was published in 2005, it inaugurated the latest vampire hype and basically became synonymous with it for a large part of the audience. Targeted specifically at teenage girls, the novels have drawn praise, but even more criticism, particularly due the texts’ very conservative take on gender roles and relationships. While there are also a few

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critics who offer sympathetic readings of the novels, exploring, for instance, the complicated dynamics of (female) readers’ reception,4 overall there is little doubt about their conservatism. In this section, I want to explore the ways in which Meyer takes the trope of the vampire, which, as I have just outlined, in recent decades has figured as a trope which destabilizes, and turns it into a figure of closure and stability. Thereby, the novels position themselves at the conservative end of the ideological disputes in contemporary American society. The novels focus on the romance between seventeen-year-old Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, a vampire who has been seventeen for quite some time and lives in a vampire family with adopted parents and siblings. The texts narrate Bella’s voyage toward immortality and conjugal bliss with Edward, an old-fashioned guy who refuses to have sex with her before their wedding. The wedding finally does take place at the beginning of book four (the details of their wedding night however being blanked out in the gap between two paragraphs). Subsequently, Bella gives birth to their daughter Renesmée, a child half human, half vampire conceived during their wedding night, and is turned into a vampire by Edward upon her own request. The series ends after a dangerous attack on the Cullen family by the feudal vampire rulers from Italy, the Volturi, has been averted, with the prospect of Bella and Edward spending their immortality together and existing happily ever after. One main criticism that the Twilight series has drawn to itself is its advocacy of sexual abstinence and the portrayal of sex as dangerous (cf., e.g., Ames 40f.). It is this kind of attempt to regulate female sexuality which puts the series in proximity to 18th century sentimental novels. In the first volume Twilight, the main protagonist and first-person narrator Bella frequently immerses herself in Jane Austen novels, which are directly linked to her budding romance with Edward Cullen. Bella herself, in fact, often appears like the heroine of a sentimental novel. She frequently faints or has accidents, during which Edward dutifully appears as her “guardian angel with fangs” (Tyree 32). It is telling that Twilight does not refer to the tradi-

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Toscano goes as far as identifying a “subtle feminist subtext” in the novels (34). Verena Maria Siebert has argued in her GFF conference talk “From Buffy to Twilight – A Feminist Backlash in Youth Vampire Fiction?” that, while Bella appears as a “pre-feminist damsel in distress” and does not lend herself as figure of identification for female readers, the text positions itself toward gender roles in a more complicated fashion as it frequently turns Edward’s body into a passive object of the female gaze. According to Siebert, one may see an instance of female empowerment in the Twilight novels and films, as the texts appropriate a voyeuristic gaze which is conventionally male. I fail to be fully convinced by this argument, primarily because, as I suggest further down, Edward’s body is heavily aestheticized and its eroticism therefore limited.

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tion of other vampire texts, but rather alludes to the sentimental texts of Jane Austen. Twilight’s borrowings from the romance genre are not merely noteworthy in the context of the texts’ relationship to issues of gender and sexuality, but are part of a larger, overall reactionary appropriation of cultural tropes. Meyer takes the trope of the vampire and thoroughly reconfigures it. If, in the era of Dracula, the vampire represented the devil, the antichrist, it takes on the opposite meaning in Twilight. Here, the vampire assumes a godlike position. Consider, for example, the way Bella describes Edward: Edward in the sunlight was shocking. I couldn’t get used to it, though I’d been staring at him all afternoon. His skin, white despite the faint flush from yesterday’s hunting trip, literally sparkled, like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface. He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare. His glistening, pale lavender lids were shut, though of course he didn’t sleep. A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal. (Twilight 228)

Reminiscent of a Greek statue of a male god, Edward’s body represents an eroticism which has been fully aestheticized and idealized. Bella repeatedly refers to Edward’s face and smile as that of an angel (Twilight 152; 230; 298) and the faces of the Cullen family appear to her as “painted by an old master” (Twilight 17). The vampires are stunningly beautiful and have achieved a state of eternal perfection. Bella is drawn to their pure beauty, and longs to become one of them. This desire for immortality, which the text conveys in the figure of Bella, is deeply rooted in Christian rhetoric. Significantly, Twilight starts out with an epigraph taken from the Bible. Meyer quotes Genesis 2:17: But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

The quote of course alludes to man’s fall from grace, brought on by Eve’s seduction and her eating from the tree of knowledge. Twilight, then, attempts to undo the fall metaphorically, as Bella, the text’s new Eve, sacrifices her life in order to become immortal. The novels thus project the eternal life of the Cullen vampires as a state of Edenic perfection in which all human deficiencies, fears, and needs have been obliterated. The text, however, also makes clear that vampires are not good per se, but only those vampires who are able to control their own desires. The Cullens, who have taken to a diet of animal blood in order to spare human lives, are ethical vampires refusing to be monsters. This sets them in stark contrast to the feudal rulers in the vampire world, the Volturi in old Europe, who think of humans as food. The cruelty of the latter is illustrated

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in New Moon: as Edward and Bella visit the Volturi in Italy, they observe a tourist group being led into the chambers as a meal for the rulers (483). The Cullens, on the other hand, represent an advanced form of civilization. Carlisle Cullen, the head of the family, specifically came to the United States in order “to exist without being a demon” (Twilight 295). Carlisle’s resolution is explicitly linked to his decision to leave Europe and try the “New World,” which he takes after staying for a while with the Volturi. Carlisle not only achieves the ability to resist human blood in “two centuries of torturous effort to perfect his self-control,” but also finds “his calling” in the practice of medicine (Twilight 297). A “brilliant surgeon,” in Forks he quickly becomes an “asset to the community” (Twilight 31). The son of a clergyman in 17th century London, Carlisle upholds religious values and a belief in God, even granting the possibility of an afterlife for vampires (New Moon 37). His ethical stance and self-control are motivated by the idea of a heavenly judgment day. Carlisle creates a family of like-minded vampires, only taking human lives of those already doomed to die due to an accident or illness. The troubling aspect of all this goodness, however, is the way his ethics are directly related to a white, heteronormative family ideal. In contrast to the less “civilized” members of their species, who are solitary creatures and usually live as nomads, the Cullens are a loving family among humans, with Carlisle and Esme pretending to be adoptive parents to Rosalie, Emmett, Alice, Jasper and Edward, the latter themselves involved in romantic relationships with each other. Thereby, they emulate a prototypical family ideal. One could argue that the Cullens are a family by choice reminiscent of Gilda’s family in Gomez’s Gilda Stories. But unlike in Gomez’s novel, which suggests loving relationships between members of different races and sexualities, the Twilight vampires are all white and live in monogamous, heterosexual relationships. Moreover, the Cullens are not only ‘good’, but also economically powerful, driving expensive sports cars and having more cash at their disposal than they could possibly ever spend. While Bella emphasizes that she is not interested in Edward’s money and expensive gifts, the Cullen’s wealth nevertheless appears as desirous. Bella frequently compares their looks to those of movie stars and notes their designer clothes (Twilight 27). Money is never an issue for the Cullens: “It was just something that accumulated when you had unlimited time on your hands and a sister who had an uncanny ability to predict trends in the stock market” (New Moon 13). This quote not merely underlines the Cullens’ economic privilege, but also points to their rather contradictory moral behavior; while Meyer emphasizes the vampires’ morality in the context of their relationships to humans and within the family, the same vampires have no reservations about taking immoral advantage

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in the financial markets. They also never hesitate about using forged passports or stealing cars in emergency situations. The text contrasts the beautiful, white Cullens with their antagonists, the Quileute werewolves. The members of this Native American tribe are consistently described in darker tones and appear less as individuals than the Cullens. Bella observes that “they all had the same long, round muscles under the same red-brown skin, the same cropped black hair, and […] their expressions altered at exactly the same moment” (New Moon 323). After his transformation into a werewolf, Jacob appears physically changed to Bella; his “beautiful hair” is cropped short and covers his head with “an inky gloss like black satin.” His features are thicker, “veins more prominent under the russet skin” and the “warmth in his dark eyes altered to a brooding resentment that was instantly disturbing” (New Moon 262). While each member of the vampire family is distinguished by a special gift, the werewolves are primarily characterized by pack mentality and determined by involuntary behaviors and outbursts of temper. Werewolf Sam, for instance, accidentally disfigured his girlfriend Emily in a rage. Edward calls werewolves “unstable,” insisting that Bella stay away from them so she will not be hurt (Eclipse 30). The werewolves appear animalistic, often barely dressed even in their human forms (Eclipse 215). Not even the selection of their life partners is their choice, but seems instinctual, as the werewolves “imprint” on their mates. They are savages in comparison to the Cullens, who cultivate their refined tastes by listening to classical music and reading philosophy. If werewolf Jacob works on cars and motorcycles, Edward composes musical pieces at the piano, perfects himself in foreign languages and has earned several graduate degrees. In this way, the Twilight series incorporates a racial subtext, which perpetuates stereotypes that associate whites with the life of the mind and Native Americans with physicality and primitivism. Thus, I agree with Natalie Wilson argues, that “the saga upholds dominant ideas about race that associate whiteness with civility, beauty, and intellect on the one hand, and indigenous people with animality and primitivism on the other” (55). Even among vampires, the Cullens emerge as the most civilized and the most intellectual. The only other family avoiding human blood lives in Alaska. While they are relatively similar to other vampires of Anglo-Saxon descent, e.g. their vampire friends from Ireland, the text describes those vampires racially marked as Other as more dangerous and savage. The vampire who threatens Bella’s life is racially characterized by his “olivetoned” complexion (Twilight 329). Vampires distinguish themselves due to their origins: the two Amazon vampires from South America are very exotic, wearing animal skins and feathers, and Bella remarks: “I’d never met any vampires less civilized” (Breaking Dawn 613). At the same time that the Cullens distinguish themselves from more savage vampires, they also set

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themselves apart from the Volturi, with their powdery skin and hierarchical ideas representing European aristocracy. Thus, the Twilight series carries a racial subtext, which reinscribes white privilege and links it to notions of American exceptionalism. After her transformation, Bella comes to epitomize the new type of the refined and restrained vampire. When Bella awakens as a newborn vampire, her family is anxious to keep her under control. As it turns out, however, Bella is perfectly capable of controlling her emotions and her thirst for blood from the very first moment. Her special gifts as a vampire are “exceptional self-control” and the ability to protect others with a mental shield (Breaking Dawn 466). When Bella and Edward accidentally cross the path of a human on their first hunting trip, Bella is able to resist the urge to go after the person (Breaking Dawn 420). Unlike other vampires, who come to the new life involuntarily, Bella does not need to practice self-discipline. Having always been too fragile to fit into the human world and having felt out of place, she thrives once she has become a vampire. Moreover, she not only has the gift of self-control, but also the capacity to overcome other struggles and antagonisms. The last volume of the series, Breaking Dawn, stylizes Bella as the central figure of reconciliation who brings together the antagonistic forces of vampires and werewolves, and who protects her family against the Volturi. The ending, in which the Volturi threaten the American family idyll, finally once more emphasizes the Cullen’s advanced civilization. Against the powerful rulers, who coerce other vampires into bondage and hold the entire vampire world at their mercy, they stand together with the other free vampires and ultimately prevail. The Volturi are the last enemy to the life of love and beauty the Cullens have created. As I have outlined in the preceding pages, the Twilight series possesses a subtle racial subtext, which establishes the vampires of the Cullen family as an exceptional, American version of restrained and self-controlled vampires setting themselves apart in their moral values from other species. The racial implications are particularly poignant in Breaking Dawn, in which Bella gives birth to her half-vampire daughter Renesmee. A hybrid being, like the figure of the vampire itself, the half-vampire could have been construed as a figure of transgression and subversion of essences. However, like in the case of the vampire, Meyer uses the hybrid child as a figure which cements, rather than subverts categories. Renesmee is able to reconcile oppositions; as Jacob imprints on her upon her birth, her existence makes his pack effectively part of the vampire family. Her special gift being the ability to communicate, she erases the antagonisms preventing vampires and werewolves from coexisting peacefully. Though Renesmee is a blend of both human and vampire attributes, the text explains her existence not as a position in the inbetween, but ra-

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ther presents her as the member of a new species, which is even backed up by scientific arguments. Humans, vampires, werewolves, and half-vampires, the text argues, are biologically distinct species which all possess a unique set of chromosomes. And as it turns out, Renesmee is not the only one of her kind: the Cullens are able to locate another half-vampire in South America, the son of a vampire who “considers himself a scientist” and attempts to create “a new super-race” (Breaking Dawn 737). Though the Cullens do not regard Renesmee as a scientific experiment but a happy accident, the text here clearly plays on racial fantasies with the suggestion of a creature which combines the most favorable traits of vampires and humans, possessing not merely a heartbeat and human eyes, but eternal life and beauty as well. It is in this focus on essences that we can link the Twilight series back to Haraway’s critique of fantasies of purity and rituals of kinship. As my discussion so far has shown, Meyer employs the figure of the vampire antithetically to Haraway. No longer a trope of resistance, it becomes the representative of a white heteronormative ideal. She appropriates the vampire for essentially conservative ends. In a complete reversal of the Draculean scheme, the series takes the figure which pollutes and destabilizes and turns it into a signifier of eternal perfection and closure. The threating Other, here represented by the werewolves and the Volturi, is subsumed or negated. In contrast, True Blood does not gloss over categories of difference and narrative rupture. In fact, the series deliberately draws attention to such fissures, to contagions and pollutions. In that respect, the TV series appears like Twilight’s ideological opposite. In the following section, I will show that True Blood engages more directly with the status of the Other in American society than the Twilight-series and may in fact be read as a reflection on the social movements for diversity in the United States. 3. “If we can’t kill people, what’s the point of being a vampire?” Vampire Mainstreaming in True Blood In True Blood, the alleged purity of vampires which Twilight stipulates is more contested.5 The vampires in True Blood share some of the features of domestication, but actually, the series negotiates the very question of whether the Other can ever be fully domesticated. The show is set in Bon 5

True Blood is loosely based on the “Southern Vampire” novel series by Charlaine Harris. The first season roughly corresponds to the first novel Dead Until Dark (2001). Though the TV series takes up most of the main plots, it notably diverges in its presentations from the original text, particularly in its implicit commentary on civil and gay rights. For this reason, I limit my discussion here to the television series, focusing on the first season in which these aspects are particularly developed.

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Temps, Louisiana, revolving around telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse, who falls in love with vampire Bill Compton. In the series, vampires emerge as a literal category of the Other, a minority group like African Americans and homosexuals: the vampires have recently revealed themselves to humans, with Japanese scientists having created synthetic blood as substitute nutrition for vampires. In a sense, then, in True Blood, the vampires of Twilight have evolved to the next level, as they “mainstream” to be accepted by society. When Sookie and Bill first meet, the vampires are struggling for equal rights. The Vampire Rights League advocates an amendment to the constitution to grant vampires judicial equality, which conservative Christians oppose. The series thereby stages social conflicts familiar in contemporary American society between liberals and conservatives, particularly a fundamental Christian right opposing equality for gays. The discourse on vampire politics in True Blood is in many ways a commentary on issues of race and sexuality in contemporary American culture. As J. M. Tyree observes, “True Blood positions itself as a loose but obvious allegory about the mainstream acceptance of so-called ‘alternative lifestyles’” (32). The show’s credit sequence establishes the setting in the Deep South, its often unsettling images alluding not to the plot of the series, but rather to the social history of racial and sexual violence. The series often uses language which directly references the Civil Rights and Gay Rights Movements. The credits prominently feature a sign reading “God hates fangs,” an obvious reference to the anti-gay hate slogans of Baptist pastor Fred Phelps, whose church can be seen as model for the anti-vampire church “Fellowship of the Sun” in the series.6 Vampire groupies in True Blood are referred to as “fangbangers” (presumably an allusion to the terms “fag hag” and “gang banger”) and the fact that vampires have made their existence public is called “coming out of the coffin.” Moreover, the show’s plot is interspersed with references to an official political discourse on vampire rights in the media. The primary function of these references is to establish continuity with media discourses in contemporary society, thereby creating reality effects. Thus, we frequently see snippets of talk shows – broadcasts familiar from US television, like HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher – which feature representatives of the “Vampire Rights League” and the Christian conservative “Fellowship of the Sun.” In one episode, we get a glimpse of a newspaper headline reading “Angelina adopts vampire baby,” poking fun at Angelina Jolie’s adoptions of children of diverse ethnicities. In another episode, a politician running for office exploits xenophobic and homophobic attitudes in his election campaign, 6

Fred Phelps’s Westboro Baptist Church maintains its official website under the domain name “Godhatesfags.com.”

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arguing against the vampire rights amendment: “Equal rights for vampires? I don’t think so. Many of them are foreign immigrants. Taking our jobs and our women. And their very blood turns our children into addicts, drug dealers and homosexuals. No vampire and none of these vampire-loving deviants deserve any rights at all” (episode 11, “To Love is to Bury”). In the first season’s final episode, a TV story reports that Vermont is the first state to legalize marriage between vampires and humans – Vermont had been the first state to allow gay marriages. While the series “wears it sexual liberalism on its sleeve” (Tyree 32), its main plot focuses on the love story between Sookie and Bill, presented as a courtly romance reminiscent of Bella and Edward in the Twilight series. Though most characters in True Blood are rather promiscuous – e.g. Sookie’s brother Jason, whose life revolves around sleeping with pretty women, or Lafayette Reynolds, the gay African American short order cook, road crew worker, drugdealer and occasional prostitute – Sookie is established as an innocent virgin and Bill as her gentleman caller. Bill is introduced to the series in the first episode immediately after Sookie has rejected some of Lafayette’s bawdy jokes. As Bill walks into the bar, the sounds of people’s chatter fade out, being replaced by soft piano music. Close-ups of Sookie’s and Bill’s faces are framed in a shot-countershot sequence. Bill’s face looks haggard and torn. This scene is highly melodramatic and appears exaggerated, allowing the possibility for the viewer to read it both seriously and ironically, as a satire of conventional narratives of romance. Many of the romantic scenes are symbolically overdetermined in this way. For instance, when Sookie decides to have sex with Bill for the first time in episode 6, she exchanges her black mourning dress from her grandmother’s funeral for a white gown almost resembling a wedding dress, before running barefooted to Bill’s house. Presumably, such ambiguities primarily serve to make the series attractive to diverse audiences as they enable it to appeal to viewers with different expectations. Politically, the series positions itself at the liberal end of the spectrum. The opening scene of the first episode (“Strange Love”) establishes a complex scenario in which it is already difficult to distinguish who is a vampire and who is human, mocking the idea that a vampire can be known by his mannerisms and clothing (Brace and Arp 93). The first scene also establishes the central premise of the series, the vampires’ coming out. The rural, Southern setting in a convenience store is contrasted with the TV talk show in the background, in which Nan Flanaghan, the representative of the Vampire Rights League, advocates vampires’ complete mainstreaming. The slick blonde professional, who throws back accusations about centuries of racial crimes at her interlocutor (“Doesn’t your race have a history of exploitation?”), gives way to the creepy sales assistant behind the store counter.

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Yet, as it turns out, while he seems to be enamored with the symbols of the undead, the real vampire comes disguised as a redneck. Thus, this very first scene is both funny and unsettling. In the logic of the series, Southern rednecks would be the kind of radicals to pursue and lynch vampires; the vampire in this scene thus has taken on the identity of one of his oppressors. Simultaneously, the shop assistant toys with the danger of vampirism. Thereby, the scene stages a mutual fascination between humans and vampires, also underlined by a young couple coming into the store and asking for vampire blood (“V”), which humans consume as a drug. Vampires in True Blood are represented both as an oppressed minority group and an exotic Other which fascinates mainstream society. “Fangbangers” are drawn to the illicit danger of sexual intercourse with one of the undead, and vampire bars like Eric Northman’s Fangtasia quickly become venues for tourists to meet “real vampires.” When Bill takes Sookie to Fangtasia in episode 4 (“Escape from Dragon House”), we see vampires in dance performances on stage and a middle-aged, middle-class couple buying Fangtasia merchandise. Sookie remarks to Bill: “This feels a little bit like what a vampire bar would look like if it were a ride at Disney World.” And few of the citizens of Bon Temps miss the opportunity to meet the “town vampire” when Bill gives a public talk on his involvement in the Civil War, being more attracted to the exotic spectacle than showing an interest in local history. It is one of the ironies of the show that the relations between humans and vampires are reciprocal rather than hierarchical, most forcefully suggested by the reverse consumption of vampire blood by humans. Within the series, vampires frequently become the victims of human violence and abuse, while on the other hand, some vampires resisting mainstreaming keep human sex slaves. Vampires thus not only feed on people; humans feed on vampires, craving the substance that increases their health, heightens their senses and strengthens their libido. If vampires need human blood to sustain their existence, their own blood metonymically represents life itself. Lafayette explains to Jason in episode 5: “Our blood sustains life. This blood is life. […] Billions of molecules of pure, undiluted, 24-karat life.” At a later point in the first season, Jason and his girlfriend Amy kidnap vampire Eddie, to store the fresh vampire blood they are addicted to. Upon his abduction, Amy and Jason keep Eddie tied up in the basement of Jason’s house. Jason takes pity on Eddie, but Amy insists that “he isn’t a person,” and does not experience pain like humans do. While she prides herself on being an organic vegan whose “carbon footprint is miniscule,” torturing Eddie is not against her ethics, since he is only an instrument to her fulfillment. The series juxtaposes Amy’s killing of Eddie with Bill’s appearance before a vampire trial, where he has to take responsibility for killing

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another vampire in defense of Sookie. The Magister, judge in the trial, presents an attitude towards humans which is remarkably similar to Amy’s justification of torture for vampires. Accusing Bill of maintaining the wrong allegiances, he states that “humans are quite primitive, incapable of feeling pain as we do.” In a notable contrast to Twilight, then, vampires in True Blood are not idealized as morally superior. Resisting the official policy of mainstreaming, many members of the species see themselves as racially superior, standing above humans in the food chain. Diane, Malcolm and Liam, three acquaintances of Bill’s, for instance, share a “nest” and keep humans as pets, food, and sex toys. They show up uninvited at Bill’s house in episode 3, bringing along the two humans Janella and Jerry. When they learn that Jerry is infected with hepatitis D – the only disease transmissible to vampires – they kill him and Janella as well. For the vampires, assimilation to social expectations is “dress[ing] up and play[ing] human,” as Diane suggests to Bill, a game they are not at all interested in. Responding to Bill’s plea to moderate their behavior, Malcolm puts it more bluntly: “Honey, if we can’t kill people, what’s the point of being a vampire?” Vampires are depicted as an Other which can never fully assimilate, living in a society with entirely different rules than human society. The vampire world is a hierarchical one with kings and queens, functioning according to archaic principles. Bill Compton himself is a particularly ambivalent character. He is aware that he needs to emulate human values to be part of mainstream society, but that in doing so, he is playing by rules which are not his own. He repeatedly tells Sookie that he is not human and that vampires do not possess human values. While officially living of synthetic blood, he occasionally feeds off people and he also does not refrain from killing. He murders the human couple who drained him in the parking lot and Sookie’s uncle after learning that he molested her when she was still a child. At the same time, Bill seems to sincerely uphold moral values and courts Sookie in an old-fashioned manner, impressing even Sookie’s grandmother. Flashbacks narrate how he was involuntarily turned on his way back from the Civil War, showing his pain at not being able to reunite with his wife and children. His repugnance about his own nature as a vampire also becomes apparent when, while kissing Sookie for the first time, he is ashamed of his fangs. And when he is sentenced to turn a human girl into a vampire, he would rather be locked in a silver coffin for five years than be forced to create a new undead being. Bill’s conflicting desire to both be true to his vampire nature and to be an integrated member of human society is also suggested in episode 5 (“Sparks Fly Out”). Here, Bill agrees to give a speech to the “Descendants of the Glorious Dead,” a club engaged in the commemoration of the Civil

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War, in which he, in his human life, served as a soldier. The scene evokes Southern history, particularly racial history. As a soldier in that war, Bill is both complicit with the Southern oppressors and slave owners and, as vampire, part of a minority that is socially oppressed. The scene establishes Bill as a voice of morality. Significantly, the event takes place in a church, and Bill speaks to his audience much like a minister to his congregation. His morality is first of all established by the fact that he is immune to the harm that Christian symbols supposedly exert on vampires. If vampires were traditionally associated with the antichrist and the devil, Bill here offers words of reconciliation and the utopian hope of community between vampires and humans. Bill’s moral position is also reinforced by the crosscuts between images of Bill and some of the members of his audience. When a little boy exclaims: “He’s so white!”, his mother replies: “We’re white, he’s dead.” She voices a racist position, attempting to maintain a racial boundary which the inclusion of a vampire into society threatens to erase. Thus, the racism against which the series takes a stand is highlighted. The scene conveys pathos, but also ironically undermines it. As Bill recounts his involvement in the Civil War, he stresses his honesty and integrity, claiming that he and his comrades entered the war with little awareness of the ideological conflicts at stake. As he outlines how he and his friends believed in a “higher calling,” we see a close-up of Sookie’s brother Jason, who has actually appeared at the event high on vampire blood. In this instance, the pathos of the scene tips and is ironically broken. The images that we get with Bill’s speech thus suggest ambivalence toward his words. Moreover, the fact that Bill has “glamored” a police officer at the beginning of this very episode, using his vampire powers to get his way, also underlines that that his morals may in fact be dubious. As I have shown, one may easily read the series as a comment on ideological conflicts in contemporary American society, as well as on the politics of diversity in American culture. Tyree has suggested that the series could be accused “of a certain type of gay-friendly conservatism” (34), as it uses a heterosexual love story as an allegory for gay rights. However, I would argue that this perhaps puts too much weight on the love story between Bill and Sookie, a romance that viewers do not necessarily need to take all that seriously. Furthermore, the series’ fascination with transgressions and ambivalences is much stronger, thus resisting a fixation of meaning, and in effect undermining the domestication of the Other. Pursuing a politics ultimately less one-dimensional than the Twilight series, True Blood, while suggesting a liberal position, allows alternative readings by viewers who choose to focus on the romance aspects or the pornographic scenes. One might also argue that in wittily presenting vampires as a literal Other and ironically commenting on discourses of difference in the United

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States, the series diverts attention away from the racism and homophobia that still exist in contemporary American society. The metadiscourse on the social movements of the last decades may appeal to viewers who position themselves as liberal, but simultaneously leaves room for conservatives to dismiss continuities with actually existing social problems. Therefore, the series might be transgressive without being actually very subversive of social discourses. However, True Blood does point to issues of race and sexual orientation in the characters of Tara Thornton and Lafayette Reynolds, the two main African American characters on the show. Tara frequently points to her own position as a black woman, accusing interlocutors of racism in various situations and playing with racist stereotypes. At one point she says: “People think because we got vampires out in the open, race isn’t the issue no more. You ever see the way folks look at mixed couples in this town? Race may not be the hot-button issue it once was, but it’s still a button you can push on people.” In Tara and Lafayette, the series possesses two characters that establish links between the fantastic figure of the vampiric Other and existing categories of difference. Tara is portrayed as a character intensely aware of the racism of mainstream society. In her first scene in the show, we encounter her at her job at Super-Save-a-Bunch, where she picks a fight with a customer and then quits her job, accusing her boss of racism and sexual harassment. It is particularly ironic that she sits in a discounter store, idly reading Naomi Klein’s critique of capitalism, The Shock Doctrine. In the first episodes, Tara is frequently shown reading books, thus cultivating an image of intellectualism by which she distinguishes herself from the rest of the characters on the show, none of whom appear interested in intellectual topics. When Jason is arrested as an alleged murderer, Tara corners the local policemen, presenting herself as Jason’s attorney with thorough legal knowledge. As detective Andy Bellefleur laughs at her sophistication, she acidly replies: “Was that funny because I’m a woman or because I’m a black woman?” Pointing to the policemen’s implicit misogyny and racism, she empowers herself as an African American woman. When asked whether she has taken night classes on the issue, Tara replies: “School is for white people looking for other white people to read to them. I figure I save my money and read to myself.” Lafayette, Tara’s cousin, is a trickster figure and one of the strongest characters in the show. He is flamboyant, yet also integrated into the local community. He prostitutes himself and deals drugs, but he is not a victim. Rather, his lifestyle gives him power over people. As a figure on the margin, he has prime insights into the perversions of the allegedly normal members of society, who come to him for sex and drugs. For instance, one of his customers is a Republican senator, who comes for sex and consumes vam-

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pire blood, but then publicly speaks against vampire rights on television. When Lafayette sees him speak on TV, he dresses in his best suit and appears at the senator’s meeting with citizens, where he threatens to make his hypocrisy public (episode 11). In episode 5, Lafayette beats up redneck customers at Merlotte’s for their homophobic remarks. Like Tara, Lafayette is outspoken about social injustices. 4. The Fantastic and Contemporary Political Rhetoric At the beginning of this essay I pointed to Donna Haraway’s argument that the figure of the vampire is linked to categories of race and sexuality in the historical national unconscious in the United States. For Haraway, the vampire, subverting essences, threatens fantasies of racial purity and the inherent violence of family bonds based on blood relationships. In conclusion, I want to propose that the issue of blood, with its racial and sexual implications, is also central to Meyer’s Twilight series and Alan Ball’s True Blood, which thereby participate in negotiations of alterity in US-American culture. In Twilight, blood figures primarily through its absence; the self-controlled vampires in Meyer’s texts consciously avoid the messiness of spilling human blood, adhering to an ideal of cleanliness and purity. Yet it is precisely this focus on morality which makes the politics of the Twilight series suspicious: using the vampire as a figure of stabilization and closure, the novels reinscribe essences and the very fantasies based on exclusionary categories that Haraway criticizes. As I have shown in my discussion, Meyer’s texts not only adhere to conservative sexual morals and family ideals, they also propose a white American exceptionalism by suggesting that the Cullen family represents an advanced form of civilization. Unlike Twilight, True Blood is insistently messy, portraying an American society which is haunted by sanguineous fantasies. The characters spill blood with relish, and even Sookie and Bill’s romantic love story is interspersed with transgressive imagery of blood exchange: Sookie drinks Bill’s blood to heal after having been beaten up, and Bill bites Sookie during sex. With humans craving for vampire blood and vice versa, the series decidedly focuses on the unclean and the impure, narrating stories of racial miscegenation. The show thereby enacts the social conflicts Twilight suppresses, remembering particular moments in US cultural history and advocating a liberal political position of cultural diversity. Calling into question society’s ability to fully domesticate the Other, I would argue that the series counters the charge of a “gay-friendly conservatism” some critics have voiced. The fantastic, as this essay has underlined, is not escapist, but, to the contrary, deeply entrenched in social and political issues. While the domesti-

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cation of the vampire in contemporary representations suggests that Otherness has become an accepted part of mainstream society, Twilight and True Blood point to the fact that questions of race and sexuality are still contested. Works Cited Ames, Melissa. “Twilight Follows Tradition: Analyzing ‘Biting’ Critiques of Vampire Narratives for their Portrayals of Gender and Sexuality.” Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media, & the Vampire Franchise. Ed. Melissa A. Click, Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, and Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz. New York: Lang, 2010. 37-53. Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Bartsch, Ingrid, Carolyn DiPalma, and Laura Sells. “Witnessing the Postmodern Jeremiad: (Mis)Understanding Donna Haraway’s Method of Inquiry.” Configurations 9 (2001): 127-64. Brace, Patricia, and Robert Arp. “Coming out of the Coffin and Coming out of the Closet.” True Blood and Philosophy: We Wanna Think Bad Things with You. Ed. George A. Dunn and Rebecca Housel. Hoboken: Wiley, 2010. 93-108. Click, Melissa A., Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, and Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz. “Introduction.” Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media, & the Vampire Franchise. Ed. Melissa A. Click, Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, and Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz. New York: Lang, 2010. 1-17. Haraway, Donna. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_Onco Mouse™. New York: Routledge, 1997. Hollinger, Veronica. “Fantasies of Absence: The Postmodern Vampire.” Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture. Ed. Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997. 199-212. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Routledge, 1981. Jones, Miriam. “The Gilda Stories: Revealing the Monsters at the Margins.” Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture. Ed. Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997. 151-67. Gomez, Jewelle. The Gilda Stories. New York: Firebrand, 1991. Meyer, Stephenie. Twilight. London: Atom, 2005. —. New Moon. London: Atom, 2006. —. Eclipse. London: Atom, 2007. —. Breaking Dawn. London: Atom, 2008.

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Siebert, Verena Maria. “From Buffy to Twilight – A Feminist Backlash in Youth Vampire Fiction?” Paper presentation. “Fremde Welten – Wege und Räume der Fantastik im 21. Jahrhundert.” GFF Conference, 30 Sep to 03 Oct 2010. Universität Hamburg. Webrecording. . Thaler, Ingrid. Black Atlantic Speculative Fictions: Octavia E. Butler, Jewelle Gomez, and Nalo Hopkinson. London: Routledge, 2010. Toff, Benjamin. “Victories for NBC, MTV and True Blood.” New York Times. 15 Sep 2009. Web. 24 Dec 2010. . Toscano, Margaret M. “Mormon Morality and Immorality in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series.” Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media, & the Vampire Franchise. Ed. Melissa A. Click, Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, and Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz New York: Lang, 2010. 21-36. Tyree, J.M. “Warm-Blooded: True Blood and Let the Right One in.” Film Quarterly 63.2 (2009): 31-37. Wilson, Natalie. “Civilized Vampires Versus Savage Werewolves: Race and Ethnicity in the Twilight Series.” Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media, & the Vampire Franchise. Ed. Melissa A. Click, Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, and Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 55-70. Winnubst, Shannon. “Vampires, Anxieties, and Dreams: Race and Sex in the Contemporary United States.” Hypatia 18.3 (2003): 1-20. Zanger, Jules. “Metaphor into Metonymy: The Vampire Next Door.” Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture. Ed. Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997. 17-26. Films True Blood. Season 1. Creat. Alan Ball. Perf.. Anna Paquin, Stephen Moyer. Warner, 2009. TV. Twilight. Dir. Catherine Hartwicke. Perf. Kristen Steward, Robert Pattinson. Summit Entertainment, 2008. Film. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. Dir. David Slade. Perf. Kristen Steward, Robert Pattinson. Summit Entertainment, 2010. Film. The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Dir. Chris Weitz. Perf. Kristen Steward, Robert Pattinson. Summit Entertainment, 2009. Film.

The Semiotics of Sexual Transformation Ursula and Ariel as Representations of Metamorphosis in The Little Mermaid PAUL BEEHLER Even after some twenty years, Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989) is perceived as one of the “new classics,” and many copies of the DVD can be found in libraries throughout the world.1 Indeed, Disney, in August of 2008, saw fit to produce and release the third sequel to The Little Mermaid, The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning (2008), in an attempt to capitalize upon the renewed interest around the characters and concept. Even more recent is the debut of Disney’s World of Color, a production that was released in the Disney California Adventure park in Anaheim on June 11, 2010. Offering a keenly prominent position specifically for Ariel, Disney’s World of Color is the apotheosis of a highly technical nighttime special effects show that relies extensively on animation, lights, lasers, and water canons. June of 2011 saw yet another tribute to the heroine as the debut of The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Undersea Adventure drew lengthy queues and reified Ariel’s presence in such a way as to secure her influence in the theme parks for many years to come. This particular ride consistently evokes numerous images of the impressively popular aquatic princess, and is worthy of its own exegesis.2 With the passage of time has come a greater appreciation of (and in this case greater verve for) the work, as well as a certain critical perspective.3 1

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Indeed, according to www.the-numbers.com/movies/1989/LMERM-DVD.php, three releases of The Little Mermaid have taken place: November 15, 1989; November 14, 1997; and December 7, 1999. During the last period that the DVD was released from the vault, sales were epic: 6,290,363 copies were sold for a total of $95,266,221 between October 8 of 2006 and December 3 of 2006. What is more astounding is that these sales numbers only apply to the DVD and not Blu-ray Disc nor VHS (which reported over four million copies sold in the first week alone of the re-release). The recent release (late August of 2008) of the third sequel that showcases Ariel, The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning, is certain to ignite sales and reinvigorate interest once again in The Little Mermaid and all its accompanying lore. The ride presents a veritable cornucopia of images of both the little mermaid and the seawitch that seem to echo, in a delicate fashion, many of the sentiments presented in this paper. Recently, I polled my students to get an anecdotal sense of how pervasive The Little Mermaid is with an audience that is removed from the film in time by a full generation. To my

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That the protagonist of The Little Mermaid undergoes a profound metamorphosis, in both Disney’s and H.C. Andersen’s versions, is undisputed. Laura Sells, in a chapter entitled “Where Do the Mermaids Stand,” is perhaps one of the more vocal critics of the film, and she directly identifies the theme of change as she positions the film, and specifically Ariel, in a feminist discourse. After considering Barbara Bush’s use of mermaid imagery when speaking to a group of Wellesley students, Sells asserts that, The Little Mermaid reflects some of the tensions in American feminism between reformist demands for access, which leave in place the fixed and complementary definitions of masculine and feminine gender identities, and radical refigurings of gender that assert symbolic change as preliminary to social change. (177)

Change in the film is seemingly desirable, inevitable, and essential, but what Sells only tangentially mentions (and this is an argument generally found wanting in the field) is the intense scrutiny regarding the agent of that change, Ursula – a self proclaimed ‘witch.’ A study of the actual change and its political/feminist ramifications is most certainly a productive conversation, but a complete exegesis of The Little Mermaid must move beyond the transformation into a broader argument regarding the catalyst for such change. This odyssey, an investigation that has thus far eluded critics, is essential to any plenary appreciation of the work. In many ways, Ursula in Disney’s film can be read as a binary to Ariel, for she is the matron with experience who, in the past, has held some authority. Ariel, of course, serves as a naïve (albeit tantalizingly seductive) coquette, taking the first tender steps in her incipient journey. Ursula, on the other hand, is poised as a far more complex and mature character in the film in that she is also what Ariel, a type of chrysalis, can become; indeed, in some ways, Ariel longs to be the recipient of Ursula’s sage-like knowledge and power; to be sure, Ariel very much requires the matronly image as an agent to instigate the young princess’s epic journey. Joseph Campbell, in his text Hero with a Thousand Faces, meticulously considers how journeys and transitions, like those found in Disney’s and Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, manifest themselves in the monomyth. This concept, according to Campbell, serves as a crucial component in the foundation of many heroes and heroines. Birth in particular, and here I would certainly include metaphorical birth, becomes a representation of the journey and transformation. Campbell explains that Only birth can conquer death – the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be – if we are to

surprise, all of the women in my class demonstrated an impressive familiarity with the film, even to the point that some spontaneously broke out into song. The men seemed aware, but much less so of the film.

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experience long survival – a continuous “recurrence of birth” (palingenesia) to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death. (16)

Ariel in The Little Mermaid signifies, ultimately, not just the hero, but also a representation and even extension of Campbell’s vision in that she is “the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.” The powerful transformation that absorbs Ariel, both physically and psychologically, serves as a testament to the profound depths of change that can, and often do, occur in the formative process of adolescence. Perhaps the enduring appeal of both Andersen’s and Disney’s heroine is their seemingly powerful representation of the transformational monomyth that, according to Campbell, is ubiquitous in the realm of heroines and, indeed, is manifest in many actual individual experiences in an instant that permits a moment for art to imitate life. Ariel’s change is powerfully steeped in mysticism and even magic. This stage of life, both for Ariel and young female viewers alike, presents an opportunity imbued with excitement about the unknown, but the events also signal the advent of a troubling and lurking danger that manifests itself in the witch’s magic. The title ‘witch’ has always struck me as both powerful and fascinating. Disney is most faithful to H.C. Andersen’s text at many turns, but this particular point is especially important, and Andersen is very clear about the form in which the little mermaid’s ‘help’ materializes: “While my sisters are dancing within my father’s palace, I will go to the sea-witch; I have always been frightened of her, but she, perchance, may help and counsel me” (21). Consistent with the general approach of fairy tales, Andersen never actually assigns a proper name to the marginal character his protagonist seeks, but the role and social properties are both pellucid and conventional in the text. This creature, one that is imbued with the powers of dark magic, lives outside the bounds of ordinary society, for the little mermaid must travel, “out of her own sea right towards the raging whirlpool behind which the witch dwelt” (ibid.). Andersen is very careful in naming the figure a “witch,” who serves the purpose of offering the heroine “help” and “counsel.” This description intoxicatingly invokes a very traditional image of the witch4 as she has been perceived historically and academically; furthermore, Disney seizes upon Andersen’s impulse and then significantly expands the role of the witch. Disney’s Ursula, in song, seems to take great pride in noting that, “They weren’t kidding when they called me, well, a witch.” This moniker, so closely associated with Ursula, serves as a complex tool to illuminate 4

Consider the characterization of witches as Deborah Willis presents them in her text, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England. Ronald Holmes, in his Witchcraft in British History, also provides a powerful overview of the witch and its cultural interpretation.

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Ursula’s past and present influence in the film. In Walt Disney’s Parade of Dreams in Disneyland, for example, Ursula uses language (and only a few lines are devoted to her persona, as is the case with all of the Disney characters in the parade) to refer to herself as a “sea-witch” or perhaps employ the homophonic phrase of “see-witch” in an attempt to draw more attention to her role not only in the parade, but also in the tale. She is the witch, the outsider – the one who is both marginalized and endowed with mystical powers that one would be loathe to underestimate. Her image as outsider and witch is also reinforced through a technological feat of animation in Disney’s newest theme park, California Adventure. Here, Ursula inhabits a watery world of isolation where she ‘helps’ tourists by guiding them through musical adaptations. Witches, of course, have enjoyed a turbulent and colorful history both in the United States and in Europe, but the culture of the witch is perhaps most powerfully manifested in the Early Modern period. During the 16th and 17th centuries in England, witches were often, though not always, those women who threatened society.5 The old widow, who presumably knew the pleasures of sex, was frequently deemed lascivious as well as prurient and hence held up to the community as a prime example of the witch. Does this description reflect Ursula? Most certainly, her image indeed conforms to this depiction. Ursula introduces herself with the line, “In my day, we had fantastical feasts when I lived in the palace.” These lines are delivered shortly after what are likely her familiars, a pair of eels, magically create an image of Ariel in a bubble that curiously enough resembles a crystal ball. Ursula’s words are the words of experience, for she formerly served as an integral component of the palace, perhaps even a concubine to King Triton himself. Who can be certain as to what bacchanalian “feasts” she enjoyed while at the palace? Clearly, the sea-witch is fascinated by Triton, for she mentions him within the first two lines of her dialogue, thus establishing an intimate connection between the two entities of Triton and the palace.6 Ursula knows the palace, and she also knows the secrets of sex (whether or not these feasts included King Triton), for her clothing and movements act as powerful signifiers in this case. Ursula’s jewelry grounds her in the images of a woman imbued with sexual experience.7 Her earrings dangle in such a way as to attract the audience’s mind5 6 7

Again, for a powerful overview of how English societies viewed witches in the Early Modern period, please see Deborah Willis’s Malevolent Nurture in its entirety. Also, at the conclusion of the film, Ursula absconds with King Triton’s trident, a graphic moment steeped in images of castration. I am certainly not the first critic to recognize the provocative image of Ursula. Richard Finkelstein, in his chapter entitled “Disney’s Tempest: Colonizing Desire in The Little Mermaid” offers a number of highly astute observations regarding Ursula: “Her body is not only large but connects with a wide range of issues toward which the film takes a strong attitude. Disney’s

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fulness to the motion, and the charm around her neck with its sleek lines speaks of her sophistication and knowledge of talismans. Ursula’s lips are noticeably full (even to the point of suggesting collagen treatments), and they cannot be ignored because the red lipstick is a colorful element in the animation that demands attention against a drab background. Finally, the scene offers a close shot of Ursula’s hands when she consumes a living morsel of food.8 The red lips complement the red nails and, in concert, present an image of the highly sexualized, appetite-driven, cosmopolitan female. Ursula is a creature of magic who has successfully negotiated a path to power; she is cast as a mature matron who harbors the secrets of sex and the adult world; furthermore, she is in a position to impart these secrets to the budding heroine who comfortably assumes the role of naïve coquette. Few if any of these overt Ursulian signifiers that are so closely associated with courtship and sexual knowledge, of course, can be found on the person of Ariel – at least when the movie commences. The only element that might possibly be subject to this interpretation of sexual experience is Ariel’s lips in that they may, and here I feel compelled to emphasize absolutely the use of ‘may,’ have artificial coloring. A more likely interpretation of the mermaid’s reddened lips offers an Ariel with natural coloring that approximates lip stick, indicating a certain sexual potential, but this element of the movie is clearly resigned to the realm of the ambiguous. Ariel hints at a sexuality that has potentially divergent interpretations depending on its expression and so resides in the world of the indeterminate. When the film commences, this sexuality, along with other sexual markers, is hidden under the ocean in a sequestered place of secrecy and repression. Here lies a world of danger and excitement that awaits the light of day. Historically, the experienced and prurient widow was a seminal component of the Early Modern witch, but the other common image of the 16th and 17th century English witch is equally important: that of the young unmarried temptress. Ostracized and banned from society, witches, who were in part identified as unattached women, scratched out a living in the outskirts of villages by offering council and herbs to other women as a

8

animators invest Ursula’s fleshy body with a range of signifiers which have historically been used both to construct women and to identify essential biological facts about them. At her first appearance she wears that heavy makeup. When singing ‘Poor Unfortunate Souls,’ she jiggles her breasts and swings her wide hips to underscore her points. She is not just flesh but also a Puritan nightmare of a female sexual body” (137f.). This close-up also serves the role of highlighting Ursula’s mole, a birthmark closely positioned to her mouth. The mark is significant because it creates a stronger connection between Ursula and the witches of yore. Witches were believed to have a physical manifestation of the devil, often referred to as “the Devil’s teat.” This defect could take the form of a third nipple, but it could also be a mark like the number six, or, less glamorously, a birthmark like the one Ursula conspicuously sports in this scene.

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form of uenificium. Those women who tended to women, especially in matters of reproduction and birth, routinely faced the hazards of witch-hunts. Their powers could be officially indicted under maleficium. The formal profession of midwife offered an especially tempting target for those zealots interested in prosecuting witches through forces like King James and the Malleus Malifecarum. Here were a group of women who offered assistance with birth, abortion, and contraception – these women were frequently present in the lives of other women during crucial periods of feminine transition; for their efforts, they were occasionally rewarded with fines, imprisonment, scorn, and even execution. Like these historical witches, Ursula serves as a midwife to assist Ariel during her process of transformation, and Ariel stands before a crossroads: will she be fashioned in the image of Ursula, or will she assume the role of young temptress/witch? Essentially, Ariel finds herself positioned between the two primary roles of witch: on one hand, Ariel faces the possibility of assuming the position of a seductively threatening woman while on the other hand the heroine may, under the tutelage of Ursula, refashion her identity into the witch who has knowledge of sex and can manipulate society through this position of power. Neither form of the feminine nightmare is suitable, especially for an ascending princess of Ariel’s magnitude. Indeed, Ariel must simultaneously divorce herself from her current form while avoiding the undue influence and auspices of Ursula. Bruno Bettelheim sums up the situation of Disney’s heroine best when he argues that with every fairy tale’s end the hero has mastered all trials and despite them remained true to himself, or in successfully undergoing them has achieved his true selfhood. He has become an autocrat in the best sense of the word – a self-ruler, a truly autonomous person, not a person who rules over others. (127)

Ariel requires Ursula’s guidance to achieve, ultimately, a new form that serves as a delicately tempered hybrid of the sexual witch and the experienced matron/witch; however, Ariel extricates herself in the final moments of the film to claim, at least in relation to Ursula, the ostensible role of Bettelheim’s autocrat. Would that such a role enjoyed some traction; unfortunately in Ariel’s case the heroine’s liberty is perhaps more ephemeral than even that of a common mayfly because she quickly delivers herself to the much anticipated wedding nuptials. In many ways, the journey towards this change and struggle for autocracy is physically represented in the body of Ariel. While not discussing or even considering an application to Disney’s The Little Mermaid, Caroline Walker Bynum nevertheless introduces a model in Jesus as Mother that provides some illumination to the journey and change that Ariel experiences. Much can be divined from the image of the breast, as Bynum suggests, and

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Ariel’s breasts at the beginning of the movie are prominently displayed.9 Breasts, as Bynum powerfully asserts, can serve a maternal function, but breasts can also be used to allure and seduce. This duality that is oddly lacking in the spiritual writings of the Middle Ages enjoys a seminal position in Disney’s creation. Ariel’s role as seductress or matron has yet to be determined when The Little Mermaid opens. Her breasts are those of a budding adolescent, and this image acquires a certain intensity with Ariel’s line, “I’m sixteen years old. I’m not a child.” Ariel’s line is delivered in one of the opening scenes in which she openly declares that she is not a child; indeed, the audience does not know what she is just yet, and this precarious moment is where the female threat is poised. Ariel’s physical body – that of mermaid or human – is as ambiguous as her role in the film. Is she a girl or a woman? Does she reside in the water or on land? Is she the maternal or the seductress? The movie can essentially be read as a journey for the protagonist, a journey that results in the birth of her identity and then a renunciation of identity, an act that yields to a solidification of her position in society. This birth is appropriately mired in the image of water and forcefully moves upwards towards the concretely defined surface of land. Of greatest consequence is that this process can only be negotiated with the aid of Ursula, the midwife witch, and Ursula harbors her own agenda. Chris Richards, in his essay “Room to Dance: Girls’ Play and ‘The Little Mermaid,’“ addresses the dramatic binaries that stand before Ariel at the moment she considers the flotsam of the human world: Ariel’s song sets out a series of binary oppositions and it is through these that her yearning is constructed. Her desire is animated by the distance between the treasured, but lifeless, objects in her cavern and the vibrant mobility of life on two legs shared by the people on land. The wish to be part of that world above, from which her physical form appears irrevocably to exclude her, is expressed in terms which divide her fishy attributes from those which might be associated with maturity and sexuality. (144)

The transformation of forms and the binaries present in the film are also powerfully communicated through the image of the breast. Granted, all of 9

Bynum considers the maternal nature of the breast, almost to the exclusion of any seductive element. She points out that Bernard of Clairvaux relies on the maternal image, most especially of the breast, to describe a number of religious figures: Jesus, Moses, Peter, Paul, and religious hierarchy in general. Bynum ultimately concludes that, “In spiritual writers from Anselm to Julian, we find three basic stereotypes of the female or the mother: the female is generative (the foetus is made of her very matter) and sacrificial in her generation (birth pangs); the female is loving and tender (a mother cannot help loving her own child); the female is nurturing (she feeds the child with her own bodily fluid)” (131). This fixation on the breast as signifier is no less apparent in Disney’s work today, but, unlike the medieval interpretations of the breast, 20th century expressions struggle profoundly with the dual roles of mother and seductress. Ariel is a clarion example of just such a struggle.

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the female mermaids are clad in the same garb, a bikini top crafted out of shellfish, throughout the film; nonetheless, the movie still holds up Ariel, specifically, as the singular protagonist, and her features and journey are seminal to the interpretation of the visual medium. The mermaid culture is but a minor point of interest, a footnote really, relative to the image and role Ariel serves in the film. While all female mermaids, to some extent, resemble Ariel, it is the images fundamentally associated with Ariel that contribute to an understanding of the young mermaid and the movie as a whole. That being said, Ariel’s scanty clothing reveals, upon her introduction, shapely and youthful breasts. Like the other mermaids, she has a single tail with no vaginal opening. She is, at one and the same time, oddly seductive and disturbingly asexual: Richards’ binary is potently communicated through such an image. The camera is trained on Ariel throughout her opening sequences, and she becomes the object of ‘the gaze’ because the young mermaid with her scantily clad breasts and ‘V’ shaped scales around her navel is an unapproachable seductress who, without some form of physical transformation, is incapable of assuming the role of mother. Ariel faces a dilemma of the greatest magnitude: will she maintain her current form, thereby becoming a nexus of frustrating and threatening actions to society and the larger audience as a whole, or will the worlds below and above conspire against her by consigning her to the acceptable and controlled role of matron? Disney’s heroine struggles with the role of identity and even questions that dance around existentialism: she must decide whether she will subvert or reinforce the power structure before her. Ariel becomes a malleable object hidden deep beneath the waters of the subconscious, and she serves as a frustration which requires some ultimate form of resolution in the course of the film. Ursula too plays a very important role in this process that should not be underestimated or diminished. Like Ariel’s body, Ursula’s body reveals much throughout the film. Ursula’s breasts are domineering and overpowering. Her full bosom enjoys a sweeping and commanding motion in the water; indeed, much like Ariel, Ursula’s breasts become a defining signifier.10 They serve as a ubiquitous quality that identifies the sea-witch. Like the bad mothers seen in the Early Modern witch who tend to their familiars,11 Ursula sports breasts that shun the seductive with their large and shapeless features. They represent the maternal in a world of perversion that has gone awry; indeed, Ursula’s breasts are very much filled with the milk of inhuman kindness. The distorted witch’s affiliation with a foul maternity is 10 11

Again, Richard Finkelstein’s essay goes into some detail analyzing Ursula and the signifiers that surround her (cf. 136-42). Cf. Willis; Willis argues that familiars assumed the function of aberrant children and placed witches, by a kind of default, in the role of malevolent mother.

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further strengthened when Ursula is introduced through her children, a pair of eels that share an eye and do her bidding. This association is further reinforced at the conclusion of the film when Ursula, after Prince Eric obliterates her eels, mutters, “Babies… my poor little poopsies.” The direct name of “babies” is used in such a way as to secure Ursula’s role as the malevolent mother/witch. In many ways, Ursula becomes a powerful foil to Ariel. Instead of a single fin, Ursula has many tentacles, and she serves as the symbol of excess and access on a sexual level. The witch is quick to comment upon her history and experience at the palace – again, another image of sexual excess/ access; more importantly, the sea-witch, unlike Ariel, has a physical hole that swallows up the camera angle at certain points in the movie. Ursula knows about all consuming sex, and she is capable of assuming the role of mother, albeit a distorted and malevolent mother, both physically and socially. Her knowledge of sex and physical capability places her in the potential position of sexually consuming all who inhabit the spaces around her and manipulating the structure that envelopes both her and Ariel. In essence, Ursula has the hidden knowledge that Ariel so deeply longs for – that is, an understanding of sex and procreation – but Ursula is a bad mother; more precisely, she is a malevolent mother. The use of the sea-witch is faithful to Andersen’s vision, which introduces a perversion of the maternal through his initial description: “She [the sea-witch] called the hideous fat water-snakes her chicks and let them roll about over her large spongy bosom” (23). Andersen himself relies on powerful associations that are drawn between the image of witches, midwives, birth, and maternity. The author’s concept of the perverted mother with her chicks, however, is given a full vivacity when Disney completes the image with a pair of eels, enabling Ursula to inhabit the domain of the maternal. Such detail specifically in Ursula cauterizes the intimate connection between Disney’s seawitch and the secretive world of sex. Disney skillfully constructs an elaborate and sophisticated Ursula who is wholly and potently predicated on the associations initially present in Andersen’s work. In Ursula, Disney’s audience sees an extreme just as in the unformed Ariel the audience sees an extreme. The sea-witch’s physical breasts are an extreme enhancement, much like the image of the “large spongy bosom” Andersen offers. In Disney, Ursula’s understanding of sex and subsequent exploitation of that quality suggests the extreme purpose of consolidating and subsequently intensifying social power. Ursula knows how to use sex and clandestinely changes her form towards the end of the movie for the sole purpose of seducing and manipulating Eric. In the concluding moments of the film, Ursula even seizes King Triton’s trident, a representation of his phallus and socio-sexual power. Just as Ursula’s image in Dis-

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ney’s creation is more pronounced than what Andersen gives us, so too is her role more pronounced and distorted. Andersen’s sea-witch does not assume the role of a rival in his version of The Little Mermaid; indeed, Andersen’s witch even offers the wayward mermaid a chance to redeem herself by killing the prince. Disney’s conception of Ursula offers an unmatched extremism that translates most especially into a violent and turbulent sexuality. Every facet of Disney’s Ursula is an extreme compared to Andersen’s ideas. Even Ursula’s tentacles are an extreme expression. Ariel wants additional appendages, but she does not desire the eight appendages that characterize Ursula. Likewise, Ariel longs for a vagina in order to couple with Eric, but she does not seek a hole like Ursula’s that overpowers the world and engulfs all images. Ariel is not satisfied with her situation at the beginning of the movie, so a journey is set before the young princess, but to follow Ursula completely would result in an extremism that would be disastrous both to her personally and her role in society at large. Ariel also suffers from her own extremism at the beginning of the film. She is inordinately shy but highly seductive. Without a vaginal opening, her seductiveness serves an empty futility that can only spawn frustration, and she assumes a curiously extreme sexual inaccessibility. She is, essentially, unformed and inchoate. She needs more, and she needs others to assist in the transformation. Finally, a single fin serves as the defining characteristic of Ariel’s body. Ariel deeply longs for the middle road. She wishes to abandon her own extremism, but she also fears the extremism represented in Ursula’s consuming hole and her many tentacles. In Ursula’s presence, Ariel consistently assumes a timid air of deference that acts to subdue and contain her youthful exuberance. Ultimately, Ariel requires Ursula’s guidance and extremism to transform herself from jejune (and even potentially threatening) coquette to contained (and servile) matron. If the young princess does not embark on this journey, she remains an extreme frustration to all on a multitude of levels. If, on the other hand, she succumbs to the extremism of Ursula, she risks becoming a minion in Ursula’s miserable forces, and the young mermaid might then venture down a similar path as Ursula to further the forces of the sexual virago. The middle path is that which wholly attracts Ariel and consumes her full attention; indeed, it is the right path – conservative or otherwise – that Disney seems to encourage,12 and that journey lies directly between the naïve 12

Disney is intimately associated with a conservative, even repressive some might say, ideology among many critics, far more than could ever be mentioned here. Elaenor Byrne and Martin McQuillan are two critics among this phalanx who represent much of the animosity towards Disney and its animated productions. In Deconstructing Disney, they forcefully claim, “Disney has become synonymous with a certain conservative, patriarchal, heterosexual ideology which is loosely associated with American cultural imperialism. As such, Disney films (never mind the merchandise, theme parks, and media conglomerate) might be thought of

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Ariel represented by a single fin and the sly Ursula signified by a creature entangled in a bevy of tentacles. As a tempered matron, the transformed Ariel at the end of the film must be able to negotiate an adult world that is steeped in guile; simultaneously, however, the heroine must eschew the temptation to revel in power and deceit, the very same temptation Ursula enthusiastically embraces. The young mermaid’s physical transformation, then, enables her to breach the adult world through sexual maturation and mobility; furthermore, the movement between the world below and the world above symbolizes her successful negotiation of two distinctly defined gender roles: the manifestation of sex as manipulation through a seductive medium (the sexual breast) and the manifestation of sex as maternal through procreation (the nurturing breast). Ariel becomes what Ursula is not, but Ariel unequivocally must rely on the sea-witch for the transformation, and so the sea-witch effectively fulfills the role of midwife, a device that ushers in the sexually mature and powerful, not to mention benign, Ariel. When Disney’s film concludes, Ariel is poised to assume the role of queen by kissing Prince Eric in a wedding ceremony; her ascension to the role of queen requires, in part, that she, to use Bettelheim’s terminology, has “gained mature adulthood,” and this act is steeped in the mystique of “what sex consists of; that is the secret of adults which [s]he wishes to discover” (128). Through Ursula’s intimate guidance, Ariel has mastered the secret and power of sex without succumbing to a potential extremism Ursula fosters: the young heroine now physically signals the profound transformation through her covered breast, a breast that neither intimidates nor threatens society. Ariel is no longer the seductress/witch, nor has she overshot her mark to become the sexually knowledgeable witch; instead, Ariel enjoys but a brief existence in the tempered role of autocrat only to yield to a construction as both society and Prince Eric define it – that is, as a function of deference. When the film concludes, Ariel’s existence as an independent force is tragically ephemeral, even rivaling that of the famous mayfly. Again, the image of the breast is illuminated in a most provocative manner through Bynum’s argument and offers a glimpse into the physical sign that represents the process of transformation at hand. Under the sea, Ariel is limited in her expression of sexuality. Clearly, she is a sexual being, albeit not fully actualized. Her breasts are shapely and defined by a set of shells, but she wears no other jewelry or sexual markers like her sisters. In this regard, Ariel is isolated. Her waistline has a seductive V pointing downas not in need of ‘deconstruction’ because they are self-evidently reactionary parables of the American Right” (1f.). Such an observation can certainly be applied to The Little Mermaid, but the underlying struggle and transformation of the protagonist complicates such a simplified representation of Ariel. She may ultimately succumb to the heterosexual ideology and ruefully accept her place in society, but she makes waves before this transition is completed.

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wards as if calling attention to her otherness as a mermaid and, more importantly, the unrealized female. To society, Ariel is both frustration and desire: threat and hope. After the transition occurs, Ariel vigorously swims to the surface of the ocean where the audience receives an extended gaze of what is essentially a carefully crafted nude Ariel. The threat and promise, in this moment that Ursula presides over, is unleashed upon the human world without any clear direction. Ariel’s sexuality and expression are both liberated and beyond any control, and this point in the narrative is the brief moment that Ariel can claim herself as autocrat. Surrounded by Flounder, Sebastian, and Scuttle, Ariel is free from the influence of Ursula. The young ersatz mermaid taunts Scuttle with her legs in such physical moves that are both revealing and tantalizing. Ariel can now enjoy her sexuality and explore the depths of her role as woman before the voyeuristic audience. The moment, imbued as it is with self-determination, is short lived, for Ariel as sexual threat is very quickly covered and hidden from the world. Her ‘friends’ seize upon a large sheet from an old mast and cover Ariel’s seductive body with an unshapely cloth and a rope. The danger of an assertive and sexual woman is quickly covered, removed, and contained. Even the servants who survey her clothes comment disparagingly upon the cloth and efficiently replace the only connection to her autonomy with the socially acceptable garb of a dress. The moment before she is ushered into the new garments, the audience is again reminded of the new-formed Ariel as threat because she is filmed in a bathtub. Here is one final reminder of the Ariel who could serve as disruption to society. Returning to a watery environment, Ariel exudes a playful disposition that reflects her newfound liberty, and she revels in this new world during a carefully crafted moment that celebrates the nude Ariel. Ariel’s nudity and the unfettered breast, however, are deftly exchanged for a series of dresses and clothing that fully efface any seductive trace of Ariel’s breast. With the single exception of a brief retransformation of Ariel into a mermaid (which interestingly enough enables Prince Eric to again express his amorous desires), the images of Ariel’s breast become increasingly stifled and controlled until Disney offers its final image of the heroine: Ariel in a wedding dress. Even when King Triton, in the final moments of the film, extends his trident to transfigure his daughter one last time from mermaid to human, Ariel emerges from the ocean not as an unclothed woman, but as an enchanting female donning a luminescent gown. This emergence is significantly different from the earlier resurrection of Ariel that revealed a nude heroine. No chance is afforded for the emergence of the autocrat as Ariel runs into the arms and subsequent protection of Prince Eric. Ariel’s sleeveless gown is then, in a single moment, re-

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placed with the image of Ariel in her wedding dress, a piece of clothing that almost entirely eclipses Ariel’s body – even white gloves hide Ariel’s hands. The movie, as well as Ariel’s transfiguration, comes to an irrefutable conclusion, and Ariel assumes her contained and isolated position in society – a position that comes at the cost of her independence and sexual expressiveness. In Andersen’s conclusion, however, the little mermaid meets a less traumatic ending in that she is released upon the sea as bubbles and so meets a physical demise, but her identity and determinism, most especially in the realm of sexual expression, remain intact until the moment of her permanent physical effacement. Acts of violence and social transgressions as they relate to Andersen’s protagonist, while not resolved in a comforting manner, are at least recognized, and a crystalline sense of loss is effectively imparted. Andersen’s tale is seen for what it is: an unmitigated and impenitent tragedy. Disney’s more comic ending, at least in the sense of a Shakespearean comedy, is in many ways far more disturbing because Ariel is physically passed from her father, King Triton, to her husband, Prince Eric. The existential crisis for Ariel is muted in Disney’s interpretation because of a deceptive celebration on love, whereas Andersen’s little mermaid confronts the existential question on a more direct physical plane that cannot be cavalierly dismissed. The final minutes of Disney’s film, while seductive and charming, nevertheless suggest that Ariel’s window to fulfill the role of autocrat may indeed have been very brief if, alas, it ever existed in this world of illusion. Works Cited Andersen, Hans Christian. The Little Mermaid and Other Stories. Trans. R. Nisbet Bain. London: Lawrence, 1893. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vantage, 1989. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High and Middle Ages. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982. Byrne, Eleanor and Martin McQuillan. Deconstructing Disney. London: Pluto, 1999. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon, 1949. Finkelstein, Richard. “Disney’s Tempest: Colonizing Desire in The Little Mermaid.” The Emperor’s Old Groove: Decolonizing Disney’s Magic Kingdom. Ed. Brenda Ayres. New York: Lang, 2003. 131-49. Holmes, Ronald. Witchcraft in British History. London: Muller, 1974.

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Richards, Chris. “Room to Dance: Girls’ Play and ‘The Little Mermaid.’“ In Front of the Children: Screen Entertainment and Young Audiences. Eds. Cary Bazalgette and David Buckingham. London: BFI, 1995. Sells, Laura. “Where Do the Mermaids Stand? Voice and Body in The Little Mermaid.” From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture. Eds. Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. 175-92. “The Little Mermaid: DVD Sales.” The Numbers. 3 Sep 2008. Nash Information Services. 01 Jan 2011. . Willis, Deborah. Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. Films The Little Mermaid. Dir. Ron Clements and John Musker. Perf. Samuel E. Wright, Jodi Benson, Pat Carroll and Kenneth Mars. Disney Feature Animation, 1989. Film. The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning. Dir. Peggy Holmes. Perf. Jodi Benson, Sally Field, Jim Cummings, and Samuel E. Wright. Disney Toon Studios, 2008. Film.

FANTASTIC GENRES: FANTASY

Taking a Zebra to Vegas Allegorical Reality in the Percy Jackson & the Olympians Series LILY GLASNER In his series, Percy Jackson & the Olympians1, Rick Riordan places his teenage hero in a world both familiar and unfamiliar to the contemporary reader. The plot takes place in 21st century USA and yet, this recognizable space is inhabited and controlled by the gods of ancient Greek mythology. Like most others, in this fictive world, the young hero is as oblivious to this strange setting as he is to the fact that he is “a half-blood”, being the son of a mortal woman and an immortal father, the sea god Poseidon. The revelation of the truth will mark the beginning of his quest for self, familial identity, and comprehension of the role he is called to play in this dual world. The goal of this paper is to show how, as the narrative progresses, a second dimension arises within the text in which both the fantastic and the mimetic become the bearers of an allegorical inner meaning. 1. But is it Allegory? Through the ages different definitions have been offered for the term ‘allegory’.2 The rejection of the classification of the Narnia series as an allegory by its own author, C.S. Lewis – himself a professor of literature –, is an excellent example of the fact that there is no universal agreement as to its exact nature (cf. Lewis, “Fairy Stories” 36; “MRS Hook” 475f.). In my analysis of Riordan’s text, I will adopt the classical rhetorical definition given by Heraclitus the grammarian, around the first century: “[Allegory is] the trope which says [agoreuôn] one thing but signifies something other [alla] than what it says” (9; par.5). For whatever the disagreements regarding 1 2

The following abbreviations will be used: LT = Lightning Thief, SM = Sea of Monsters, TC = Titan’s Curse, BL = Battle of the Labyrinth, LO = Last Olympian. For an exhaustive bibliography of studies on ‘allegory’, see Whitman (3 note 1; 6 note 4). In Appendix I of his book one can also find an overview of the history of the term. For more recent studies see the new anthology edited by Copeland and Struck.

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the term allegory – concerning, for instance, the relationship between allegory and symbol – the simple truth stated by Heraclitus about its linguistic nature is the fundamental trait of this phenomenon. This broad definition still leaves us with the problem of literary works that whilst being interpreted as allegories are not distinctly indicated to be so within their own framework.3 Notable examples are Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Though nowhere in the texts does the poet yield any indications that the works, or parts of them, should be understood allegorically, Heraclitus the grammarian vehemently suggests such a reading (7; par.3).4 Focusing, for instance, on the lines describing the goddess Athena coming down from heaven in order to pacify Achilles’ anger, during his confrontation with Agamemnon (Iliad 1.223-261), Heraclitus interprets Athena as an allegory of “wisdom in perfection” (37; par.20). Is such an interpretation justified? Jon Whitman pointed out that there are two traditions of allegory: one is the tradition of allegorical composition which “In its most striking form, […] personifies abstract concepts and fashions a narrative around them” (4); the other is the tradition of interpretive allegory which “claims to discover the truth hidden beneath a text” (3). In both traditions the writer (the author or the interpreter) who uses this technique inevitably faces the challenge of maintaining a delicate balance between the literal and the ‘other’ meaning of that which is being treated allegorically (3-6). Therefore, equilibrium must be maintained between two conflicting tendencies, divergence and correspondence: “a narrow correspondence leaves no room to sustain an allegory, but a wide divergence destroys it as well” (4). Turning to the above mentioned episode in the Iliad –Whitman demonstrates the misapplication of the allegorical technique found in the ancient readings of Homeric poems. He points out that if we consider the various appearances of the goddess Athena in this epic it becomes clear that there are too many divergences to allow a correspondence between Athena and the concept of Wisdom, therefore the allegorical parallel is unsustainable. An example of this is to be found in Book XXII, in the famous duel between Hector and Achilles, Athena – whom we once thought might be Wisdom – deliberately deceives Hector, and hastens

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The allegorical quality of a given text may be unambiguously indicated in different ways. In the New Testament it is specifically declared that Jesus is using parables (Matthew 13); whereas in the opening lines of the 13th century The Romance of the Rose, the poet explains that the Rose is the lovely woman he had fallen in love with in a dream that came true, thus giving us the justification to read what follows not just literally but also allegorically (Guillaume de Lorris 1: 21-44). David Konstan points out that from later writers, such as Porphyry, we have testimonies that as early as the sixth century B.C. the Homeric epics were understood to be allegorical (xiii-xiv).

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his death, so that Hector, in almost his last words, says that ‘Athena cheated me’ […] hardly an appropriate thing for Wisdom to do. (16)

But why should we assume that wisdom and cunning were two opposing qualities in Homer, especially if we take into consideration the latter epic, in which both Athena and Odysseus are described, by the goddess, as wise and cunning (Odyssey 13.296-299)? That is not to say that I reject Whitman’s conclusion, although later on I shall use, as a legitimate interpretive tool, the Homeric interpretive allegory, which has gained an independent status in Western culture. On the whole I agree with Whitman that the Homeric epics are not allegories even though the potential is there (19). Whitman’s claim, however, that Wisdom cannot be identified with cunning and deception, should alert us to yet another problem, one concerning the interpreter’s previous assumptions which may well determine his acceptance or rejection of the existence of an allegorical technique in a given text. As Andrew Laird recently wrote: [f]inding an example of allegory is no less difficult than settling on a definition. Examples of allegory are like Macavity the Mystery Cat: it is very hard to tell whether or not they were really there. […] the recognition of allegory (of any kind) is not like the recognition of a hexameter, nor even like the recognition of a metaphor. The detection of allegory is really a subjective issue, or to be more accurate, a question of ideology. Someone’s detection of an allegory is more likely to be determined by culturally induced expectations than by any personal perspective. (153).

Percy Jackson & the Olympians, just like the ancient poems of Homer, is not characterized by any formal sign designating it conclusively as an allegory. Furthermore, it must be noted that – with the exception of the case where the meaning is explicitly added within the text, for the edification of the reader (as in the case of Aesop’s Fables or in the entries of Medieval Bestiaries) – an allegory is a complex expression, demanding from the reader advanced interpretive skills and at least a certain amount of knowledge (consider for example Dante’s Divine Comedy or Orwell’s Animal Farm). The Percy Jackson series, on the other hand, whether we consider it as children’s literature, teenagers’ books or crossover literature, seems to be characterized by its plain, straightforward language, in short a style that does not expect previous knowledge from the reader (see, e.g., Medusa’s story, LT 185). In light of Northrop Frye’s assertion that “all commentary is allegorical interpretation” (89), it is tempting to conclude that my considerations on the nature of the Percy Jackson series are but a futile attempt.5 In fact, the validity of reading certain segments in this literary text as allegorical, as I 5

But see Whitman comment regarding the adoption of this interpretive strategy: “Finally, while there are broad senses in which it can be claimed that all composition or interpretation is in some measure ‘allegorical’, this view is liable to give an already distended word so wide an application as to compromise both its historical meaning and its analytic usefulness.” (7 note 4).

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propose to do, springs not from the intentions of the empirical author, as may or may not be indicated directly in the text but – following Umberto Eco’s line of argument when considering the limits of interpretation – it springs from a unity of meaning that prevails in the text as a whole (Eco et al. 65). Perhaps, from this perspective the differentiation between interpretive allegory and allegorical composition is no longer of any consequence. 2. Why Read the Classics? 2.1 Eco and Baudrillard in Postmodern America Turning to the Percy Jackson series, I would like to suggest that the text serves Riordan as a platform to convey his criticism of our contemporary Western civilization. In this sense, the series as a whole functions as an allegory, a “trope which says one thing but signifies something other than what it says”, which in its subtext employs the postmodern view as articulated separately by Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard. Each thinker took a trip across the USA that resulted in a written manifest about the nature of contemporary American culture (Eco “Travels in Hyperreality”; Baudrillard America, preluded by Simulacra).6 Both describe a world, which undermines the boundaries between real and fake, its purest materialization being Disneyland/Disneyworld, a world in which a hyperreality is being established. Hyperreality, as viewed by Eco, is composed of perfected replicas of an imperfect reality, being more real than the real, “but with everything obviously more polished, shinier, protected against deterioration”, therefore a substitute for reality (“Travels” 7f.). The perfected replica can add or lose a dimension. Thus, when a 17th-century portrait is translated into a statue, the replica “gains” a third dimension (ibid. 9), whilst in a wax museum, a presentation of Shakespeare and Beethoven enjoying a cup of coffee and a conversation together, results in the loss of the dimension of time.7 From a semiotic point of view the purpose of the perfected fake replica is to “supply a ‘sign’ that will then be forgotten as such: The sign aims to be the thing, to abolish the distinction of the reference” (ibid. 7). Alongside the linguistic perception, however, there is a capitalistic undercurrent. A faked city like Disneyland is a: 6 7

Baudrillard’s essays from Simulacra will be abbreviated as follows: PS = “The Precession of Simulacra”, AA = “Absolute Advertising, Ground-Zero Advertising”, VLT = “Value’s Last Tango”. This is the implied sense of Eco’s description of the wax museum which is preceded by: “As in some story by Heinlein or Asimov, you have the impression of entering and leaving time in a spatial-temporal haze where the centuries are confused” (“Travels” 11).

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[d]isguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing. In this sense Disneyland is more hyperrealistic than the wax museum, precisely because the latter still tries to make us believe that what we are seeing reproduced reality absolutely, whereas Disneyland makes it clear that within its magic enclosure it is fantasy that is absolutely reproduced. […I]n this sense Disneyland is really the quintessence of consumer ideology. (ibid. 43)

In short, the perfect fake image, which now rules American culture, can be identified, ironically, through two advertising slogans: “the real thing” and “more”.8 Several years later, in an essay of that title, Baudrillard will term this phenomenon “The Precession of Simulacra.” Reality is no longer actual but has become virtual. Disneyland, in his analysis too, is the perfect model by which we may perceive the meaning of a virtual world: it is based on and produces not the actual but the simulacrum, the image without origin (PS 1).9 Baudrillard, however, extends the notion to an extreme. This “frozen, childlike world,” is also the means by which a much crucial truth is concealed from us: America, outside Disneyland, is not real anymore (PS 12-13). For the European intellectual, America is indeed unique: “America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present” (America 76). Hyperreality, however, charges a heavy price. People have lost both basic human capacities to experience the world and basic human communication faculties, like looking at and touching each other in a natural personal way; people have become the addicted consumers of a manipulated non-reality, in which the media play a leading role (PS 13; 27-32).10 Furthermore, traditional values, like efforts and knowledge are now dissociated from their contents (VLT 155). The existential danger, it is implied, lies in the fact that whilst “there is an end to value and to work, there is none to the simulacrum of value and of work” (VLT 157). 8

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Cf. Eco: “The first, widely used by Coca-Cola but also frequent as a hyperbolic formula in everyday speech, is ‘the real thing’; the second, found in print and heard on TV, is ‘more’ – in the sense of ‘extra.’ The announcer doesn’t say, for example, ‘The program will continue’ but rather that there is ‘More to come.’ In America you don’t say, ‘Give me another coffee’; you ask for ‘More coffee’; you don’t say that cigarette A is longer than cigarette B, but that there’s ‘more’ of it, more than you’re used to having, more than you might want, leaving a surplus to throw away – that’s prosperity.” (“Travels” 7f.). For the purposes of my discussion I am less concerned with the different successive phases of the image as defined by Baudrillard in this essay, or with their exact inter-relations. As the analysis of the Disneyland case demonstrates the different phases may co-exist in producing a specific virtual reality. See also “Virtuality and Events”, a more recent publication in which Baudrillard explores the part of the media and authorities, such as the FBI or the Pentagon, in creating a reality of non-existing events.

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2.2 Postmodern America in the Percy Jackson Series In the Percy Jackson series, while the literal level narrates an adventure story in which its main protagonist is a teenager suffering from a learning disability, the inner meaning signifies the mirroring of a culture that, by cutting itself off from its roots, has become, recklessly and dangerously, dyslexic, unable to decipher reality for what it is (Riordan, too, identifies America as the center of contemporary Western civilization, LT 73).11 As such, this looking glass also serves as a wake-up call for its grown up readers who, just like the passengers on the train in which Percy and his friends travel, are unaware of both the natural beauty and the dangers that lurk outside their passenger car since they are too busy with their laptops and magazines, that is – too drawn into a duplicated, detached and manipulated reality (LT 198). In other words, the postmodern world has turned its human inhabitants into slaves of the simulacra. Thus, a recurring theme in the series is the human need to readjust reality into a digestible and comprehensible picture, disengaging from it all irrational and disturbing facts.12 For example, whether Percy is presented in a television show or in news reports as a disturbed criminal or as a victimized kid (LT 274f.; 334f.) – these are but manufactured images, which, whilst they do not mirror the “true Percy”, are indeed consumed as such by the audience, who care very little for the connection of an image to an origin.13 Although this is not exactly the Disneyland perfect model, Baudrillard’s words seem to apply to it too: “It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle” (PS 12f.). Only by returning to its roots, by recognizing its past glory, by reviving its fundamental texts, will Western civilization be able to ‘reconnect’, cure its self-inflicted ‘dyslexia’, and regain its wisdom, creativity and sensitivity (Percy, like most of his half-blood friends, is dyslexic only in relation to contemporary language, LT 88). It is, therefore, no coincidence that the chain of events begins with a class of “mental-case kids” taking a trip to “the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at ancient Greek and Roman

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“The Americans are not wrong in their idyllic conviction that they are at the centre of the world, the supreme power, the absolute model for everyone. […] the others have come to believe in it too.” (Baudrillard, America, 77). In LO Hermes’ words to Percy, after the great and terrible battle has been won, testify that, in spite of the intervention of exterior forces in human life, it is humans who decide to choose any explanation but the truth (336). Ironically, this kind of manufactured (non)reality is the opposite of the allegorical mode of expression because, adopting Whitman’s argument, the very obliquity of allegory “relies upon an assumed correspondence between the fiction and the truth” (2).

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stuff” (LT 2).14 The kids are not, of course, “mental-case kids” but only the sad product of our contemporary society, culture and education. In the following chapter, feeling cranky and irritable, Percy rudely replies to his English teacher: “I called him an old sot. I wasn’t even sure what it meant, but it sounded good” (LT 17). On the plain literal level of the text Percy’s insult serves as a motivating force for the plot. At the same time, these two plain sentences demonstrate a multilevel act of communication: Percy’s utterance, pointed at the reader – the explicit addressee of the text (LT 1), incorporates his previous direct exclamation to his teacher. In both cases the sender, the receiver and the message itself are obvious and the reader grasps them automatically. Yet, there is a third level of communication, in which the implied author directs an ironical and critical observation at the reader, behind Percy’s back – an observation concerning the Western culture in general and its current educational tenors in particular, which conduct themselves in an ill-considered, “drunken” manner.15 The only way to fix and save contemporary children (and adults) is not by prescribing medication for them (LT 88), but by introducing them to the treasures of the past. This is Mr. Brunner’s/Chiron’s most important lesson to Percy: an intimate knowledge of the Classics not only applies to real life but is “vitally important” (LT 7).16 A return to our cultural roots, to our cultural foundations also means a return to the right structure. It is no coincidence that Annabeth, who symbolizes human wisdom, being the offspring of a man and the goddess Athena, is passionate about architecture and aspires to be the architect of a beautiful, flawless, “new world” (SM 196).17 Furthermore, as Chiron explains to 14

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During this trip to the museum the young hero will encounter his first mythological antagonist, Mrs. Dodds. If, by naming her so, Riordan implied (somewhat intriguingly) a tribute to the late Classical scholar E.R. Dodds, it is interesting to note that Dodds’ famous study, The Greeks and the Irrational, began too with a visit to a museum: “looking at the Parthenon sculptures” (1). The reader will not comprehend this second meaning automatically, its reception depends upon a second, critical reading of the text. The basis of my argument, regarding the double meaning in Percy’s words, goes back to Booth’s classical narrative theory (The Rhetoric of Fiction), which explored the secret act of communication between the implied author and the postulated reader, “behind the speaker’s back”, and in which irony is an essential component (304; although, it should be noted that in this text, Percy is not “the butt of the ironic point”, nor is he ridiculed. His sentiment stands in agreement with that of the implied author; only he is unaware of a wider criticism and its implications – the irony and hence the secret act of communication is based on that unawareness). The similarity in the educational criticism found both in Riordan’s series and C.S. Lewis’ Narnia is noteworthy. For all the apparent differences between the two (as well as the gap of half a century), both the American and the British writer call for a reestablishment of an intimate knowledge of the Classics in schools. The correlation between structure and human culture is obliquely demonstrated in Annabeth’s vision (SM 196; 199f.). This idea calls to mind other Classics, the writings of the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius, who demonstrated the correlation between the right structure

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Percy, in order to realize that ‘Western civilization’ is not merely an abstract concept but a living force “All you need to do is look at the architecture” (LT 73). However, if the foundations, the classical heritage, are forgotten, the whole structure, that is the whole of Western civilization, will fall apart. For a civilization, just like the great god Pan, can die and dissolve if all the things it stands for are gone (BL 298). 3. Enclosures of Allegorical Reality After presenting an overview of the series as an allegory we may now take a closer look at the individual books comprising it. Throughout the series, Riordan makes use of this rhetorical device in specific segments of the text, in which he creates what I identify as ‘enclosures of allegorical reality’ that serve as a looking glass for contemporary Western civilization, mirroring more specifically some of its corrupt and destructive values.18 Although this phenomenon occurs in all five books, in the following section I would like to concentrate on the three most discerned and developed instances of it, proceeding chronologically. 3.1 The Lightning Thief In the first book Percy and his friends, Annabeth and Grover, travel covertly to Vegas in the back of a smelly truck that illegally transports three pathetic, starved, zoo animals: a zebra, an albino lion and a weird looking antelope (242-257). The zebra, probably a creation of Percy’s father, telepathically connects with Percy, calling to him for help. On reaching Vegas, the heroes succeed in helping these animals to regain their freedom, letting them out of their cages while diverting the attention of the smugglers. Next, the heroes take a wrong turn and find themselves “at a dead end, standing in front

18

of temples and the perfect proportions of the human body (Book 3, Chapter 1). The importance of architecture, as well as its dark side, will be once again emphasized in the fourth book, BL, both as a theme and as a plot device. For contemporary discussions on architecture and culture see for example Popescu’s article (in a special issue dedicated to architecture and cultural identity); cf. also note 20 and my discussion of TC below. Unlike in medieval allegories not every detail in Riordan’s texts corresponds to an external idea. Concerning the issue under examination in this article, it must be said that not all enclosures described in the books are of an allegorical nature. Using the criterion suggested by Whitman (“a narrow correspondence leaves no room to sustain an allegory”) it becomes clear, for example, that the Underworld, described in LT, is not an allegory albeit the fact that at certain points in the text it reflects the world of the living, hence our world: Cerberus is but a Rottweiler, Hades is the ancient Greek mythological god and the Underworld is the world of the dead. No divergences are created that may justify an allegorical readings.

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of the Lotus Hotel and Casino” (258). This luxurious, inviting residence, in which nothing but an abundance of pleasures awaits them, seems like the complete opposite of the animal smugglers’ truck, which operated as a prison for the wild animals and in the case of the zebra as a prison cell for the one condemned to death. In fact, these two spaces reflect one another, functioning as “dead ends.” The Lotus Hotel and Casino, which at first sight looks like a dream come true, a paradise on earth, is a capitalistic golden cage, controlled by the American slogan “more”, within which the human soul may be lost forever.19 Like Odysseus’ three companions, who ate from the Lotus flowers and as a result developed an unquenchable desire for them whilst forgetting all else, including their journey back home (Odyssey 9.83-102), all who enter the Lotus Hotel and Casino become addicted to materialistic and virtual pleasures and oblivious to all else. Furthermore, for those captive inside this virtual dimension, “glued to the TV screen, or the video game” (262), time ceases to exist. Years may elapse in the outside world but inside the hotel it is as though only hours or a few days have gone by. When, at last, Percy realizes the truth, he has to struggle with his friends in order to free their souls, each from the mesmerizing trap that has ensnared him (or her) into this golden cage. When Percy and the sobered Annabeth find Grover he has already been drawn into a reverse “Virtual Deer Hunter“ (263) game in which the deer hunt down the human hunters. The usually kind satyr, now oblivious to external reality, cries out: “Die, human! Die, silly polluting nasty person!”, and turning his plastic gun on Percy starts shooting at him, as if Percy “were just another image from the screen” (263). Even on the verge of leaving this place and being fully aware of its nature, Percy has to struggle with the temptation of the golden cage when the Lotus bellhop promises him that an entire new floor of games has just been added and that he and his friends are entitled to platinumcard membership, the ultimate consumer’s temptation – to acquire “more”. On the literal level the episode in the Lotus Hotel and Casino is but one more adventure in Percy’s quest to save his mother and rescue the world from a third world war that will arise from the anger of Zeus if Percy fails to return his stolen lightning. At the same time, this hotel located in Vegas, an epitome of Western contemporary temptation and hedonism, becomes within the inner meaning of the text an enclosure of allegorical reality carrying pointed messages with respect to our society.20 A society, which has 19 20

From a materialistic point of view, the essence of the slogan “more”, as described by Eco (see above note 8), may be summarized as unquenchable desire to acquire. It is interesting to note that whilst looking at Vegas from an architectural point of view, Eco and Baudrillard reach opposite conclusions regarding the city’s “real” nature. Eco states that, although it is an amusement site with an artificial architecture, functioning as a “‘message’ city, entirely made up of signs […] Vegas is still a ‘real’ city”, unlike Disneyland (“Travels” 40). For Baudrillard, on the other hand, the artificial lights issuing from this

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turned its back on its basic connections with nature and reality and instead has developed an addiction to virtual reality, easily gained pleasures and unhealthy spending habits. The danger of the addiction to virtual reality, the simulacra, is that it may lead to the loss of individual as well as cultural identity. Percy realizes that if he takes the platinum-card membership he will eventually forget everyone and everything including his own name. In Grover’s game, mentioned above, there is also a hint of ecological criticism (“Die, silly polluting nasty person!”), a recurring theme throughout the series, which will come to its climax in another allegorical enclosure, the crystal cave where the heroes will witness the death of the great god Pan, the lord of the wild places (BL 295-300). The Western world is pictured as detached and unable to appreciate the real and the natural: The gods, which according to ancient cosmological interpretive allegories are natural elements or forces21; the wild animals which humans are turning into pathetic creatures in cages22; the natural water sources that are being polluted by us. All these are also part of the self-inflicted dyslexia of Western culture. “What’s in a name?” – If I may borrow Juliet’s famous line, the Lotus which in Homer’s epic designated total obliviousness, in the ancient interpretive allegories of his texts came to represent pleasure and delights (Heraclitus 113; par. 70). The two concepts of oblivion and pleasure make up the essence of the Lotus Hotel and Casino, literally as well as allegorically. 3.2 The Sea of Monsters A similar phenomenon, the creation of an enclosure of allegorical reality, in which temptation and pleasure based on immediate satisfaction are key factors, occurs in the second book, in which the narrative is organized around the episodes of Homer’s second Epic, the Odyssey. This time, after a ship’s explosion that leaves the heroes adrift in the Sea of Monsters, the current carries Percy and Annabeth’s lifeboat to a beautiful island that “looked like a tropical paradise” (169). As happened in front of the Lotus Hotel, the weary heroes are willing to let down their defenses and surrender themselves to pleasure, delight and forgetfulness. They have reached C.C.’s Spa & Resort, where they are promised that all their physical deficiencies will be fixed and their potential, true selves unlocked. This is especially true of Percy who, according to their hostess, is in great need of “serious help”

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“absolute advertising city,” efface completely its architecture, stripping it empty and leaving the beholder in a zone of “stupefied hyperreal euphoria” (AA 91-92). See for example, Heraclitus’ treatise (passim); Balbus’ speech in Cicero’s famous dialogue, “On the Nature of the Gods”, supplies quite a few examples (esp. Book 2, XXIV -XXVIII). There is also a reference to these kinds of interpretations in Riordan’s text itself (LT 67f.). Even this may be turned into a hyperreality Disneyland show (“Travels” 48-53).

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(173). Through an almost effortless makeover, he will lose all his bodily faults and become perfect, immediate results are guaranteed. He is only required to admit that he is not happy the way he is and relinquish his own, independent, judgment.23 That and to drink a draught that looks like strawberry milk shake. Percy succumbs to the enticement of his hostess, who has shown him the reflection of his perfect image, a replica of himself “without the faults” (174). He drinks the liquid and is turned instantly into a guinea pig. Their hostess is none other than the mythological enchantress Circe, who had turned Odysseus’ companions into pigs (Odyssey 10.135396). Luckily, Annabeth realizes in time the identity of their hostess and what has befallen Percy. She is able to resist Circe’s temptations, the promise to make her a great sorceress, and instead helps Percy to undo the metamorphosis and regain his true form. Once again, on the literal level the episode in C.C.’s Spa & Resort is but one more adventure in Percy’s quest to save Grover, who is being kept prisoner in the cave of the Cyclops, and to find the famous Golden Fleece, which is desperately needed for the protection of Camp Half-Blood, the heroes’ home. At the same time, this Spa & Resort located on the island of Circe, an ancient symbol of the temptations and dangers of pleasure (Heraclitus 113, 115-117; par. 70,72; Dio Chrysostom 8.20-26), becomes within the inner meaning of the text an enclosure of allegorical reality carrying pointed messages concerning our society that worships and pursues perfect looks. Enslavement to the ideal of perfect beauty is evident in contemporary television reality shows such as “Extreme Makeover”, “Beauty and the Geek”, and “Ten Years Younger”. The external, the superficial, the fake image, become the essence of life. Furthermore, this false ideal is based on instant solutions, on deceiving guarantees of immediate results. By abandoning the traditional values (continual effort and industry), by relinquishing independent judgment, by choosing the perfect image over reality, contemporary Western culture is turning itself into a guinea pig: a little scared animal locked in a cage and controlled by somebody else’s power, authority and agenda. 3.3 Battle of the Labyrinth In the third book of the series, TC, Riordan further develops the use of allegorical enclosures by creating an allegorical enclosure within an allegorical enclosure. In chapter thirteen the heroes happen to arrive at the deadly dangerous junkyard of the gods, an enclosure that on the allegorical level may refer to the ecological criticism present in the entire series. In order 23

Compare to that which Eco identifies as the demand of total passiveness, robot-like behavior, from the visitors in Disneyland (“Travels” 48).

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to save her friends from Talos, who is trying to destroy them, Bianca decides to sacrifice herself and performs a suicidal act by climbing into the defective metal bronze giant in her effort to switch him off. The colossal giant is described in architectural terms; he is “a skyscraper” (182). This metal monster, with the brave girl trapped inside, is doomed to collapse, due to an electric failure, leaving death and destruction behind (182-188), and it stands as an allegorical enclosure which mirrors human hubris as exemplified in the Hollywood 1974 acclaimed disaster film The Towering Inferno.24 Yet, in TC this technique is still limited in its scope; its high potential will come to full flower in its sequel. The creation of enclosures of allegorical reality is, indeed, forcefully employed in the fourth book, in which our heroes must enter Daedalus’ ever changing labyrinth.25 The labyrinth itself functions as an enclosure of allegorical reality that dominates the whole narrative by exploiting two well-known literary themes: the human quest for wisdom; and the futile as well as fatal desire of a mortal to take control over his fate, to trick death itself. Within this enclosure Riordan has created several inner allegorical enclosures, thus turning what can be termed a ‘local instance’ in TC into a key principle in the narrative of BL. In order to demonstrate the use of this technique in BL I would like to focus on the heroes’ meeting with the Sphinx, 24 25

The movie opens with the celebration of a grandiose human achievement – the erecting of the highest skyscraper in the world. Yet, following a fire, ensuing from an electric failure, the skyscraper soon turns into a deadly trap which brings about horrible destruction and death. According to Eco’s trifold division of the concept labyrinth (Semiotics 80ff.), Riordan’s creation reflects not the mythological one but the third and most complex type, the net labyrinth in which “every point can be connected with every other point” being “an unlimited territory” (81). Thus Annabeth explains its nature to Percy: “It’s been growing for thousands of years, lacing its way under Western cities, connecting everything together underground. You can get anywhere through the Labyrinth” (BL 44). Moreover, it is (following Eco’s adoption of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, in order to describe the essence of the net labyrinth): “susceptible to continual modifications […] No one can provide a global description of the whole rhizome; not only because the rhizome is multidimensionally complicated, but also because its structure changes through time […]” (81f.). Daedalus’ labyrinth not only keeps changing but it has a life and a will of its own (the idea is hinted at throughout the book and finally clearly attested to by its maker; 267). This idea is also implied in the double meaning of the book’s title: The Battle of the Labyrinth. What does the term ‘labyrinth’ denote? A) The labyrinth is a battlefield between Kronos’ army and Percy and his friends. Each side is trying to gain control over this realm, as well as over its entrances/exits. B) The labyrinth, being repeatedly referred to as dangerous and manipulative (see for example BL 47; 73), is the essence that fights, opposes and challenges, physically as well as mentally, those who enter it. Quintus’/ Daedalus’ testimony, the skeletons inside the labyrinth, and the horrible fate of Chris Rodrigues all point to the dangers of entering it, namely death and madness (BL 73; 93; 69f.; 218). Interestingly, these dangers are similar to the ones awaiting those who wish to enter the mystical realm as exemplified in the Jewish story of the Pardes (see Glasner 227-32), a legitimate comparison, but one that goes far beyond the scope of the present paper.

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since this episode portrays the misuse of the classroom: instead of being the birthplace of learning, thinking and creativity the contemporary classroom has become a barren place of mediocrity and terror. The very enclosure in which the classical heritage should have been communicated to children has become a mean and meaningless arena. As seen in the examples from the previous books, this episode functions both at the literal level – as one more adventure in the heroes’ quest to find the ancient inventor in the hope that he may help them secure their Camp and save the world at large – and at the allegorical level as a mirror which reflects a serious deficiency in our contemporary culture. In chapter ten, Percy, Annabeth, Tyson and Grover, following their guide, a mechanical spider, arrive at a large room that turns out to be a combination of a TV show studio, a classroom, a trap, an old dungeon ridden with skeletons, and a passageway. Locked and trapped in this room they must face the monster who governs it and demands that one of them will act as a participant in a deadly game, “ANSWER THAT RIDDLE!” – a sort of TV contest in which one can win “fabulous prizes!” (171) mixed with a school multiple choice test (“‘Please be sure to mark your answer clearly on your test sheet with a 2B pencil.’“; 172). In contrast to the scene discussed in SM, the mythological identity of the antagonist, the Sphinx, is clear to the heroes from the very beginning. The twist is in the contents of its words. Annabeth volunteers to undertake the task, expecting the famous riddle from the story of Oedipus: “what is it that has a single voice, and has four feet, and then two feet, and then three feet?” (according to Apollodorus Book III 5.8).26 The Sphinx, however, no longer uses the ancient riddle but instead has twenty different common knowledge questions (“What … is the capital of Bulgaria?“; 172). Infuriated by the simplicity of the questions, which do not demand the exercise of one’s thinking faculties but only the repetition of “a bunch of dumb, random facts” (174), Annabeth (who knows all the answers) refuses to continue. In return the Sphinx proclaims her failure in the test and prepares to attack and devour her. A fierce fight ensues between the monster and Annabeth’s companions. Once Tyson has smashed the monster’s grading machine, the bars are lifted and the heroes manage to escape. The crucial issues underlining the Greek myth of Oedipus, namely patricide and incest, have been obliterated from Riordan’s text.27 Other signifi26 27

According to Edmunds, the Sphinx and the riddle are late additions to the Oedipus legend (passim). Furthermore, he refers to a folkloristic position, according to which there might have been a version, now lost, in which “the Sphinx posed not one but three riddles” (151). A faint reference to the dark side of the Greek myth may be argued for, since almost at the very beginning of their quest inside the labyrinth Hera materializes in front of them in order to talk to Annabeth (96-101). According to late versions of the Oedipus myth, Hera is the goddess responsible for sending the Sphinx to Thebes (Apollodorus Book III 5.8), and

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cant elements have been altered in order to adjust them to the contemporary text, which is neither a tale of a man seeking his identity and family origins nor a tale about a curse inflicted on a certain house.28 A closer look at the nature of Riordan’s adaptation of the Greek myth reveals changes in the character of the riddle, the protagonist and the antagonist, which I will now review. As we have seen, the ancient enigma has been replaced by simple factual questions. The ancient myth posed the need to address the question of a possible link between the content of the riddle and the contents of the story. Folklorists like Edmunds implied that the only possible connection, Oedipus’ swollen feet, is forced (161, esp. note 46; 163f.). In contrast, Vernant suggested, in his literary interpretation of Sophocles’ play, essential thematic and structural connections between the riddle of the Sphinx and the character of Oedipus and his tragedy (197f.; 207f.). In fact, by the end of the play Oedipus, it is revealed, is the creature described in the riddle (207f.). In BL the questions posed by the Sphinx, whether in the frame of a TV show or as part of a school test, are designed to represent an ideal emptied of its values (true thought and knowledge). Yet, while there is an essential thematic connection between the questions and the text as a whole, the questions in no way characterize the solver, Annabeth. In the adaptation of the myth in Sophocles’ tragedy, Oedipus’ reputation as a wise man rests foremost on the fact that he has solved the riddle of the Sphinx (Oedipus the King: lines 508-9).29 Furthermore, as Knox argued, Sophocles’ Oedipus is “the intelligent amateur who without special training sees the essential thing the experts could not see” (20). Annabeth, daughter of Athena, stepping into Oedipus’ shoes as the riddle’s solver, is already known for her intellectual capacities, and, since she spent hours learning every theoretical aspect of Daedalus’ labyrinth, she can hardly be called an “amateur without special training.” Additionally – unlike Oedipus, who will not listen to anyone else in his pursuit of the truth, cost what it may (Knox 12; Dodds, “On Misunderstanding” 187) – Annabeth, brave and a

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particularly for sending it as a punishment for Laius’ (Oedipus’ father) sexual transgression (Swift 56f.; Edmunds 155. Edmunds points out that Hera’s involvement is by no means canonical and in other sources different gods are named as responsible for the appearance of the Sphinx, ibid.). I would suggest, however, that the presence of Hera in the labyrinth is more concerned with another critical issue criticized by Riordan: the maintaining of the perfect family image (compare Hera’s actions and words to those of her son, Hephaestus, both pronounced inside the labyrinth: BL 97-102; 180f.). Issues of acquiring identity and discovering family origins do exist in other books, most clearly in LT and in TC. According to Edmunds, while in Sophocles’ tragedy “it is Oedipus’ remarkable intelligence that enabled him to solve the riddle”, in the legend, which preceded the play, it is vice versa: “Oedipus became intelligent because he solved the riddle.” (160f.).

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truth seeker too, knows when to draw back and take heed of Percy’s cry to step aside and become invisible (BL 175). The Sphinx herself, though essentially the classical combination of a lion and a woman, has been denied her classical dual nature as both a sexual figure and a virginal maiden (parthenos).30 Not only is there nothing erotic in this figure but she is, according to Percy’s description, quite the opposite: She would’ve been pretty, but her hair was tied back in a tight bun and she wore too much makeup, so she kind of reminded me of my third-grade choir teacher. She had a blue ribbon badge pinned to her chest that took me a moment to read: THIS MONSTER HAS BEEN RATED EXEMPLARY! (BL 171).

This is the mixed (stereotyped) image of three figures: a geek exemplary schoolgirl who is without blemish and always knows the right answers, but unfortunately viewed as a little perfectionist monster by her classmates (echoed for example by the figure of Hermione in the first book of the Harry Potter series); a woman whose excessive use of makeup results in a cheap, unattractive appearance; and an old spinster (the old fashioned teacher wearing her hair in a tight bun). The hair, the first physical element which Percy describes, is especially significant since in ancient Greek poetry loose and flowing hair was employed as a sexual attribute to describe the desirability of a young maiden (Swift 64; 81). Riordan’s Sphinx, then, is devoid of the erotic trait. Percy’s memory of his “third-grade choir teacher” serves perhaps as a distant hint as to the nature of the original monster, the “singer of oracles” (Sophocles: line 1200; Swift 77). This reference, however, does not call to mind a dangerous temptress (as in the case of the sirens), but the unattractiveness of a former figure of authority. Riordan’s adaptation of the myth, in this episode, underlines his critical attitude towards the current Western educational system. The problem lies both with the teachers and with the program. In LT Annabeth explains to Percy the true nature of teachers: “‘Most of them are monsters. They don’t want you seeing them for what they are’“ (88). The Sphinx episode of book four embodies Annabeth’s statement. The exemplary teacher is a devouring monster whose only interests lie in her grading machine and in producing perfect (exemplary) test scores. Thinking, originality, innovation, true knowledge, the love of books and the love of wisdom are all farfetched, even ridiculous notions to her. From this perspective there is no difference between a dyslexic pupil who has difficulty in reading and learning (Percy), and an excellent pupil, engaged in reading extra-curricular books, 30

I am here following Swift’s interpretation of the Sphinx in Euripides’ adaptation of the Oedipus’ myth in Phoenician Women (Swift 75-78). For two opposing views concerning the Sphinx’s virginity see Swift 76 note 56; Gould in Sophocles, note to line 508.

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who demands intellectual challenges (Annabeth) – both do not fit the mediocre, uncomplicated pattern and therefore should be eliminated from it. The mark of Hephaestus, on the monster’s grading machine, suggests that once there was passion and creativity in teaching; for those are the powers of the physically unattractive but amazingly skilled god who can make out of a lump of springs and metal plates a flying falcon, like the one that landed on Tyson’s shoulder (BL 173; 180).31 But those days are gone; classrooms now are part of the ‘perfect image world’ (just like a television show) – and if a pupil does not fit in, he must be obliterated from the system: “‘Why then, my dear,’ the monster said calmly. ‘If you won’t pass, you fail. And since we can’t allow any children to be held back, you’ll be EATEN!’“ (174). It is then no wonder that throughout the series our hero has a history of (literally) fighting school authorities and blowing up schools … (LT chap. 1, SM chap. 2, TC chap. 2, BL chap. 1). On the other hand, Mr. Brunner’s/ Chiron’s classroom demonstrates that this very space can and should serve as a place where the healing process of Western culture begins. Why read the Classics (or if you cannot read, listen to them)? Because it is “vitally important”. Why is it so? I believe the actions of Riordan’s young heroes reflect Calvino’s view: [y]outhful reading can be […] literally formative in that it gives a form or shape to our future experiences, providing them with models, ways of dealing with them, terms of comparison, schemes for categorizing them, scales of value, paradigms of beauty: all things which continue to operate in us even when we remember little or nothing about the book we read when young. (Calvino 4)

3.4 Hestia These are, then, three impressive instances of enclosures of allegorical reality in the Percy Jackson series. They are by no means the only ones. They are, however, the most developed instances in which a postmodern criticism of the ills of our time is expressed. Nevertheless, the overall standpoint of the series is not one of despairing pessimism. On the contrary, our world can still be saved. Only now we must take it upon ourselves: 31

It is interesting to note that although their guide, the mechanical spider, is also a creation of Hephaestus he is not present during the encounter with the Sphinx, having “scuttled between the Sphinx’s paws and disappeared” (171). He will be met again in front of Hephaestus’ chamber door (177). While architectural and conceptual resemblance between net and labyrinth provide at least one possible explanation for attributing the spider to Hephaestus, I find the falcon a more puzzling attribution. Indeed, in literary tradition, the falcon is a symbol of the thing most longed for by the soul. This meaning may certainly be employed in Riordan’s text with regard both to the issue of teaching and to the figure of Tyson. However, to the best of my knowledge this symbolism stems from medieval texts such as Boccaccio’s famous story (Decameron Day 5, 9) and not from the Classical tradition.

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‘Be strong,’ Pan said. ‘You have found me. And now you must release me. You must carry on my spirit. It can no longer be carried by a god. It must be taken up by all of you.’ (BL 299)

Thus, in the last book of the series the reader is not only confronted by the meaning of the threat of a total destruction of Western civilization (visualized throughout the book and directly pronounced by Dionysus; LO 251), but he is also, through an identification with the hero, called upon to partake in the salvation of the world (LO 251f.). Moreover, as the narrative progresses, the focus shifts towards a reestablishing of traditional values. First and foremost that which is symbolized in the modest figure of ‘the last Olympian’, Hestia, whom Percy entrusts with the task of guardian of Pandora’s jar, the jar which contains – Hope (LO 289). In the first book of the series Chiron explains to Percy the essential connection between Western civilization and the Greek gods. The gods did not die centuries ago at the end of the classical era, and they will exist as long as Western civilization is not extinguished. To be more precise, the fire started in Greece and ever since, the gods have been following its brightest flame (“America is now the heart of the flame”; 72f.). Hestia is the goddess of the hearth, in particularly of the burning fire of the hearth, both in the private enclosure, the oikos, and in the public domain; symbolizing both domestic happiness and prosperity, and a harmonious community (Schmitz 444f.). According to the ancient philosophers her name holds the idea of the “essence of all things” (Plato 401d), and “she is the guardian of the innermost things” (Cicero, book 2 XXVII). The fire then, is existential and just like its modest goddess, it points to the fact that hope as well as true essence are literally and metaphorically indoors. Thus, after Percy deposits Pandora’s jar in the goddess’ hands, inside the cold throne room, “the center of the gods’ power” (285), the fire in the Olympic hearth, which has become hard to maintain, burns a little brighter (286; 289). Hestia not only holds the key to hope and true essence, through the symbol of fire, but she is also (though this is less known) the inventor of the art of building houses (Schmitz 444). Hestia, the peaceful and virginal power within, is the one who keeps the fire burning and can help restore Western civilization to its right structure. The final enclosure then, is one of hope and belief. 4. Conclusion When the ancient commentator employed an allegorical technique in order to rescue Homer from the charge of impiety he had, in a sense, divested the Olympian gods of their pagan aspect, namely that which presented them as having human traits. Two thousand years later Riordan brings back to

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life the Olympians and invests them once again with human qualities and deficiencies in the literal Homeric fashion (Aphrodite and Ares are still having an affair, to name one example). Creating enclosures of allegorical reality within this fictive world (in which a hotel in Vegas becomes as fantastic as Daedalus’ labyrinth) enables him to deliver penetrating social and cultural messages without compromising the aesthetic dimension of the text. The young hero and thereupon the reader is invited to examine current cultural values and reevaluate the world he inhabits. Furthermore, the allegorical technique enables him to reinstall in the contemporary Western world meaning and values, thus resisting its blind drift into a complete virtual existence (‘I tweet, therefore I am’). The very nature of allegory, as explained by Whitman, rejects the idea of hyperreality, as defined by Eco and Baudrillard, since it requires the existence of a signifier and a signified as well as a delicate relationship between the two. The allegorical technique in Riordan’s text may also be viewed as an ideological reply to Eco’s observations in his description of America’s hyperreality. When Nico explains to his friends that the dying god Pan, in front of them, “is more like a memory” (BL 298), this memory is not a replica like the Venus de Milo in the Palace of Living Arts in Los Angeles; reproduced in colored wax and with added arms (Eco, “Travels” 20). This image fulfills the Palace’s philosophy: “We are giving you the reproduction so you will no longer feel any need for the original” (ibid. 19). The ‘memory status’ of the great god Pan, within the crystal cave, is not a replica but an allegory of the state of nature, the wild places, which can be reconstructed and recharged with true life and meaning – so that the spirit, the essence of a thing, may live on in others. Thus, it seems to me that the capacities and flexibility of the ancient rhetorical device embodied by the allegorical mode are quite illuminating and promising even in an age which celebrates, concurrently, both the briefest modes of communication and ceaseless empty discourses. Works Cited Apollodorus. The Library of Greek Mythology. Trans. Robin Hard. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Baudrillard, Jean. “Virtuality and Events: The Hell of Power.” Trans. Chris Turner. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 3.2 (2006): n.pag. Web. 6 Dec 2010. . —. “Absolute Advertising, Ground-Zero Advertising.” Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. 87-94.

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—. “The Precession of Simulacra.” Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. 1-42. —. “Value’s Last Tango.” Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. 155-57. —. America. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1988. Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Trans. G. H. McWilliam. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961. Calvino, Italo. “Why Read the Classics?” Why Read the Classics? Trans. Martin McLaughlin. London: Vintage, 1999. 3-9. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De Natura Deorum; Academica. Trans. H. Rackham. London: Heinemann, 1933. Dio Chrysostom. “The Eighth Discourse, On Virtue.” Dio Chrysostom. Trans. J.W. Cohoon. Vol. I. London: Heinemann, 1932. 375-99. Copeland, Rita, and Peter T. Struck, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Allegory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Dodds, E.R. “On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex.” Greek Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. Erich Segal. New York: Harper, 1983.177-88. —. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: U of California P, 1951. Eco, Umberto, et al. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Eco, Umberto. “Travels in Hyperreality.” Travels in Hyperreality. Trans. William Weaver. San Diego: Harcourt, 1986. 1-58. —. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. London: Macmillan, 1984. Edmunds, Lowell. “The Sphinx in the Oedipus Legend.” Oedipus: A Folklore Casebook. Ed. Lowell Edmunds and Alan Dundes. New York: Garland, 1983. 147-73. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1957. Glasner, Lily. “The Jewish Pardes Metaphor as Reflected in the Magical Garden of a Christian Knight.” Interaction between Judaism and Christianity in History, Religion, Art and Literature. Ed. Marcel Poorthis, Joshua Schwartz and Joseph Turner. Leiden: Brill, 2009. 219-35. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. The Romance of the Rose. Trans. Frances Horgan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Heraclitus. Heraclitus: Homeric Problems. Ed. & Trans. Donald A. Russell and David Konstan. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. Intro. & notes Bernard Knox. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. —. The Odyssey. Trans. Albert Cook. New York: Norton, 1993.

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Konstan, David. Introduction. Heraclitus: Homeric Problems. By Heraclitus. Leiden: Brill, 2005. xi-xxx. Knox. B.M.W. Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and His Time. New Edition. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. Laird, Andrew. “Figures of Allegory from Homer to Latin Epic.” Metaphor, Allegory, and the Classical Tradition: Ancient Thought and Modern Revisions. Ed. G.R. Boys-Stones. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. 151-75. Lewis, C.S. “To MRS Hook [from The Kilns, 29 Dec. 1958].” Letters of C.S. Lewis: Edited and with a Memoir by W.H. Lewis. Rev. and enl. Edition. Ed. Walter Hooper. Orlando: Harcourt, 1988. 475-76. —. “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said.” Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories. Ed. Walter Hooper. San Diego: Harcourt, 1966. 35-38. Plato. Cratylus. Trans. C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998. Popescu, Carmen. “Space, Time: Identity.” National Identities 8.3 (2006): 189206. Riordan, Rick. Percy Jackson and the Last Olympian. London: Puffin, 2009. —. Percy Jackson and the Battle of the Labyrinth. London: Puffin, 2008. —. Percy Jackson and the Titan’s Curse. London: Puffin, 2007. —. The Sea of Monsters. New York: Miramax Books, 2006. —. The Lightning Thief. New York: Miramax Books, 2005. Schmitz, Leonhard. “Hestia.” A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Ed. William Smith. Vol. 2. London: Murray, 1880. Sophocles. Oedipus the King. Trans. & commentary Thomas Gould. London: Prentice-Hall, 1970. Swift, L.A. “Sexual and Familial Distortion in Euripides’ Phoenissae.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 139 (2009): 53-87. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. “Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex.” Greek Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. Erich Segal. New York: Harper, 1983. 189-209. Vitruvius. Ten Books on Architecture. Trans. Ingrid D. Rowland. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Whitman, Jon. Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.

“Real adventures weren’t about Hogwarts and Muggles” Intertextual References in Amanda Hemingway’s Sangreal-Trilogy ANNE KLAUS “Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (Kristeva 66). These words by Julia Kristeva from 1967, which radicalize Michail Bachtin’s precursor concept of dialogism (cf. Latham 214), probably form the most often quoted definition when it comes to the concept of ‘intertextuality’. The phenomenon naturally is as old as literature itself. The thesis is that every text is influenced by previous texts and in one way or the other incorporates them. A text cannot exist as a self-sufficient whole because “the writer is a reader of texts (in the broadest sense) before s/he is a creator of texts, and therefore the work of art is inevitably shot through with references, quotations and influences of every kind” (Still and Worton 1). The inevitability of prior texts influencing their literary successors has also been pointed out by Harold Bloom, who saw in this interaction the potential for an artistic evolution (cf. Middeke 227). Don Latham emphasises: “No text can escape being intertextual, even if the author wanted it to, but some texts are more overtly, more consciously intertextual than others.” (214) This assumption certainly applies to fantasy fiction for young adults, which frequently feeds from archetypal motifs taken from mythology, legends, fairy tales or the Bible. Amanda Hemingway (also using the pseudonym of Jan Siegel) belongs to the authors who openly and unabashedly dip into the “cauldron of stories” as Tolkien calls it (cf. Cairney 478) or, in Philip Pullman’s words, she is one of the authors who read like a butterfly and write like a bee (cf. 533). In her Sangreal-trilogy, published between 2004 and 2006, Hemingway develops a compelling variation of the Arthurian legends and thus creates a subliminal frame of intertextuality. Her three volumes, The Greenstone Grail, The Traitor’s Sword (aka The Sword of Straw in the USA), and The Poisoned Crown1, 1

In the following, short reference to the novels will be to GG, TS and PC respectively.

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feature the adolescent protagonist Nathan, born under mysterious circumstances that very much remind the reader of the immaculate conception of the Bible. The young adult discovers his extraordinary ability to dream himself into other universes. Eventually he finds himself destined to seek mythical relics from other planets and transport them into his own world to prevent evil forces getting their hands on them. In accordance with the rhythm of the traditional quest, Nathan retrieves one artefact per volume, these being the Grimthorn Grail (aka the Greenstone Grail), which he fetches from the dying world of Eos, the Traitor’s Sword from wooden Wilderslee, and finally the Iron Crown from the planet of Widewater. Together the three objects will be needed for a Great Spell, the exact outcome of which remains unknown to Nathan until the very end. Especially the first relic, the Grail, is clearly evocative of the Arthurian Legends and the Holy Grail. While Nathan goes on his quests into the other worlds to retrieve the three objects of power, evil forces are trying to get a hold on him in his real world, too, leading to mysterious incidents and murders in his small town near London. Only with the support of his friends, his devoted mother and a wise old mentor, Bartlemy – the typical Merlin avatar – is Nathan able to accomplish his task. So far, Hemingway’s Sangreal trilogy might not strike the reader as being particularly exceptional. The tripartite gather-quest can be placed firmly in the tradition of the fairy tale and the repetition of famous motifs from legends and mythology in modern fantasy fiction is fairly common as well. Fantasy literature for children and young adults seems especially to be saturated with Merlin-derivatives. Hemingway plays on the function of her ageless, “fat and placid and kindly” (GG 17) wizard Bartlemy by having him wear an “enormous dark-blue dressing-gown with stars on it” (TS 12), a clear jesting commentary on the popular image of the magician. Hemingway shows an obvious awareness of the tradition her Merlin-avatar is built upon which borders on metafiction. By modeling her tutor playfully on the popular Merlin figure Hemingway deliberately and ironically evokes a set of fixed associations and makes the reader reflect upon the prototypical cast of fantasy fiction. Apart from these underlying patterns, Hemingway’s narrative is spiced up with numerous direct references to 21st century pop culture as well as to various fantasy predecessors. How is the reading experience changed by these obvious nods to other works of literature? What does Hemingway accomplish with her overt use of intertextuality? Firstly, unlike many writers of high fantasy who locate the action of their works in alternative and rather archaic settings, Hemingway introduces readers to the possibility of fantastic scenarios in a modern context, as to be found in the sub-genre of fantasy, ‘urban fantasy’, defined by John Clute

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and John Grant as “texts where fantasy and the mundane world intersect” (975). In Hemingway’s work, the city does not become a character of its own as in genuine urban fantasy, her trilogy is not “significantly about a real city” (ibid.), but the supernatural coexists with mundane Britain as it does in the works of for example China Miéville. The surroundings of Hemingway’s protagonist Nathan are “not just […] a backdrop” (ibid.) but become a “natural venue” (ibid. 976). Hemingway hardly ever misses an opportunity to emphasise that Nathan is a typical contemporary British youngster and city dweller. He drinks coke (GG 27) which his mum buys at the local “Sainsbury’s” (ibid. 188), uses a mobile phone with a “Pay-As-You-Go deal” (TS 87), plays Nintendo (PC 200) and watches Neighbours (TS 200), goes to McDonald’s (GG 133) or Café Nero (PC 27) during the day, and to a new disco at night where one of the other teenager’s is caught selling “E” (GG 81). People around him drive BMWs (ibid. 267) or the new look Volkswagen Beetle (TS 78) and can call the AA (PC 72) if they have a problem with their cars. They have Aga kitchen equipment (GG 37), clean their houses with Dyson vacuums (ibid. 340), and look up phone numbers in the Yellow Pages (PC 28) or google them (ibid. 289). By accommodating a whole range of these up-to-date brand names into her three volumes and by including real place names like London or Crawley, Hemingway leaves no doubt that Nathan’s world is mimetically reproducing 21st century Britain. She establishes a putative real world in contemporary times and thus reconciles the familiar with the unfamiliar supernatural. Those readers still not convinced about the actuality of Hemingway’s setting find bold criticism of George W. Bush’s presidency on various occasions, such as when Nathan is involved in a discussion with his best friend Hazel about the ethos of the ruler of the other world Eos: ‘He’s ruthless […] but not cold-hearted. He only kills when he has to. He’s trying to save his whole world […]. Life isn’t like the movies. Even in this world, rulers have to make decisions that get people killed, if the survival of their country is at stake.’ ‘Like George Bush and the Americans invading Iraq?’ Hazel said with heavy sarcasm. (PC 104)

Hemingway sacrifices the largely timeless scenario which frames traditional fantasy fiction in favour of a setting that is anchored in determinable contemporary times and that consequently also allows for pert criticism of current social and political issues. Her references establish Nathan as mirror image of the critical, curious teenage reader of Hemingway’s books and provide points for identification. Nathan’s world seems to be as real as can be. Allusions to science and physics additionally give his world plausibility, if not probability. Until Nathan finds out about his unusual ability to enter other universes in his sleep, he is presented as a down-to-

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earth boy for whom magic and fantastic events are first of all something that can only be encountered in books and movies. Like Hemingway’s readers, Nathan’s access to fantasy is through film and literature, and he initially perceives the two realms ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ to be clearly separated from one another. Thus, he is entrusted with Todorovian moments of hesitation when faced with the supernatural. The same holds for most of his fellows, who when confronted with Nathan’s magical abilities suggest that he has “been watching too many science-fiction films” (GG 52) and that “[i]t’s all nonsense. Fairytales and fantasy.” (PC 110) The character of the local police officer, Pobjoy, who investigates the mysterious murders in the real world, represents the climax of mundane reasoning, as he is not thoroughly acquainted with science fiction, myths and fantasy. He remains sceptical when hearing about Nathan’s expeditions into other worlds and calls it preposterous, perhaps not a direct lie but some sort of bizarre juvenile exaggeration, Harry Potter syndrome […], a condition where children imagined they were living in a magical world populated by wizards and monsters. (PC 217)

His practical commonsense also prevents him from grasping the village talk about supernatural powers following the mysterious murders and about ‘loreleys’, the beautiful maidens who lure sailors to their doom. He asks Nathan’s mother Annie: ‘How come everyone knows about these things except me?’ ‘It depends what books you read when you were a child,’ Annie said. ‘Most of us get through Hans Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, the Chronicles of Narnia… Tolkien, Alan Garner, Roger Launcelyn Green. What did you read?’ ‘Sherlock Holmes.’ ‘Good stuff,’ Annie said. ‘I read those too. But if you’re going to go chasing loreleys, you’ve got some catching up to do.’ (TS 258)

In the third volume, The Poisoned Crown, it is again stressed that Pobjoy “had read few of the right books but had once inadvertently watched a documentary on the making of Narnia” (77). In contrast, in a later scene Hemingway acknowledges that the young protagonist Nathan “had read a lot of the right books – he’d read about spells that make heroes invincible and invulnerable” (308f.). It is always works which belong to the fantasy genre that Hemingway labels “the right books” according to her self-made category. At times, her narrative reads like an advertising campaign for reading in general, such as when Nathan declares “If we know a story is made up, then it doesn’t matter. It’s good. We learn from stories.” (GG 132) According to Nathan’s mother Annie, police officer Pobjoy needs to read fantasy to think more creatively and thus make the necessary links in his investigations – to introduce him to fantasy literature, she provides him with copies of The Wind in the Willows (PC 357), The Midnight Folk and Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards! (ibid. 368). Just as it is expected of Pobjoy that he acquaints

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himself with “the right books”, the reader of Hemingway’s trilogy needs to know various works of fantasy literature to get the best out of her narrative. The knowledge of previously published ubiquitous fantasies is not only acknowledged but used as a prerequisite to understanding the ironic nuances of her text. Various fantasy works of literature and cinema are referred to directly by their title and are therefore easily recognisable as such. Thus, for example, the wizard Bartlemy’s dog Hoover is said to be “like Nana in Peter Pan” (GG 14) or like Scooby-Doo (ibid. 152) in a later scene. When Nathan receives a phial with an enchanted potion, he comments: “Drink me […] Like Alice in Wonderland. Maybe I’ll shrink to the size of a plankton” (PC 272). When he encounters the merfolk in the other world of Widewater, he is strongly reminded of Andersen’s Little Mermaid (cf. PC 296), and his mother Annie, when visiting their new neighbours and hearing that the wife lives in her own tower for which not even her husband has a key, thinks of “Bluebeard’s Chamber” “stacked with the bodies of her exhusbands” (GG 38), an intuitive association which proves not to be that far-fetched after all. The examples are versatile and almost endless, ranging from folkloric sources, such as the Scarborough Fair lyrics (cf. PC 168), to Shakespeare’s Hamlet (ibid. 56), The Tempest (ibid. 181) and Macbeth (ibid. 156), to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “A Musical Instrument”, to Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple crime novels (cf. ibid 194). References to works of fantasy, however, make up the largest slice of the intertextual pie. While book and movie titles are easily identifiable for the reader, there are other hints and allusions to famous works that are woven more intricately into the fabric of Hemingway’s narrative. These literary works are not referred to by their titles but rather by character and place names, famous quotes or patterns and might consequently only be detected by attentive bookworms who are acquainted with the respective stories. Jill Tedford Jones comments: “In all cases, the writer depends on the reader to remember and recognize the host text” (81). The question arises whether Hemingway’s exclusive target group is children and young adults after all. Thus, only for readers of Brontë’s Jane Eyre will the neighbour’s following remark to Nathan’s mother about his wife in her private tower of the house ring a bell: “If she is going mad, maybe I could lock her in the attic, go all dark and brooding, and you and I could…Sorry” (GG 297). Only readers of the Alice books will recognise the mother’s remark “Curiouser and curiouser” (GG 115) and it needs at least a slight familiarity with Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to spot the straightforward allusion in the description: “Nathan was a down-to-earth boy who had yet to find a magical country at the back of the wardrobe, so it was unnerving for him to find one in his head” (TS 1) or in the accusation “You want Narnia to stay in the ward-

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robe” (ibid. 64). When Nathan finds himself wearing his pyjamas after having entered another universe in his sleep, the narrator jokingly comments: And of course, he was wearing pyjamas – the curse of travellers in other worlds, from the children who followed Peter Pan into Neverland, to Arthur Dent on his galatic voyages. He wasn’t particularly fashion-minded but he really didn’t want to meet the princess [that is a princess of another universe] for the first time as a pyjama-clad spectre. ‘I am the ghost of Christmas Past’, he said to himself with a sigh. (TS 90)

In this paragraph, Hemingway alludes to the works of Barrie, Douglas Adams, and Charles Dickens and thus reveals how dense her narrative really is. It is mainly in moments when they step into the magic realm or encounter supernatural forces that Hemingway’s characters are reminded of the fantasy works they have read. The contents of the novels thrust themselves repeatedly upon them. By embodying characters as readers who think about, discuss and perform acts of reading, the role of the reader in general is made a topic. Hemingway pays close attention to being authentic in that her adult characters see analogies with the classics primarily, while Nathan’s associations as a youngster additionally involve slightly more recent works and cinematic influences, such as Star Wars. It is usually in dialogues and in free indirect discourse that Hemingway makes use of the device of intertextuality, thus rendering the main characters’ comparisons of their own adventures with their famous predecessors. Although detecting similarities, Hemingway’s characters repeatedly feel that the literary heroes do not always stand up to comparison with their ‘real life’ and cannot fully function as role models. Her characters come to the conclusion that “life isn’t like stories” (TS 200) and that magic does not work the way they have encountered it in popular fiction. Nathan’s friend Hazel, who tries to work magic, plays the “theme music from Lord of the Rings [because] she had hoped it would be suitably atmospheric” and lights a candle because “[i]n Buffy, Willow always lit candles when she was doing magic” (TS 42). But alas, nothing happens (TS 43). Protagonist Nathan, fighting against a huge Urdemon in one of the other universes (TS 93) also feels betrayed by the unrealistic smooth course in The Lord of the Rings: “This was a moment when you needed an elvish star-glass, and words like Elbereth! Gilthoniel!” (TS 93) – but Nathan cannot think of an equivalent of this Elvish hymn to help him. To Nathan it feels as if he has had to suffer more hardship than the heroes of the books he has read and that the choices he has to make are far more difficult than in popular fiction. He, for instance, reflects that “real adventures weren’t about Hogwarts and Muggles and good guys and bad guys. Real adventures were shadows and confusion and doubt, and a terrifying personal responsibility” (GG 76f.). On the surface it certainly seems

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as if Amanda Hemingway feels a personal grudge against Rowling’s Harry Potter series, as she also has her young characters make each other pay “10 p in the forfeit box for mentioning the H-word” (TS 140). Her treatment of the Harry Potter books, however, is completely in line with her overall ironic tone. Thus, when his ‘uncle’ Bartlemy gives Nathan the advice to go to bed “with a very dull book” (TS 216) to make sure he will sleep, Nathan decides that “Walter Scott was dull enough (The Heart of Midlothian), besides being full of people speaking Scottish. The print was small, the paragraphs long, the pages thin and crinkly” (TS 220). By drawing comparisons to the fantasy stories they have read, the young adults realize again and again that they are no “fairytale [heroes], rubbing a lamp to get a genie. This was the real world (or at least, this was a real world) where rubbing a lamp gave you nothing but a cleaner lamp” (TS 44). Hemingway thus lays a veil of real-life experiences on her fantasy trilogy. Modern technology, common sense and supernatural events are juxtaposed and enter an interplay, as do reality and fiction when Hemingway’s (fictional) characters relate situations in their lives to the ones they have encountered in books, and contemplate the realness of those imaginary characters and scenarios. The reader of Hemingway’s work, however, never forgets that the overall structure and the ground layer of Hemingway’s narrative is pure fantasy itself. By having her characters tread and sometimes question well-worn fantasy paths, Hemingway shows her awareness of the tradition she is building upon. Wittingly engaging in a play with former fantasy works and literary conventions, the author raises an awareness of her trilogy belonging to the fantasy genre as well. In this respect, the author’s overt intertextual allusions offer room for some playful treatment of literary patterns and thus reach the border of metafictionality. With their narrative self-consciousness and their playful nature, Hemingway’s three stories meet Martin Horstkotte’s definition of metafiction as “fiction that provides a self-conscious commentary on its own fictionality” (138). The metafictional potential of Hemingway’s work becomes most obvious when she lets her characters comment “We’re looking for the classic movie villain, right?” (TS 32) or “Don’t you know the stories? […] There is always a price. The mermaid who sold her voice to turn her fishtail into legs, the prince who toiled seven years to break a witch’s spell…” (TS 45). Hemingway’s characters thus not only show that they are acquainted with specific works of fantasy but reveal their awareness of more general literary patterns and genre conventions. During their first encounter in the world of Nathan’s dreams, the princess recounts a legend about a mysterious stranger “– a prince, or a knight –” (TS 190):

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“[A]nd his heart will be so pure he’ll heal the king at a touch, and end the curse, and he’ll be the one man who can lift the sword and subdue the evil in it. Of course, we don’t know if my father’s the king in the legend. […]” “This prince,” Nathan said, “does he get to marry the princess as well?” “Naturally.” “It figures.” “Are you – are you pure in heart?” she inquired doubtfully. “No. I’m not a prince or a knight, either. I can’t heal your father at a touch and we’re going to have real problems with the sword. Apart from that – “ “You’re a mysterious stranger,” the princess pointed out. “One out of four isn’t bad. And mysterious strangers are in short supply around here.” “I think we’d better forget about the legend […] We haven’t got the cast.” (TS 190)

Here, the typical plot structure of legends and fairy tales with their knights in shining armour who come to rid the kingdom from evil and are rewarded with the princess’s hand in marriage are exposed with a wink. Hemingway thus revives and cultivates a tradition in children’s fantasy literature, which can already be found, for example, in fairy tale parodies from the Victorian era, such as Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring, but is more prominently traceable in the works of E. Nesbit (cf. Kullmann 160f.). Yet, despite her ironic disclosures of prototypical generic structures, Hemingway does not refrain from treading the same well-worn paths in the long run. For instance, Nathan indeed ends up gaining the sword, healing the princess’s father and falling in love with the princess. Thus, the traditional patterns are not so much deconstructed as they are signposted pointedly. To recapitulate, Hemingway adds her personal flavour to the fantasy genre in a threefold way: First, with her contemporary setting, Hemingway – just like writers of urban fantasy – meets the readers in their own worlds and presents them with a protagonist who is one of them, with his scepticism, and failures as well as with his acquaintance with popular literature and movies. Maria Nikolajeva detects an overall trend in postmodern fiction that “contemporary characters tend to become more like ‘real people’, appearing on lowmimetic and ironic levels” (“Harry Potter” 136). Secondly, by “alluding to figures with whom the reader is assumed to be familiar” (Nicolajeva, Rhetoric 280) Hemingway shows faith in her audience as thoughtful, intelligent readers who will spot the intertextual references or, if not, might be encouraged to read and reflect on a variety of texts, from folk tales to poems and plays, but preferably what she terms “the right books”, that is books belonging to the fantasy genre. To some extent her works can thus contribute to the initiation of young readers to the ‘canon’ of fantasy literature. By drawing comparisons of her own fantasy trilogy with works of literature of the same literary tradition, Hemingway also places her work in this canon. She invites the readers to recognise

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the interrelationship between a variety of texts. Those “wishing to gloss over” Hemingway’s references can do so “without losing the thread of the narrative” (Latham 225). For those readers who recognize the connections, however, a richer, enhanced reading experience awaits (cf. ibid.). If successful, a ‘strong bond of complicity’ (Malarte-Feldman 210) between readers and authors is forged. It is precisely these intertextual, metafictional insinuations that apparently make Hemingway’s novels attractive for a dual audience of young adults and adults. No scholarly research on her trilogy has been undertaken so far, but as reviews of the Sangreal trilogy reveal, adults enjoy the “hilarious” (cf. Fontaine, n.pag.) interludes and the “wholly original effect” (cf. Strauss, n.pag.) of Hemingway’s blending technique. The reviewer Victoria Strauss, or example, comments: “Though marketed as YA, the Sangreal Trilogy is a crossover work that can be enjoyed equally by adults.” The shifting boundaries between children’s and adult literature constitute a significant trend in contemporary literature. The crossover phenomenon accords with C.S. Lewis’s often-cited dictum: “I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story” (quoted in Beckett xvii). Thirdly, through her intentional engagement with previous texts Hemingway raises an awareness of literary conventions, especially of the fantasy genre itself, and presents her own work as a literary construct. Her selfirony shines through when she consciously hurls the readers out of their absorption with the storyline and makes them think about genre conventions. “In metafiction it is precisely the fulfilment as well as the non-fulfilment of generic expectations that provides both familiarity and the starting point for innovation” (Waugh 64). While once in a while Hemingway distorts the traditional fantasy patterns, overall she faithfully follows the common fabrication (e.g. her tripartite quest structure, the Merlin avatar, the salvation of a kingdom etc.). Yet, the author does not merely apply but draws attention to these patterns. Hemingway not so much defies genre conventions or transgresses generic boundaries but interrupts the narrative flow to include self-reflexive comments on the fantasy tradition she is building upon. Each fantastic element is consciously negotiated and foregrounded, either by the narrator or by the characters themselves. Hemingway thus engages with the fantasy tradition, alternating embracing and questioning it. This mode of writing, which clearly can be termed metafictional, provides, as Joe Sutliff Sanders stresses, “a pea – or, if that fails, a pumpkin – beneath the mattress that causes the formerly comfortable reader to stir” (350).

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Works Cited Beckett, Sandra. “Introduction” Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults. Ed. Sandra Beckett. New York: Garland, 1999. Cairney, Trevor. “Intertextuality: Infectious echoes from the past”. Read-

ing Teacher 43.7 (1990): 478-84.

Clute, John, and John Grant, eds. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Fontaine, Nancy. “The Greenstone Grail: Amanda Hemingway.” Review. 2006. Web. 20 Aug 2010. . Hemingway, Amanda. The Greenstone Grail. 2004. New York: Del Rey, 2006. —. The Traitor’s Sword. 2005. London: Harper, 2006. —. The Poisoned Crown. 2006. London: Harper, 2007. Horstkotte, Martin. The Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary British Fiction. Trier: WVT, 2004.

Jones, J. T. “Depending on Memory: Intertextuality in Popular Fiction.” Journal of American & Comparative Cultures 25.1/2 (2002): 81-4.

Kristeva, Julia. “Word, Dialogue and Novel”. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia UP, 1980: 64-91. Kullmann, Thomas. Englische Kinder- und Jugendliteratur: Eine Einführung. Berlin: Schmidt, 2008. Latham, Don. “Empowering Adolescent Readers: Intertextuality in Three Novels by David Almond.” Children’s Literature in Education 39.3

(2008): 213-26.

Malarte-Feldman, Claire. “Folk Materials, Re-Visions, and Narrative Images: The Intertextual Games They Play”. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 28.4 (2003): 210-18. Middeke, Martin. “Intertextualität/Transtextualität: Funktionen und hermeneutische Tiefenstruktur.” Theorien der Literatur. Grundlagen und Perspektiven. Bd. 2. Ed. Hans Vilmar Geppert and Hubert Zapf. Tübingen: Narr, 2005. 225-42. Nikolajeva, Maria. The Rhetoric of Characters in Children’s Literature. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2002. —. “Harry Potter: A Return to the Romantic Hero.” Harry Potter’s World: Multidisciplinary Critical Perspectives. Ed. Elizabeth Heilman. New York: Routledge, 2003. 125-40. Pullman, Philip. “Acknowledgements.” The Amber Spyglass. 2000. London: Scholastic, 2007. 533-34. Still, Judith and Michael Worton. “Introduction.” Intertextuality: Theories and Practices. Ed. Michael Worton and Judith Still. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993. 1-44.

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Strauss, Victoria. “The Poisoned Crown.” Review. SF Site. 2007. Web. 20 Aug 2010. . Sutliff Sanders, Joe. “The Critical Reader in Children’s Metafiction.” The Lion and the Unicorn 33.3 (2009): 349-61. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Routledge, 2003.

On Alien Alders The “Erl-King” Inspirations in Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher Saga JUSTYNA DESZCZ-TRYHUBCZAK AND AGATA ZARZYCKA 1. Intertextuality in Fantasy Fiction The publication of Andrzej Sapkowski’s debut short-story “The Witcher” in 1986, which gave rise to the famous Witcher saga, was seen by Polish critics as a welcome sign in the development of Polish fantasy. As Krzysztof Uniłowski comments in his article “Łorginalność, czyli coś się kończy, coś się zaczyna,”1 the lack of a Polish tradition of fantasy fiction seemed to negate any chance for the “native” growth of the genre without a strong reliance on Anglo-Saxon models. Sapkowski’s short-story however proved such misgivings unfounded by creating an original fantastic world marked by inspirations from both Western and Slavic literature, sometimes outward, sometimes implicit, but at all times highly self-conscious and controlled. Today he is, after Stanisław Lem, the most frequently translated Polish author of speculative fiction.2 As Polish critics note, what ensured Sapkowski a phenomenal success was – apart from authentic and humorous dialogues, engaging plots, and a rapport with readers – his fondness of playful intertextual references to well-known folk and literary motifs, adeptly used to build the world of the saga. As Anna Misztak points out in her article “Andrzeja Sapkowskiego krótka historia zapożyczeń,”3 in Sapkowski’s case intertextuality should be understood in its broadest sense, as rhizomatic, palimpsest relations not only among generic and stylistic conventions but actually among all kinds of cultural products, within literature and beyond it. Interestingly, despite an initially positive reception, the typically postmodern “citational hybridity” (Butler 89) of Sapkowski’s fiction has been 1 2 3

Polish title in translation: “Fake Originality: Something Ends, Something Begins.” All translations of quotations from Polish sources are ours. It is also worth noting that in 2009 Sapkowski won the first David Gemmell Legend Award for Fantasy, established in Britain to promote awareness for the genre. Polish title in translation: “Andrzej Sapkowski’s Short Story of Borrowings.”

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viewed with suspicion if not sarcastic contempt. For Madgalena Roszczynialska, Sapkowski clearly aims at gaining a reading clientele by self-stylization consisting in assuming “charming artsy manners” and “an air of literary connoisseurship”; whilst he “communes with unsophisticated readers by quoting, paraphrasing and imitating the canon of Polish and foreign literature. His tactics are aimed at profit and, without a doubt, at entertaining himself” (“Postmodernistyczne łowy”, n.pag.).4 Still, as we claim, Sapkowski’s intertextual strategy does not detract from the potential of the saga to engage the knowledge and worldviews of the audience, as it can be seen as productive of much more than the mere enjoyment of deciphering the variety of allusions. We propose to verify the above by approaching Sapkowski’s uses of Goethe’s “Erl-King” in the light of Brian Attebery’s concept of contemporary fantasy as a postmodern genre subverting cultural heritage and constituting “a mix of history, legend, and literary sources [that] generates a narrative of seemingly inexhaustible fertility” (Strategies 124). Such a theoretical context in turn enables us to look at Sapkowski’s uses of the ballad’s imagery as a transition from the clash of the rational and irrational worldviews, ascribed to Goethe’s poem as a Romantic work, towards the representation of the complex relationships between the self and the other. For Brian Attebery, one of the most salient aspects of fantasy fiction is “the cultural work performed by the genre,” consisting in the archaeological discovery and recycling of traditional stories, similar to a characteristic postmodern practice of “a return to early narrative forms – the fairy tale movements and mythic structures that never really disappeared from more popular forms of literature – but with an awareness of their artificiality” (ibid. 40). In this sense, just as does postmodernism, which aims at contesting established truths and proposing controversial viewpoints, fantasy becomes a form of cultural criticism. For Attebery, “it is an acknowledgement that the great cultural narratives that shape the world are, after all, texts” (“Stories” 30), which in turn alerts readers to the necessity of active and critical reception of any texts they encounter. Moreover, Attebery argues, the exposure of “the arbitrariness of narrative choices” facilitates the selfrenewal of fantastic conventions (Strategies 68), as well as, we might add, an active search for new solutions on the part of writers. Even more importantly, it is through this abundance of resurrected and reapplied stories that we can learn about “those parts of ourselves that defy any other means of analysis” (ibid. 50). And this is so because, Attebery writes: [r]ather than leaving us in a solipsistic world, fantasy invites us to recreate what it has denied. As soon as it is announced that the world we are reading about bears no relation to our world, we begin to make connections. […] By forcing a recog4

Polish title in translation: “Postmodern Hunt.”

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nition of the arbitrariness of all such narrative conventions, fantasy reminds us of how useful they are […] in formulating our own imaginative understanding of our existence in time, which can only be comprehended through narrative. (ibid. 67)

As Attebery concludes, “[t]he storytellers of our own particular tribe [i.e. writers of fantasy] also need to ‘indulge in a playful attitude, a combinatorial game that may at a certain stage take on preconscious content and give it voice’“ (ibid. 50).5 In this light, Sapkowski ranks among those fantasy authors who are interested in making fantasy comment on the way in which both writers and readers use fiction to understand the world outside the story. Sapkowski initiates such an engagement with fiction and the extratextual world by using the presence of intertextual references to create a cognitive space in which the reader both is subject to the effects of intertextuality and interacts with the intertext, creating, in a characteristically postmodern manner, “a new readerly universe of signification” (Symons 11). Hence, the eclecticism permeating Sapkowski’s fiction does not consist in entertainment for its own sake, but rather in the common goal of the reader and the writer of searching for answers to burning and challenging questions. 2. Otherness or Anotherness The same activity of the readerly negotiation with the text was performed by Sapkowski himself in his reading and reinterpretation of Goethe’s ballad. Sapkowski’s inspiration by Goethe’s poem does not appear to be very extended and in the tangible dimension of the text itself can be reduced to: one seemingly random and stand-alone allusion to the legend itself; one or two linguistic references to the name of the Alder King, reigning over the Alder People; and finally a rather general plot parallel based on the motif of a human child being chased by elves. Still, a careful analysis of Goethe’s Erlking and Sapkowski’s Auberon reveals a number of further-reaching similarities between those two characters, the crucial one being their connection with liminality and otherness, understood literally as non-humanity.6 Our main claim is, however, that the actual realization of the function of the other by each of the fairy rulers is the source of a significant difference 5 6

In this excerpt Attebery quotes from Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, 1977. 81. In order to clarify the distinction between Goethe’s and Sapkowski’s protagonists, throughout this essay the former is called the Erlking, and the latter the Alder King or Auberon. We have preserved the alternative spelling “Erl-King,” as it appears in the 1859 translation from German, whenever Goethe’s poem is mentioned.

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between them, mostly due to the fact that, while the original Erlking can easily be inscribed in the discourse of otherness, Auberon responds better to the concept of anotherness, as postulated by an ecocritical and feminist scholar, Patrick D. Murphy, for example in his Literature, Nature and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques. Murphy’s idea relies on switching the focus on the other from emphasizing their opposition to the self to emphasizing their right to equality and partnership, as the self and the other exist together on “[a] continuum in which difference exists without binary opposition and hierarchical valorization” (5). In other words, the abandonment of such attributes of the conventional depiction of the other as, in Murphy’s words, “permanent incompleteness and prematurity, communicative incommensurability and binary constructs” (“Anotherness” 40), turns the other into the an-other and develops a mutual dependence between them and the self, who also becomes an an-other in the ecologically motivated network of coexistence.7 Hence the main innovation introduced by the perspective of anotherness is that it encourages, as Murphy puts it, “a cross-cultural comparative analysis rather than a comparative cultural analysis from the traditional center-margin orientation” (ibid. 43). It is to be noticed that, while Murphy founds his concept on the factor of complementation rather than opposition inscribed in otherness, the importance of that factor has also been acknowledged by a number of other scholars. Diana Fuss, for instance, emphasizes that “[e]very outside is also an alongside” (5), though her focus is on the relations between sexual identities. Viewed in such terms, the significance of the character of Auberon, as well as Sapkowski’s play with the Erlking’s trope, is that it not only reflects, in a way, the process of transformation from the other to the another, but also that it underlines several surprisingly controversial aspects of that process, as well as raising certain difficult questions about the principles and limits of coexistence. Namely, the recognition of the another’s equality inevitably leads to the acceptance of not only their advantages, but also their flaws, which, as exemplified in the Witcher saga, may transpire to be severe indeed. Thus, focusing on the shifting power relations between Sapkowski’s humans and elves, the humanization of the latter and their question7

To a certain extent, Murphy’s idea of anotherness might, therefore, be inscribed in the approach to otherness developed by Emmanuel Levinas. Still, we have decided to focus on the former perspective because, firstly, Murphy’s concept, ecocritical in origin, deals with the non-human as well as human (an)otherness while Levinas remains preoccupied with the human other. Moreover, Levinas’s approach to otherness invites a consideration in ethical terms, which in our discussion of Sapkowski’s novels gives way to a perspective of an ecological balance, as clarified by the end of the essay. For a recent commentary on Levinas, situating his work in the context of global justice, feminism, environmentalism, animal liberation, postcolonialism, radical democracy, technology, cybernetics, and psychotherapy, see Atterton and Calarco.

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able ethical constitution, this study poses and, to a certain extent, answers the following question: Are the others deserving in some way of being granted the status of the another, and having to meet certain basic demands or should they be accepted as they are, even if such an acceptance makes the self face up to some difficult truths? The otherness of Goethe’s Erlking responds well to the notion of self and other as “interdependent, mutually determinable constructs” (Murphy, Literature 5) even though it is, at least to a certain extent, described by critics in terms of binary oppositions, such as the “father and son, male and female, life and death”, or “natural and fantastic” (Gibbs 117; 128). The actual power of the Erlking’s figure lies, according to Christopher H. Gibbs, in its liminality (cf. 129), while the whole poem’s reference to what Geoffrey H. Hartman calls “the no-man’s-land between natural and demonic” (404) corresponds to general tendencies in the evolution of otherness in the scope of fantasy literature, as traced by Rosemary Jackson in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. She observes a gradual drift of the other expressed in fantastic terms as a supernatural, non-human creature from the manifestation of alien malevolent powers hunting for human beings to the representation of impulses or phenomena which are in fact a usually unnoticed inherent part of the familiar world (53-55). Although this incorporation occurs, first of all, through the recognition of the other as an “unconscious desire” (55) or, in other words, a hidden element of human nature, it also means locating otherness in an unspecified and formless dimension of reality (cf. 56). Jackson refers to the definition of the “demonic” coined by Goethe himself to underline the simultaneously amoral and liminal character of such fantastic imagery in Romanticism: [It is] something which manifests itself only in contradictions, and which, therefore, could not be comprehended under any idea, still less under one word. It [is] not godlike, for it seem[s] unreasonable; not human, for it [has] no understanding; nor devilish, for it [is] beneficent; nor angelic, for it often betray[s] a malicious pleasure. It resemble[s] chance, for it evolve[s] no consequences; it [is] like Providence, for it hint[s] at connection. (Goethe qtd. in Jackson 56)

Jackson concludes as follows: the naming of the demonic reveals a progressive pull towards a recognition of otherness as neither supernatural nor evil but as that which is behind, or between, separating forms and frames. ‘Otherness’ is all that threatens ‘this’ world, this ‘real’ world, with dissolution: and it is this opposition which lies behind the several myths which have developed in the modern fantastic. (57, emphasis in original)

Goethe’s Erlking seems to grasp the essence of otherness as defined above, which is confirmed by Gibbs and his reference to the spirit depicted in the poem as “a figure of uncanny difference” (132), “the uncanny” bearing the Freudian marker of a disturbing factor suspended between consciousness

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and subconsciousness, as well as the known and the unknown (129f.). According to Gibbs the Erlking unbalances the polarities of the human and fantastic, mortal and immortal, male and female, and therefore becomes the site of efforts to deny the unaccountable and to restore the balance to those oppositions. [… B]y containing opposing poles without reconciling them, his presence leaves the disturbing tensions unresolved, and indeed calls their resolution into question. The appearance of the Erlking unsettles not because it bridges oppositions, but because it dismantles them. (129)

Though the Erlking’s otherness depicted in such deconstructive terms clearly escapes moral categories that, as Jackson writes, tended to underlie preRomantic uses of the supernatural, it becomes inscribed in Goethe’s own understanding of the “demonic” as a power in which “[a]ll that limits us […] seem[s] to penetrate; […] to sport at will with the necessary elements of our existence; […] contrac[t] time and expan[d] space” (qtd. in Jackson 56). In this light otherness may be seen as preserving a certain negativity, which derives from its attribute mentioned by Hartman, who claims that “[a] purely demonic ideal […] tends to become eudaemonic: eternal youth is sought for its own sake, not for the sake of a productive life. What the Erl-King promises the child is […] eudaemonia, or arrested youth” (409). Thus, even though the supernatural creature does not reach for the young human from the depth of hell, it remains morally loaded with counterproductiveness. At the same time, such a creation of the Erl-King agrees with the traditional depiction of fairies, which is summed up by Hartman as follows: “[f]airies are frigid: they envy human passionateness and destroy what they envy unless permitted to incorporate with it. In short, they cannot be redeemed except by securing that soul or psyche which they lack” (410, emphasis in original). The full identification of the Erlking’s otherness must also take into account Franz Schubert’s musical interpretation of “The Erl-King.” Deborah Stein locates the power of the ballad, skillfully reinforced by Schubert’s composition, in the growing interference of the mysterious spirit in the tangible reality – an interference which, starting with the subjective perception and imagination of the boy, leads to his actual death (147; 157f.). Gibbs attributes to the composer an even subtler and further-reaching complementation of the vision sketched by Goethe: it actually is Schubert’s interpretation that reveals the Erlking’s in-between status, which undermines contradictions (129) and therefore disturbs the ontological balance. The crucial factor that allows the composer to produce such an effect is the boldly emphasized erotic motif in the ballad – that is, the supernatural creature’s lust for the terrified boy (132). The evocativeness of the sexual undertone of the Erlking’s interference derives from the voluptuous char-

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acter of Schubert’s music (127), and especially from making the phantom, as phrased by Franz Brendel, “sing a lovely human melody” (qtd. in Gibbs 120). That illusory kindness of the actually death-bringing and self-centred creature provides Gibbs with a ground to sum up the character of the Erlking as follows: The strangeness of the Erlking should not be reduced to binary oppositions, to either/or and neither/nor; rather, the Erlking uncannily embodies both/and: both human and supernatural, sweetly alluring and threatening, intimate and profoundly alien. The confusing and fusing Erlking represents what we want most to keep distinct: the separation between life and death, the difference between sexes. (133)

The above definition would to a large extent also match Sapkowski’s Alder King, did he not unmask himself as a character pushed even further in the apparently “humanizing” direction designated by Schubert. As far as the question of familiarity/strangeness is concerned, he drifts away from the other as a fully functional figure of difference towards what may be called a figure of an imperfect anotherness – in some ways “tamed” and deprived of the demonizing uncanny quality, but simultaneously unable to develop a productive relationship with the human child, who in this case is not a young boy, but a teenage girl, Ciri. 3. Difficult Encounters with Anotherness Ciri’s life, full of drama, tragedy, extreme dangers and most extraordinary experiences, all caused by the gradual unfolding of the mystery surrounding her direct familial background and genetic heritage, becomes the plot axis of the Witcher saga. Unaware of her supernatural power over time and space, granted to her by an ancient elvish blood running through her veins, Ciri is followed everywhere by death and destruction, as several powerful factions, mostly of politicians and wizards, struggle to capture her and gain access to the magic which has long been lost to the world. The act of recovering that unique power, unleashing its full potential, and subsequently getting it under control to make it usable, requires the girl to give birth to a child, whose reinforced supernatural abilities would be easy to develop and model from the very beginning, and who at the same time is prophesied to become someone crucial for the future of many nations.8 While Ciri, against the odds, manages to escape virtually all her enemies, 8

Also a more sinister version of the power-gaining process is suggested in the saga when an especially ruthless and cruel sorcerer mentions that all he in fact needs is Ciri’s placental blood and he intends to abort the hypothetical fetus right after obtaining the desired sample (Pani 339f.).

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she achieves it at the price of being moved to a different world, which turns out to be inhabited by an elf tribe calling themselves Alder People and ruled by Auberon Muircetach, also known as the Alder King.9 It turns out that she is a descendant of an elvish sorceress who ages ago fell in love with a human man and left her people, even though she was the carrier of the special magical power over time and space. This power even then was very important for the elves because it enabled them to wander between worlds. Therefore, by coming to the Alder People’s realm, Ciri brings with her what they once lost. Although the girl is not especially impressed by the apparent justice behind that fact and perceives the elves as oppressors and blackmailers no better, even if more subtle than the rest of her pursuers, she reluctantly agrees to give them the child they want, in exchange for her freedom. The baby’s father is to be Auberon himself, and Ciri starts to spend her nights with him, becoming involved in what seems to be an awkward attempt at flirting and courting between a rebellious and impulsive human teenager and a detached, ancient elf. None of those meetings is concluded with the expected intercourse, and Ciri faces the eventuality of an artificial impregnation. However, before anything final happens, she finds a way to escape the strange world of the elves by using her inherent power. Unicorns, natural guardians of time and space, who help her to run away, reveal to Ciri that a long time ago, right after the Alder People had abandoned her own world and entered the one they currently reside in, they committed a genocide, exterminating the whole race of humans who used to live there and only through that act did they gain the universe which they have come to call their own. The shocked girl loses all sentiments towards the elves and Auberon, who by that time is dead; she moves on and successfully evades all further attempts on her female sovereignty, leaving the question of her potentially powerful offspring unconcluded. The race of elves as such is a natural part of Ciri’s universe in the shape of the other elvish tribe called the People of the Hills, who did not join the Alder People in their conquest of the alternative universe and now, marginalized and facing extinction, wage a cruel guerilla war for the lost cause of survival in the world increasingly dominated by humans. Therefore, the Alder King’s fairy origin as such does not make him a supernatural creature. Still, the way his motif is handled by Sapkowski, from the overt 9

Both the king’s nickname and his real name express the connection with the Erlking. As commonly underlined by critics, the idea of the Erlking was born out of Johann Herder’s misspelling or faulty translation of the Danish word “ellerkonge,” which means the elf king (cf. Gibbs 118). Thus “Auberon,” being another version of “Oberon,” indicates the very same person, which is directly acknowledged by Sapkowski himself in his lexicon of fantasyrelated notions (Rękopis 110).

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references to Goethe’s ballad to building up the ominous atmosphere of tension and mystery around Ciri and turning the Alder People into the carriers of its denouement, preserves at least a part of the disturbing and momentous aura usually connected with encountering the other. The first appearance of the phrase “Alder King” in the saga takes place a long time before the heroine actually meets the otherworldly elves. One evening, Ciri, at that time in her early teens, is galloping down an alder- and willowsurrounded road at night, when her imagination starts to play tricks on her. Traumatic memories are mingled with the kaleidoscopic pictures of her quickly passing surroundings, and at one point it comes to her mind that the alders and willows are in fact the Alder King’s minions (Sapkowski, Czas 94f.).10 The association is not further developed or explained, leaving an impression as if the Alder King were a commonly known folklore or fairy tale character, likely to emerge from the subconscious of a terrified child facing scary surroundings. Soon after the name has popped up in the narration, however, it turns out that Ciri is being chased by more than her own visions. What is following her is the Wild Hunt, a cavalcade of horrifying phantom riders commonly believed to kidnap people (Miecz 92). As suggested much later in the saga, the Wild Hunt is probably a reflection of the real regiment of the Alder People warriors, who are not able to fully cross the boundary between the worlds, but sometimes raid the “human” universe as wraiths (Wieża 422f.; Pani 194). Thus, the first reference to the Alder King and the actual, albeit unacknowledged, manifestation of his presence not only produces an atmosphere of supernatural horror, but also strongly resembles the situation familiar to the reader from Goethe’s “The Erl-King”: a scared child, a running horse, an unleashed imagination, creepy trees and sinister ghostly creatures. The unfolding of Auberon’s identity and the story behind Ciri’s magical gift gradually shifts the relationship between them, drifting away from that initial scene of uncanny terror towards a more balanced and rationalized interaction. Yet it simultaneously reveals more similarities between the original Erlking and Sapkowski’s Alder King. Apart from the already mentioned obvious features shared by the characters, such as their supernatural nature and otherworldly inhabitance, the name pointing to the fairy origin, the aura of horror or the will to possess a human child, Sapkowski’s inspiration by the ballad can be seen as extending further into the plot details. As clarified by the summary above, Ciri’s interactions with Auberon develop on the basis of sexual tension, which is also present, or at least strongly suggested, in Goethe’s poem. While there are prominent differences in the 10

The third-person narration does not make it clear whether that association takes place in Ciri’s mind, but it is strongly suggested by the context.

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character of the erotic motif – the Erlking being after a young human boy for probably purely hedonistic reasons, and the Alder King determined, as much as unable, to have pregnancy-resulting intercourse with a teenage girl – what seems to link their attitudes is the element of violence, or at least ruthlessness. The seventh stanza of “The Erl-King,” which begins with the expression of the Erlking’s intentions (“Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt; / Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch’ ich Gewalt”) is quoted by Sapkowski as a motto preceding the chapter that describes Ciri’s stay in the Alder People’s world (150).11 That declaration on the part of the Erlking presents the full picture of his wooing tactics: the creature tempts the boy with gentle words and joyful visions, only to finally turn to violence. The fate awaiting Ciri among the Alder People is similar in that, firstly, she has in fact no choice but to agree on the elves’ demands; and, secondly, should her courteous meetings with Auberon prove unsuccessful, the conception is to be executed not exactly by force, but by means of an operation under laboratory conditions (Pani 189f.). The departure from the natural, desire-connected factor of sexuality towards such a detached and passionless action is both an element differing Sapkowski’s Alder King motif from the original and a detail important for Auberon’s characterization carried out in the further part of this paper; yet the very presence of violence and ruthlessness that marks the behavior of both “kings” is clear. Another link between the discussed characters is their affiliation with death, although just as the erotic motif it is realized differently in Goethe’s and Sapkowski’s interpretations. The Erlking inspires death (Stein 147), and the human child has to lose its life in order to satisfy him. The Alder King is rather an embodiment of death himself: as already mentioned, a long time ago he brought a great massacre upon the human kind living in the alternative world. While the future of Ciri, had she stayed with the Alder People as long as they wished, remains unknown, the probability of her life being threatened does not seem high. All the same, a deadly aura seems to surround Auberon, whose body “radiates the coldness of eternity” (Pani 188), and who is unable to create a new life in the natural way. Finally, it is he who does not survive the encounter with the human girl and passes away, having overdosed on a drug which was probably supposed to boost up his vital forces (195-98). The Alder King’s morbidity is especially striking when juxtaposed with his overall appearance; elves are an inherently beautiful race and, even 11

The excerpt from Goethe is accompanied by another motto, a fictional quotation from Vysogota of Corvo, a wiseman included among the Witcher saga characters: “Everything has already happened, everything took place once before. And everything has been described” (Pani 150). That comment may be interpreted as reinforcing the author’s conscious reference to “Der Erlkönig.”

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though he is very old, he preserves a “boyish” (188) quality. That contrast of a youthful exterior with a mind which is ancient and having “experienced everything, got bored with everything” (196) points to another set of similarities between Auberon and the Erlking: liminality based on the combined contradictions. Even though Sapkowski’s Alder King gradually loses his uncanny status, he reflects all binary oppositions underlined by Gibbs as building up Goethe’s protagonist. He is both a creature from an otherworld and a representative of a familiar, flesh-and-bone race; as compared to humans, he is almost immortal, yet surrounded by death and finally surrendering to it; he is sophisticated, gentle and courteous towards Ciri, but his actions are supported by the nearly total control over her and her unconditional cooperation; finally, mysterious, distant and strange as he is, he is to reunite with the girl on the most private and personal ground of physical love. However, one could expand this collection of combined oppositions by adding other qualities, characteristic of Auberon only, and introducing the subject of the difference between him and the Erlking. As already mentioned, Sapkowski’s Alder King merges noble beauty with decadence and stagnation; in his relationship with Ciri he proves both very powerful, as it is he who wins control over her, and impotent, in the literal sense. Auberon fails to “possess” the human child even though they both try to share a sexual encounter. A possible reason for this situation is that his motivation is utterly different from that of Goethe’s protagonist. Unlike him, the Alder King does not seek pleasure but a way to regain the magic his people once lost. Additionally, where the Erlking acts with desire, Auberon acts with disgust, perceiving Ciri as “a pearl in the swine dung. A brilliant on a finger of a rotting corpse […] [a] human creature in whom no, absolutely no trace of an elf has been left” (Pani 189). The last paradoxical attribute of the Alder King is linked not so much with his attitude towards the human girl as with him being an elf ruler – an origin and position that, in a certain sense, make him a victim and a victimizer at the same time. Still, the balance between those two elements is preserved if Auberon is considered in terms of a metonymy for the whole race of elves, both the Alder People and the People of the Hills, rather than a stand-alone being. The role of the victimizer can be ascribed to him personally, due to his involvement in the genocide; whereas the position of the victimized can be referred, first of all, to the People of the Hills, that is the elves who at the time the extermination or massacre was happening stayed in the original universe and later came to suffer increasing marginalization by humans until finally the threat to their bare, physical survival pushed them to involvement in a desperate and tragic war. Thus, the biggest and most obvious harm has not been done to Auberon personally, and not even to the tribe he rules, although the Alder

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People do emphasize their loyalty towards the People of the Hills and point to the necessity of opening the inter-world passage once again in order to save their extinction-facing brothers and sisters as the crucial 12 justification for claiming Ciri’s power (172). If it is at all possible to identify some injustice experienced by the Alder People and their king directly, it would probably be connected with the history of Ciri’s ancestor, Lara Dorren aeh Shiadhal, who chose her human lover over the prosperity of her own kind only to meet a quick and sad end when it turned out that human society was not ready for mixed relationships and banished Lara, which resulted in her death (Chrzest 255).13 The above overview of the Alder King’s features points both to his liminal status, typical of an uncanny representative of otherness, and his gradual movement from that role towards a position enabling a more clarified relationship with the human and providing the ground for a dialog. That change appears beneficial in terms of the coexistence-inducing anotherness. Simultaneously, however, the detailed nature of the CiriAuberon interaction shows that such a transformation may be facilitated by not only productive but also controversial or overtly negative factors. The transition from the self-other relationship towards what might be called the relationship of a “twisted anotherness” occurs through three processes: the first one is the gradual switch of individual power relations between the elf king and the girl; the second, the already mentioned “humanization” of Auberon, as well as of the whole race of elves, which in Sapkowski’s interpretation loses some of the stereotypical attributes ascribed to it by the fantasy tradition; and the third, closely linked with the previous one, is what can be called either the moral degradation of elves, or – in our opinion more accurately – the shared entanglement of the elf and the human race in a vicious circle of mutual violence and harm. As already mentioned, the very motif of the Alder King is introduced by Sapkowski in an evidently Goethe-inspired scene of supernatural 12

13

It should be added that Ciri’s original world anticipates a terrible disaster, probably in the shape of a global glaciation, which appears especially threatening to all forms of civilization. While their words can be neither confirmed nor questioned, the Alder People promise to save humans too, once the catastrophe is near (Pani 171-172). One may, however, hardly judge whether Lara’s personal decision should be considered unfair towards her people, as such musings would require a broad discussion of the border between individual freedom and commitments to society. Nevertheless, it seems justified to assume that the human lack of tolerance did contribute to the fact that, as one of the saga characters puts it, “what might have been the beginning of a reconciliation [that is, Lara’s relationship with a human] turned into a tragedy”(Czas 137). Still, it is important to underline that the responsibility for that tragic turn of events lies not only with humans. While the numerous legends inspired by the story of Lara and her lover reflect either antihuman or anti-elf propaganda, in fact both races are guilty of wasting the chance for an alliance offered by that romantic relationship (Chrzest 255).

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horror, with Ciri as a terrified child, able only to keep her horse running and wait for the nightmarish pursuit to cease – which it miraculously does, unlike the original Erlking’s hunt for the human boy. The fact that Sapkowski’s heroine, as opposed to the child from the poem, is alone during the chase and has, in fact, attracted the danger herself, by risking a solitary ride through the woods, does not seem to diminish the sense of her helplessness. On the contrary, the girl, deprived even of the illusory protection offered in the poem by the figure of the misguided, yet well-meaning father seems all the more exposed to the supernatural threat. Several years later, when Ciri and Auberon actually face each other, the Alder King still occupies a much privileged position, being in control of almost the whole realm which the girl has entered. Still, the revelation of that “otherworld’s” nature, as well as the reasons for the Alder People’s pursuit of Ciri, to a large extent rationalizes her situation and deprives the king of his uncanny aura: even though at some point he managed to move to a different world, he remains an elf, that is a creature familiar to the girl from her own reality. Additionally, the intended act of physical love, as the gist of their interaction, provides a certain ground for partnership between them.14 On the one hand, Auberon may appear dominant in the erotic game because of his skills (Pani 175, 188); yet on the other, it is Ciri who meets the demands of the task in which she is forced to participate, while he cannot complete his part in it despite his undisputed motivation to do so. Their interaction, increasingly frustrating for both parties, is concluded with the position of power completely occupied by Ciri. Having discovered a possibility of escape, she pays Auberon a last visit, only to find him dying (195f.). She stays by his side to calm his fear in the face of death, cries for him and then sets off to regain her freedom (196f.). Thus, the Alder King transforms from an intangible, ominous presence lurking behind the scenes to a tragically helpless would-be lover overwhelmed by his responsibility and age. Ciri, in turn, grows from an innocent and feeble child into an active and self-sufficient person who effectively stops all factions interested in her magic from victimizing her. In that sense, the uncanny other becomes for the girl an “another,” that is another power-hungry adversary to be outsmarted as well as another suffering being to be left behind.15 14

15

It is noteworthy that while at the time she meets Auberon, Ciri physically remains a virgin, she is by no means a novice in the field of erotic experience, as she has had a steady girlfriend and at least one intimate, though unconcluded, moment with a man. That is why we perceive the sexual interaction between her and Auberon in terms of partnership rather than a violation of innocence, and especially that the elf’s modus operandi is anything but violent (Pani 178). Throughout the novels, Ciri loses virtually everyone she has ever been close to in some way; her bad luck gradually developing a sinister mystical aura, which is well reflected in the following excerpt:

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The development of the girl’s relationship with the Alder King points to the second anotherness-supporting process, that is the “humanization” of the latter or, as some critics argue, of the whole elf race as pictured by Sapkowski. Apart from the fact that Auberon turns out to be a natural rather than a supernatural creature, he is also depicted as imperfect and, despite his unquestionable power and wisdom, prone to weakness. Whether its source is mental or physical, one is tempted to conclude that he is just a human – only, he is not a human. That clash between familiar attributes, many of them flaws, and the conventional fantasy depiction of elves as the other towards human beings becomes a controversial point in discussions around Sapkowski’s saga. Marek Pustowaruk, in his Od Tolkiena do Pratchetta. Potencjał rozwojowy fantasy jako konwencji literackiej, sees that combination as disappointing and revealing the author’s blasé attitude toward the suspension of disbelief as the essential feature of fantasy (224f.).16 He expresses the detailed cause of his dissatisfaction as follows: In the vast majority of cases, the “otherness” in the universe created by Sapkowski proves to be a mask applied to things and matters well known to the receiver. […] Questioning the image of an elf as common in fantasy, Sapkowski does not try to replace it with his own, original vision of creatures actually different from humans, but focuses on providing his elves with features of a clearly antropomorphic oppressed minority. (Pustowaruk 224, emphasis in original)

The solution chosen by Sapkowski may appear discouraging from the perspective of Pustowaruk, who, looking for the creative possibilities of the fantasy genre, defines “otherness” as something whose functioning is entirely impossible in the extratextual reality, yet convincingly incorporated into the structure of the world constructed by a given writer (23). However, Murphy’s concept of anotherness is precisely about “recogniz[ing] the ‘familiar’ in the ‘other,’“ to use Pustowaruk’s phrase (224). While on the level of the plot elves as a race remain the excluded other with no chance for a stable coexistence, the gap between them and humans becomes, in a way, bridged on the level of the saga’s reception, as they constitute a subject to whom readers can relate. The third and last argument for perceiving elves and humans in terms of anotherness is their equality as far as their moral imperfection, not to say degradation, is concerned. As noticed by Magdalena Roszczynialska (Sztuka 122; 126; 136f.), the interracial conflict in the Witcher saga has

16

“On a black mare you ride …,” he [a village storyteller] mumbled. “Through the night as black as a pall … You wipe the trail behind you […] Whoever meets you,” he gibbered, “won’t flee from death anymore. … Because you are death yourself.” The girl [Ciri] kept looking at him. For a long time. And rather indifferently. “You’re right,” she finally said. (Wieża 390) Translation of the Polish title: From Tolkien to Pratchett: The Developmental Potential of Fantasy as a Literary Convention.

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much in common with the ethnically motivated oppression and discrimination familiar to readers from contemporary reality.17 From such a perspective, elves, and specifically the People of the Hills, adopt a role of a marginalized minority, dislocated, overwhelmed and at times actively discriminated against by the majority culture in the shape of human civilization. They refuse to go peacefully and once they choose armed resistance, they prove deadly, cruel and capable of “terrorism, murdering civilians, killing and torturing prisoners of war, massacring the wounded in field hospitals” (Pani 409f.), all of which are atrocities present in the most recent history of the extratextual reality (Roszczynialska 138). Still, even with all their ruthless effectiveness, they do not stand a chance against the human majority, whose combat methods are by no means more lenient. As a result, the elfhuman conflict in Ciri’s world cannot be considered in terms of black and white; yet the development of events in the course of the saga points to an unavoidable triumph of the human race, measured in the control of territory, economy, politics and other basic fields of existence. While the overall situation of the People of the Hills brings to mind the fate of the realworld ethnic groups, which have faced the unstoppable expansion of Eurocentric civilization, the Alder People, with their dark secret, disturb that analogy. It turns out that while one branch of the elf race is rapidly losing chances for a harmonious coexistence with humanity, its other branch has already emerged victorious from a similar rivalry over the existential space in a different universe. Moreover, it was elves who were the aggressors and humans who were literally wiped from the surface of the earth; thus the roles of the victimizers and the victimized are reversed by the border between the worlds. Owing to that spatial split, the relationship between the two races should be considered in terms of symbolic balance rather than symbolic justice. It is possible to perceive the fate of the People of the Hills as a symbolic punishment for the genocide committed on humans by the Alder People in the alternative reality. Still, we believe that treating the overall picture of the guilt distribution between humans and elves first of all as a manifestation of interconnectedness is not only more productive, but also closer to the spirit of Sapkowski’s novel in general. One of the saga’s last chapters describes a surprisingly peaceful and companionable meeting between an elf and a human who during the war were deeply committed to their respective causes. Reflecting upon the recent events, they sum them up as follows:

17

Translation of the Polish title: Andrzej Sapkowski’s Fantasy Fiction: Problems of Poetics and Aesthetics (official translation of the title).

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The world has changed. Justice has prevailed.” [uttered by a third party] “Well, the justice part sounds like an exaggeration,” the pilgrim [the human] smiled a little. “I would, however, agree that the world seems to have adjusted itself to the basic law of physics.” “I wonder,” drawled the elf, “if we’re thinking about the same law.” “Every action,” the pilgrim said, “causes a reaction.” The elf snorted, but it was a rather good-natured sound. “Touché, human.” (Pani 434-435)

The replacement of a moral perspective with one relying on the rules of nature provides a welcoming ground for the category of anotherness. With reference to elves and humans, it enables the conclusion that both races become an another in their mutual relationship. However, what grants them equal status is, first of all, their common imprisonment in a spider web of violence, hurt and guilt. 4. Embracing the Another As presented above, the Alder King’s metamorphosis from the other to an another turns out to be not only complex and profound, but also controversial and disturbing. He ceases to personify an unknown, powerful danger, only to add to the sources of Ciri’s emotional frustration; he loses the uncanny aura and is unable to break the stagnation and regain his power; finally, he demonstrates that the common denominator between the self and the other, revealing their mutual relatedness, may take an uncomfortable form of something negative and not at all coexistence-supporting – for instance being prone to carrying out racially motivated mass murders. In the light of the undisputedly pessimistic picture of the Alder King as a flawed other, the analysis of that character through the lenses of anotherness may seem to undermine the notion’s productive potential. At the same time, however, a possibility exists that remaining (dis)satisfied with the revealed impotence is simply easier than making an effort to go a step further and try to embrace that impotence, looking for a productive potential in the difficult conclusion one needs to face. The depiction of Auberon not as the other, but as an another, rendered as such precisely by his imperfections, helplessness and a moral load of unquestionable guilt, produces a disquieting aura and a challenge for the reader. The perspective of anotherness requires the original self to adopt the identity shared with the other even if that identity is faulty, and while on the level of individual relations between the Alder King and Ciri the mutuality of the flaw is not obvious, it becomes clear in the relation between the elf and the

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human race in general.18 Maybe one way to break out of the impasse illustrated so well by the matted network of victimization and hurt entwining Sapkowski’s humans and elves is to start by accepting the self’s own imperfections as reflected by the another. Works Cited Attebery, Brian. “Stories Linked to Stories: Fantasy as a Route to Myth.” Relevant Across Cultures: Visions of Connectedness and World Citizenship in Modern Fantasy for Young Readers. Ed. Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Marek Oziewicz, Agata Zarzycka. Wrocław: Atut, 2009. 19-31. —. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. Atterton, Peter and Matthew Calarco, ed. Radicalizing Levinas. Albany: SUNY Press, 2010. Brendel, Franz. “Zur Einleitung.” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 22 (1845): 8-9. Butler, Christopher. Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Fuss, Diana. “Inside/Out.” Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. 1-10. Gibbs, Christopher H. “‘Komm, geh’ mit mir’: Schubert’s Uncanny ‘Erlkönig.’“ 19th-Century Music 19.2 (1995): 115-35. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Poems and Ballads of Goethe. Trans. W. Edmondstoune Aytoun and Th. Martin. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1859. —. Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life (1811-1822). Trans. John Oxenford. Boston: Moore, 1822. Hartman, Geoffrey G. “Wordsworth and Goethe in Literary History.” New Literary History 6.2 (1975): 393-413. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen, 1981. Misztak, Anna. “Andrzeja Sapkowskiego krótka historia zapożyczeń.” Fahrenheit 47 (2005). Web. 20 Sep 2010. . Murphy, Patrick D. Literature, Nature and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques. Albany: State U of New York P, 1995. —. “Anotherness and Inhabitation in Recent Multicultural American Literature.” Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature. Ed. Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells. London: Zed, 1998: 40-52. 18

Ciri’s personal share of guilt, though definitely less striking than that carried by Auberon, and definitely not connected with an interracial crime, is made prominent by the end of the saga, when she visits people and places previously affected by her morbid aura. While in most cases she had been an attractor and victim of violence rather than its active agent, Ciri admits to at least one incident when the harm was of her own doing (Pani 453).

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Pustowaruk, Marek. Od Tolkiena do Pratchetta: Potencjał rozwojowy fantasy jako konwencji literackiej. Wrocław: Polskie Towarzystwo Ludoznawcze, 2009 Roszczynialska, Magdalena. Sztuka fantasy Andrzeja Sapkowskiego: Problemy poetyki. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 2009. —. “Postmodernistyczne łowy.” Konspekt 7 (2001). Web. 20 Sep 2010. . Sapkowski, Andrzej. Miecz przeznaczenia. Warszawa: superNowa, 1993. —. Pani Jeziora. Warszawa: superNowa, 1995. —. Chrzest ognia. Warszawa: superNowa, 1996. —. Wieża Jaskółki. Warszawa: superNowa, 1997. —. Czas pogardy. Warszawa: superNowa, 1999. —. Rękopis znaleziony w Smoczej Jaskini. Warszawa: superNowa, 2001. Stein, Deborah. “Schubert’s ‘Erlkönig’: Motivic Parallelism and Motivic Transformation.” 19th-Century Music 13.2 (1989): 145-58. Symons, Morwenna. Room for Manœuvre: The Role of Intertext in Elfriede Jelinek’s ‘Die Klavierspielerin’, Günter Grass’s ‘Ein weites Feld’, and Herta Müller’s ‘Niederungen’ and ‘Reisende auf einem Bein’. Leeds: Maney, 2005. Uniłowski, Krzysztof. “Łorginalność, czyli coś się kończy, coś sie zaczyna.” FA-art 61 (2003). Web. 20 Sep 2010. .

“It’s magical!” Supernatural Elements in Children’s Literature and Young Adults’ Fiction KARIN KOKORSKI 1. Introduction “It’s magical!” – This exclamation describes the reader’s astonishment and fascination when entering the world of fantasy fiction. It is a world familiar to him or her, and yet defamiliarized through supernatural elements. I want to employ the term ‘supernatural elements’ as an umbrella concept which includes everything that violates the natural laws of the reader’s world, for example mythical creatures, talking animals and the focal points of this article: magic, and objects with magical powers. Often, the reader and the fictional characters are simultaneously confronted with incidents that surpass the laws of the real world the reader inhabits; they then need to cross what Todorov calls the threshold of initial “hesitation” (25), before they are able to fully transcend into the magical world. Fantastic literature for children and young adults often invites the reader to think outside the box of normality and explore several ‘what-if’ scenarios. These scenarios not only comprise magical abilities and the possibility of multiple secondary worlds, but also occurrences of subversive nature and fundamental questions in life. The young protagonists are constantly challenged to fight adversaries who are superior in age, knowledge, and abilities. In the books under scrutiny, the authors thus repeatedly manufacture circumstances in which allegedly weaker members of society can defeat potentially stronger opponents, in other words David-versus-Goliath situations. The protagonists’ ultimate goal is to overthrow the old regime and establish a new, better, world order. Thus, these worlds transform into the arena in which deathly battles between good and evil take place. The incredible success of fantastic literature on the market indicates that this genre has a special quality and meaning for the reader. While being entertaining, it also educates its readership by transporting the reader into strange worlds and confronting him or her with questions about good and evil. Fantastic literature for

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children and young adults tends to reduce this central dichotomy to its basic level: evil antagonists appear to symbolise evil in its purest form, whereas being on the side of good is portrayed as the one and only desirable aim in life. This article presents a rough profile of certain supernatural elements in fantastic literature for children and young adults, with J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy at the centre of the analysis. Both examples experienced immense commercial success, and were highly discussed in academic circles. While the Harry Potter series concentrates on magic which derives its source from within a person, I will employ His Dark Materials as an example of magic which lies in certain objects. Both forms of supernatural elements are prevailing, non-exclusive tropes in fantasy fiction, and contribute to the creativity of the genre. Furthermore, both examples show how magic and magical objects enable the young protagonists to defeat their opponents and thus demonstrate the subversive power and carnivalesque structure of the genre. Being touched by a supernatural element often culminates in the chosenness of the young hero or heroine: Harry Potter is destined to save the world from Lord Voldemort’s clutches; Will and Lyra in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials are designated to keep Dust, and hence a fundamental part of (human) nature, from being destroyed. Both authors also emphasise the seductive nature of supernatural elements. The abilities to perform magic and control mighty objects symbolise power, and this repeatedly seduces characters to turn their backs on rules and socially accepted behaviour. Power enables the antagonists to upset the balance between good and evil, which ultimately needs to be restored by the protagonists. All in all, this article will discuss how the supernatural elements are manifested, what they signify for the characters, and ultimately, what they mean (or might mean) to the reader. 2. Supernatural Elements in Harry Potter The Harry Potter1 series is but one example among many of how supernatural elements change the protagonist’s world. At first, the reader is introduced to a “perfectly normal” world (PS 7), which, on the surface, does not violate the laws of nature known to the reader. After a few sentences, however, the perception of this condition changes: as the reader follows the action through the focalized person Mr. Dursley, a moment of Todorovian hesitation occurs both for the character and for the reader when Mr. Dursley thinks he saw a cat reading a map (PS 8). Following Todorov’s theory, 1

The reference to the books will be given in shortened citation format: PS (The Philosopher’s Stone), CS (The Chamber of Secrets), PA (The Prisoner of Azkaban), DH (The Deathly Hallows). For full bibliographical information see the Works Cited section at the end of the article.

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Mr. Dursley and the reader have to decide whether the anthropomorphic behaviour of the cat is “an illusion of the senses, […] – and laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, […] – but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown” to the character and reader (Todorov 25). As the plot commences, the reader recognizes that the action takes place within the boundaries of fantasy, deciding Todorov’s uncertainty for the category of the marvelous. A secondary sphere, the world of witches and wizards, is introduced which “exists within the primary world”, the world known to the reader (Gates, Steffel and Molson 113). Thus, the Harry Potter series is representative for those fantasy books which depict the coexistence of two spheres in one world; further examples of this are Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising quintet of novels, and Alan Garner’s book The Moon of Gomrath. The world which J. K. Rowling creates uses several tropes I aim to explore: elements of magic, the boarding school scenario, the temptation of power and its dreadful consequences; I will also briefly focus on the theme of ‘otherness’. When Harry’s magical abilities manifest themselves, it becomes obvious that he is no longer part of the ‘normal’ world, but that he now belongs to another world, an elitist world. His new sphere is filled with unfamiliar abilities and wonder: not only is Hogwarts an exclusive school, but the wizarding society exists completely separated, independent, and hidden from the ‘normal’ world: it has its own newspapers (e.g. the Daily Prophet), its own mailing system (owl post), its own national sport (Quidditch), its own currency (Galleons, Sickles, Knuts), its own system of social strata, basically its own social microcosm. J. K. Rowling creates a very complex world; most of all, the little things, like tents which are far bigger from the inside than from the outside, or purses which can be filled with an endless amount of items, are intriguing and catch the reader’s attention. Her special emphasis lies on word magic: to successfully accomplish a magic spell, the witch or wizard needs to speak the magic, Latin sounding, words like “Wingardium Leviosa” (PS 187) or “expecto partonum” (PA 176). Rowling does not, however, create a new language as Tolkien did or as Christopher Paolini tries to do. The word magic, as well as the existence of magic and its consequences are never explained or challenged; to quote Suman Gupta: “In the Magic world things and qualities are simply manifest – they just are so – there is no need, no ability, no desire, no will to explain why they are so” (151). There seems to be an inner magical power which is channelled through the wand of the wizard or witch. Before Harry starts his life at Hogwarts, the reader witnesses how magic ‘leaks’ out of him, for example when his hair grows “all over the place” (PS 28), or when he unintentionally makes a glass disappear in the zoo (cf. PS 36). To annihilate the possibility of uncontrolled magic, witches and wizards undergo magical training to adjust

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and strengthen their abilities at Hogwarts. Boarding schools and their importance at training the young are a very popular motif in (fantasy) literature for children and young adults: in Trudi Canavan’s The Black Magician Trilogy, for example, magical training is vital for the survival of the young magicians; otherwise they may destroy themselves and/or unleash magical force on the population. This also holds for P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast’s House of Night novels: without being surrounded by adult vampires at the school, a vampire fledgling would reject the change into a full vampire and die. The boarding schools also educate the protagonists in more than one way. The heroes and heroines find a new home, new friends and new challenges, as the school environments often turn out to be places “of tests: some academic, some practical, and some moral” (Pharr 58). They further learn how to handle their gifts and discover the importance of values and the value of life. In the boarding school scenario, many heroes and heroines come to their real potential and are equipped with everything they need to save the world. No matter how much they learn, however, learning can never replace the talent of each individual (cf. Mendlesohn 169). For Harry, magic enables him to break the ‘shackles of slavery’ in his old home, gain social acknowledgement, rise to his full potential, and even achieve heroic status. Thus, at first glance, this supernatural element seems to improve his life tremendously. As soon as he enters the wizarding world, however, he learns that all that glitters is not gold. On the one hand, magic simplifies certain aspects of life conveniently: for example, there is no need to buy an expensive plane ticket if a wizard or witch can travel through chimneys or with the help of portkeys; or a wizard or witch does not need to clean the kitchen manually if s/he can do it by magic. In the wizarding world, there is no need for high technology; everything seems to be archaic and simple. Nevertheless, everything appears to be possible. Magic, however, also has its limits and its negative facets: The specialness of magic has its own, often fatal, seductive appeal. In the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry meets Professor Quirrell at Hogwarts, who is later identified as one of Voldemort’s minions. Like every other member of the dark side, Quirrell regards himself as super-human, a homo superior, and thus is convinced that elemental rules like ‘thou shall not kill’ do no longer apply to him. Further, he feels the compelling draw of power, and justifies his evil deeds with the following sentence: “There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it …” (PS 313). Ultimately, power turns out to be an addictive drug for the villains in several pieces of literature for children and young adults. For these villains, the end always justifies the means – no matter what price the individual or the whole community has to pay. The notion of ‘Might Makes Right’ culminates in the seventh book of the Harry Potter series in “Magic is Might”

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(DH 198): the might to enslave and kill the in Voldemort’s opinion less powerful race of non-magical humans, the Muggles. Voldemort aims to purify the magical society, and, as a long term goal, the whole world, in order to establish the magical race as the pinnacle of human evolution and hence the crowning glory of creation. To facilitate Voldemort’s ultimate goal, new studies at Hogwarts and new laws in the Ministry of Magic are established which intensely discriminate against witches and wizards who cannot prove a magical lineage. The punishment for not being a half-blood or pure-blood wizard is to be submitted to the Dementor’s kiss, which is akin to a death penalty in the wizarding world. Suman Gupta correctly states that this “fascist ideology […] primarily characterizes the evil of the Dark Side” (101). Throughout the series, Voldemort’s fascism and his evilness are foregrounded. Rowling repeatedly emphasises that Voldemort’s magical abilities exceed those of ‘normal’ wizards by far. Therefore, he is strong enough to pose a real threat to the whole world. With the expression that Voldemort has moved “beyond ‘usual evil’“ (DH 89), Rowling acknowledges on the one hand that Voldemort is incredibly powerful and hard to stop; and on the other hand, she challenges the reader with the notion that there is “usual evil” in the world which needs to be confronted and overcome by each individual. The supernatural element of magic in fantasy fiction for children and young adults repeatedly shows how the threshold of using violence is lowered. As I have just pointed out, evil wizards in the Harry Potter books use magic to justify racial segregation, and to actually kill Muggles. Possessing magical strength often tempts the bearer to test his or her power on weaker individuals. This is presented in Voldemort’s regular torture of his minions, and also seen in Trudi Canavan’s The Black Magician Trilogy, when a gang of students abuses the protagonist Sonea due to her lower social status (cf. The Novice 412-6). Often, these torture methods do not leave any outward scars. Some just intrude on the mind and, as shown in Canavan’s trilogy or in Christopher Paolini’s The Inheritance Cycle, create an extremely effective illusion of pain. As a result of the combination of the use of mental (and not physical) power, and the lack of outward signs of abuse, many predators feel encouraged to use this abstract method of violence. This is a procedure they can apply without dirtying their hands; in the wrong hands, magic is revealed as a very powerful and dangerous weapon – an aspect this genre constantly emphasises. While Voldemort and his regime glorify magic, characters like Petunia Dursley demonize it. Here, the clash of the primary and the secondary world becomes obvious. From the beginning, the Dursleys abuse Harry and constantly remind him that he is not a real part of their family; as Elaine Ostry states: “Harry is a classic ‘outcast child’ of fairy tale and myth, in the ranks

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of Cinderella” (90). Being a person who is touched by a supernatural element, Harry Potter becomes ‘the Other’ to his family. His aunt Petunia and his uncle Vernon perceive him as threat to their concept of normativity; Petunia even marks him as being “abnormal” and “a freak” (PS 62f.). The branding of otherness often functions as an indicator for fear and envy – fear of the unknown and envy of the powerful abilities. The labelling as ‘Other’ of the protagonist is a topic which is frequently explored in this genre, and ultimately emphasises the specialness, the chosenness of the character. Harry’s otherness is not only manifested in the distinction between Muggle and wizard, but it further plays an important role in the wizarding society as such. Harry differs from all other wizards because he has been marked by Voldemort and thereby chosen to defeat his archenemy. Like many other fantasy heroes, Harry learns that being the chosen one is as much a privilege as a burden. He repeatedly saves the world from Voldemort’s evil plans. This, however, is not achieved without blood and sweat and tears; in the final book, the weight of his task is almost too much for him to bear. Unlike Frodo in Lord of the Rings, however, Harry decides to fulfil his destiny and willingly frees the world from evil. 3. Supernatural Elements in His Dark Materials In His Dark Materials2 trilogy, Philip Pullman creates a multitude of worlds. Throughout the trilogy, he employs the trope of secondary worlds, and thus marks his works as high fantasy. The first book, Northern Lights, “opens within a secondary world and remains there, the primary world [is] simply ignored” (Gates, Steffel and Molson 113). In contrast to the first book of the Harry Potter series, however, there is no Todorovian element of hesitation in Northern Lights, marking the series as marvelous from the beginning. “Lyra and her dæmon” are the first four words of the book (NL 3). They clearly describe a world with natural laws which are not congruent with the reader’s world. Secondary worlds which have no connection to the primary world are very prominent in this genre (cf. Gates, Steffel and Molson 113); J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and Ursula Le Giun’s Earthsea quartet belong to the best known examples of this category. Right from the start, Pullman introduces a supernatural element which is the manifestation of a person’s soul in the form of a dæmon. A dæmon is an animal which substantiates part of his/her bearer’s inner nature and make it visible to the environment. Among other supernatural elements, Pullman creates portals to 2

Again, the reference to the series is given in short citation: NL (Northern Lights), SK (The Subtle Knife), and AS (The Amber Spyglass). Full bibliographical information can be found in the Works Cited section at the end of this article.

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different worlds, including our primary world, by the end of the first book and throughout the second and third book. The trope of a portal or door which leads from the primary world to a separate secondary world is also explored in works like C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series and Amanda Hemingway’s Sangreal trilogy. The depiction of multiple worlds provides the opportunity to operate with different appliances of supernatural elements. In Lyra Belacqua’s world, for example, the reader discovers the matriarchal society of the witches which uses magic as their main tool. In this part of the article, however, my aim does not lie on the depiction of magic as such, but on the instruments of power which Pullman introduces to the reader: the alethiometer and the subtle knife. The trope of the magical object, as well as the consequences for wielding such a powerful tool are two points which I want to pursue. These instruments, like the knife or even the ring in The Lord of the Rings, are not owned without a prize. The bearer must not only demonstrate responsibility and the willingness to sacrifice his or her life, but s/he must also resist temptation. All these attributes are not proportional to the young age of the protagonists in Pullman’s works. This dichotomy between adult responsibilities and the youth of the heroes and heroines, however, is a prevailing trope of this genre. The two instruments in Pullman’s trilogy follow a rich tradition of magical tools which help the bearer to achieve his task. Readers can even find them within traditional fairy tales, in e.g. the Brothers Grimm’s “The magic table, the gold-donkey, and the cudgel in the sack”, in which the cudgel in the sack helps the third brother to regain the other brothers’ treasures. An example from fantasy literature for children and young adults are the tools which Peter, Susan, and Lucy get from Father Christmas in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; which are a shield and a sword for Peter, a bow, a quiver full of arrows and a little ivory horn for Susan, and a little bottle with healing potion and a dagger for Lucy (cf. Lewis 116f.). Father Christmas puts special emphasis on the fact that “they are tools, not toys” (116). The same significance is accorded to Lyra’s truth-reader. This instrument in the form of a compass is not especially designed for her – with the help of the right books it can be read by anyone. Lyra is the only one, however, who can read it “by grace” (AS 520), which means that the significations of the symbols just reveal themselves to her. It helps Lyra to accomplish her task; and this is the only period of time in which Lyra can use the alethiometer without the assistance of the books which explain the multilayered symbols to her. Her task is to prevent the disappearance of Dust from the universes. Dust is described as being an integral part of cognitive behaviour: “Conscious beings make Dust – they renew it all the time, by thinking and feeling and reflecting, by gaining wisdom and passing it on” (ibid.). The consequence of the loss of Dust would be that “every-

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thing good will fade away and die” (AS 511) and therefore the world would go on in a state of stupidity and ignorance. After she has averted that an irreplaceable amount of Dust leaks out of the worlds, Lyra loses her intuitive ability to read the alethiometer and has to regain it “by work” (AS 520). Her possession of this instrument is not linked to a crucial sacrifice, which is in stark contrast to Will and his subtle knife. The subtle knife first appears in the second book, in which the reader is introduced to Will Parry. Will is one of the characters who are closest to the reader, as he comes from a world which mirror’s the reader’s own. Will experience the Todorovian moment of hesitation when he first encounters a supernatural incident: a cat which vanishes through a portal into another world (SK 15). This obviously breaks the natural laws of his world, and thus causes Will to briefly struggle between his belief in the ‘real’ world and the new possibilities which the portal symbolizes. Through this opening, Will travels into a secondary world, in which he is chosen to be the subtle knife’s bearer. Although Will needs to possess an inner power to wield the knife, I want to focus on the object itself, as the knife bearer is replaceable, which is apparent in the fact that Will becomes the successor to a long line of knife bearers. As an instrument with supernatural power the subtle knife does not behave like normal knives: One side of the double-sided blade can cut through every existing material, whereas the other side can open windows which lead into different worlds. With this power, the subtle knife poses an enormous threat to the order and plans which the Church, the most powerful force in the majority of worlds, wants to establish. As it is also called the “god-destroyer” (SK 286), members of the Church and other powerhungry villains strive to get it into their possession. Until the very end of the trilogy, Will does not know that the knife possesses a double-edged power: by serving Will and his good cause, it also follows its own intentions and contributes to the disappearance of Dust. By stressing the unlimited power of the knife, Philip Pullman points out its ambiguity and finally the fact that “[i]t would have been infinitely better if it had never been made” (AS 190). In the end, Will destroys the knife and with it the underlying temptation to abuse its power for self-serving purposes. Will’s deed not only shows his strength of character, but also a crucial fact about magical instruments: they can be annihilated or lose their powers, which is a severe contrast to the depiction of magic and its relationship to the characters in books like the Harry Potter series. Harry cannot lose his magic abilities as they are an integral part of him. Like the wand that chooses Harry, the subtle knife chooses Will as its new bearer. This instrument of power cripples its bearer with a special mark: Will loses two of his fingers in the process of acquiring it. As Karen Patricia Smith stresses: “[…] its power is tremendous and horrific. Such

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an instrument is not owned without sacrifice” (141). The nature of this sacrifice is not only physical, but also emotional. The suddenness and weight of the burden figuratively crush Will: “And he put the knife down on the table and crouched low hugging his wounded hand and cried. It was all too much to bear. The sobs racked his throat and his chest and the tears dazzled him, […]. He was desolate” (SK 191). In the beginning, he even refuses his new role, but soon realizes that he obviously has no choice in that matter. “You haven’t got a choice: you’re the bearer: it’s picked you out. And what’s more they know you’ve got it, and if you use it against them, they’ll tear it from your hands and use it against the rest of us, for ever and ever.” “But why should I fight them? I’ve been fighting too much, I can’t go on fighting, I want to –” “Have you won your fights?” Will was silent. The he said, “Yes, I suppose.” “You fought for the knife?” “Yes, but –” “Then you’re a warrior. That’s what you are. Argue with anything else, but don’t argue with your own nature.” Will knew that the man was speaking the truth. But it wasn’t a welcome truth. It was heavy and painful. (SK 334f.)

So one of the reasons the knife chooses Will is his nature. At this point, Pullman introduces the conflict between being chosen to do something because of one’s nature and one’s free will. In the third book, Will realizes that his destiny is not set in stone: Will said to his father’s ghost, “You said I was a warrior. You told me that was my nature, and I shouldn’t argue with it. Father, you were wrong. I fought because I had to. I can’t choose my nature, but I can choose what I do. And I will choose, because now I’m free.” (AS 440)

All in all, through his role as the knife bearer, and through the battles he has to face, Will discovers the strength of his free will, which outweighs his nature, and thus underlines Pullman’s agenda that every individual is free to choose his or her own path in life. This is crucial to the books as Pullman contrasts the aspect of free will with his portrait of the Church: a huge organisation which wants to destroy free will, and establish a ‘multiversal’ dominion. The Church’s modus operandi is very similar to Lord Voldemort’s approaches to power. While Voldemort’s regime discriminates against everyone who does not have a pure blood lineage, the Church persecutes every species which does not fit into its new image of the worlds because of a connection to magic: like witches, armoured bears, or a race called Gallevespians. Pullman constantly stresses the point that “[f]or all its history […] [the church has] tried to suppress and control every natural impulse. […] That is what the church does, and every church is the same:

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control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling” (SK 52). Metatron, the successor of the Church’s god figure in Pullman’s books, is also corrupted by the cunning temptation of power: he wants to enlarge his dominions in the multiverses, not even shying away from committing atrocious crimes, which puts him and the Church at the same level as Voldemort and his Death Eaters. Metatron follows in the footsteps of the god figure who is by now too old and fragile to pursue this goal or to continue his reign. In the His Dark Materials trilogy, Pullman denounces the Church’s, God’s, and Metatron’s striving for power, their indoctrinated ideology, and their intolerance, whereas he obviously promotes free will, wisdom and the pursuit of the greater good. These positive categories are only some characteristics which he bestows on his protagonists. Like Harry Potter, Will and Lyra have always been different from their peers. Lyra, a girl with upper class heritage which is brought up and educated at Jordan College in Oxford, plays with a kitchen boy and sets out to rescue children. She is the girl known to the witches from ancient prophecies, and hence will decide the destiny of the world(s) (cf. NL 176f). Will is a boy who has perfected the ability of blending in with his environment, of becoming ‘invisible’ to the authorities. When the reader first encounters twelve-year-old Will, he is the adult figure in his home, because he cares for his mentally sick mother. Like Harry, both children are different, other to their environment, and are ‘magically’ chosen to save the world(s) despite their youthful years. This criterion allows these three protagonists to obtain a representative function, as they become part of the tradition of young heroes, shown by their predecessors, the children in George MacDonald’s Princess books, C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series, and Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising quintet, and continued by their successors, like Nathan in Amanda Hemingway’s Sangreal trilogy, or Zoey in P. C. Cast and Kristin Cast House of Night novels. All these young heroes defy and defeat adult authority in order to create a better world. 4. Conclusion “The single most important criterion for a successful fantasy is the capacity to incite wonder” (Gates, Steffel and Molson 14, emphasis in the original). There is no doubt that Rowling and Pullman fulfil said criterion. They created worlds which belong into the category high fantasy. Both examples unite and emphasize a variety of tropes in fantasy fiction for children and young adults. Furthermore, in both works, supernatural elements are the means which enable the protagonists to succeed their missions. Being in touch with a supernatural element, no matter if it is a magical instrument

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or the ability to directly use magic, is always connected to great power and hence great responsibility: Harry chooses to give his life for the greater good, and Will and Lyra agree to give up their love and connection in order to save the ghosts from the land of the dead. As Millicent Lenz stresses: “[t]he ‘good’ of countless others takes precedence over personal desires” (7). The sacrifices which the protagonists make willingly are expected from them: like their literary predecessors, Harry Potter, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry are constructed as role models for their readership, “they endure as goals to guide us towards our possible best selves” (Pharr 54). Most of the time, magic and instruments of power as such are depicted neither as being good nor as being evil, it always depends on what they are used for: the subtle knife can be used to support or to destroy God; magic in the Harry Potter series can save or harm human kind. Readers of fantasy fiction can also perceive this in for example Trudi Canavan’s The Black Magician trilogy, and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. One of the substantial focal points of this genre aims at the ability and willingness to choose freely between good and evil; or as Dumbledore puts it: “It is our choices, Harry that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities” (Rowling, CS 358). Through the element of defamiliarisation, the authors try to convey essential messages. Like countless other authors of fantasy fiction for children and young adults, Rowling and Pullman endeavour to enlighten their readership and sensitize their outlook on the world. Rowling, for example, creates awareness of racism, and Pullman reminds us of the negative effects when a huge organisation like the Church tries to indoctrinate people with its ideological convictions. Additionally, the heroes teach the readership moral values and, as Roni Natov puts it, “The Harry Potter stories [and numerous others] center on what children need to find internally – the strength to do the right thing, to establish a moral code” (137). The clear depiction of good and evil in these books also contributes to “the human need to understand the struggle of good versus evil” (Gates, Steffel and Molson 2). Furthermore, both authors employ supernatural elements as subversive instruments. Through the supernatural elements, the protagonists are able to turn the social order upside down: they are the ones who are more powerful than the adult figures. This corresponds with Mikhail Bakthin’s idea of the carnivalesque: “the medieval carnival, Bakhtin points out, was the temporary reversal of the established order when all societal power structures changed places” (Nikolajeva 129). As the reversal of the societal order is only temporary, Will and Lyra lose their powers, and even Harry Potter becomes a ‘normal’ member of his society. Fantasy literature acts as a catalyst which enables its characters and its readers to question adult authority and adult roles. When the seed of doubt is sown, and when the heroes and heroines are prepared to challenge adult authority, only then

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does a process of maturation start. Thus, supernatural elements like magic do not only demonstrate the creativeness of an author or the subversive power of the fantastic, but “[m]agic can […] be regarded as a metaphor for maturation, the protagonists’ magical development offering a model of growth for readers” (Bramwell 142). Inner maturation is often made visible for the reader in the characters’ increase in magical ability. Most of the time, this growth is not gained without a price, which often finds its manifestation in personal sacrifices. The protagonists suffer, and, like a phoenix emerging from the ashes, they emerge from the hardship of their journeys as mentally and physically stronger characters. Their growth also leads to self-discovery and hence enhances their self-value and power. Only an increase in power enables them to defeat their enemies and thus satisfies and reinforces the reader’s longing for justice. Fantastic literature for children and young adults not only satisfies the reader’s obvious thirst for supernatural elements but also serves to subtly guide and enlighten the reader in an entertaining way. Although some critics stress the point that this genre is used to escape reality (cf. Gates, Steffel and Molson 5), it rather shows the potential to create new forms of the Entwicklungsroman and Bildungsroman in the 21st century. Works Cited Bramwell, Peter. “Fantasy, Psychoanalysis and Adolescents: Magic and Maturation in Fantasy.” Modern Children’s Literature: An Introduction. Ed. Kimberly Reynolds. New York: Macmillan, 2005. 108-23. Canavan, Trudi. The Novice. 2004. London: Atom, 2006. Cast P. C., and Kristin Cast. Marked. A House of Night Novel. New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2007. Gates, Pamela S., Pamela B. Steffel, and Francis J. Molson. Fantasy Literature for Children and Young Adults. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2003. Gupta, Suman. Re-Reading Harry Potter. New York: Macmillan, 2003. Hemingway, Amanda. The Greenstone Grail. 2004. London: HarperCollins, 2005. Lenz, Millicent. “Introduction. Awakening to the Twenty-first Century: the Evolution of Human Consciousness in Pullman’s His Dark Materials”. His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy. Ed. Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2005. 1-15. Lewis, C. S. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. 1950. London: HarperCollins, 1998. Mendlesohn, Farah. “Crowning the King: Harry Potter and the Construction of Authority.” The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary

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Phenomenon. Ed. Lana A. Whited. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2002. 159-81. Natov, Roni. “Harry Potter and the Extraordinariness of the Ordinary.” The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon. Ed. Lana A. Whited. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2002. 125-39. Nikolajeva, Maria. “Harry Potter – A Return of the Romantic Hero” Harry Potter’s World. Multidisciplinary Critical Perspecitves. Ed. Elizabeth E. Heilman. New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003. 125-39. Ostry, Elaine. “Accepting Mudbloods: The Ambivalent Social Vision of J. K. Rowling’s Fairy Tales.” Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays. Ed. Gizelle Liza Anatol. Westport: Praeger, 2003. 89-101 Paolini, Christopher. Eragon. 2002. London: Corgi Books, 2005. Pharr, Mary. “In Medias Res: Harry as Hero-In-Progress.” The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon. Ed. Lana A. Whited. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2002. 53-66. Pullman, Philip. Northern Lights. 1995. London: Scholastic, 1998. —. The Subtle Knife. 1997. London: Scholastic, 1998. —. The Amber Spyglass. 2000. London: Scholastic, 2001. Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. 1997. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. —. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. 1998. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. —. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. London: Bloomsbury, 1999. —. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. London: Bloomsbury, 2007. Smith, Karen Patricia. “Tradition, Transformation, and the Bold Emergence: Fantastic Legacy and Pullman’s His Dark Materials.” His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy. Ed. Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2005. 135-51. Todorov, Tzetan. The Fantastic. A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975.

Story Matters Story and its Concept in Tolkien and Pratchett MARGARIDA MCMURRY Story and storytelling is at least as old as language1. It is one of human kind’s distinctive traits. It depends on another two abilities: memory and imagination (imagination being also unique, as far as we know, to the human mind). Because the human mind can imagine what is not yet there – and even what may never be there – progress and evolution have been possible for our kind. It does not follow that the choices human beings have made throughout history were the best possible choices at all times. However to actually be able to choose, to have the ability to ask “what if?” and imagine answers to that question has been essential to our development. Someone thought, “What if humans could fly?” and imagined how to make this possible. This has enabled many of us to visit other countries in just a matter of hours rather than days and months, sometimes years of travelling. These dreams of the imagination2 more often than not take the shape of little narratives: stories. The uses we make of narrative are innumerable. We use stories to explain what is around us; to communicate and understand what happens around us – to ourselves or to other people – we even use it to communicate our thoughts, experiences and knowledge; we use stories to understand almost everything. If I want to explain to someone else the cycle of water, I know they will understand it better if I do so in a narrative form, rather than just a list of unconnected sentences (like bullet points). In short, there is very little we do not narrativise, whether actual past, or present events or future experiences we have not yet had (and may of course never have). Through reading or listening to stories (or watching in the case of film and drama), our experience is also increased. 1

2

“Narrative existed long before people gave it a name and tried to figure out how it works. It comes to us so naturally that, when we start to examine it, we are a bit like Monsieur Jourdain in Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme, who discovered he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it.” (Abbott xv) Note that I do not use dream here as in what happens unconsciously while we sleep, but the actual daydream of imagining a different world, something that is not there.

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Story has been a subject of study for many centuries. However only in the last two or three decades have some theorists come to the conclusion that story is not something we do, it is something we are; it is part of how we work: “Story is a basic principle of mind. Most of our experience, our knowledge and our thinking is organized as stories. The mental scope of story is magnified by projection – one story helps making sense of another.” (Turner v). Cognitive theory, which includes disciplines like philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, sociology and narrative studies, to name a few, believes story to be part of human nature. Narrative imagining – story – is the fundamental instrument of thought. [...] It is our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining. It is a literary capacity indispensable to human cognition generally. [...] Parable begins with narrative imagining – the understanding of a complex of objects, events, and actors as organized by our knowledge of story. It then combines story with projection: one story is projected onto another. The essence of parable is its intricate combining of two basic forms of knowledge – story and projection. This classic combination produces one of our keenest mental processes for constructing meaning. (Turner 4f.)

Storytellers and story-makers, of course, do not need theorists to tell them the place of story. They just go ahead and use stories. Some, like J.R.R. Tolkien and Terry Pratchett, try to explicitly show other people what story is all about because they understand the power of story. The concept of ‘story’ is rather complex. If we look at the definitions in the OED, we find that they are rather contradictory. Here are a few of those definitions: “A narrative, true or presumed to be true, relating to important events and celebrated persons of a more or less remote past; a historical relation or anecdote.” “A recital of events that have or are alleged to have happened; a series of events that are or might be narrated.” “A narrative of real or, more usually, fictitious events, designed for the entertainment of the hearer or reader; a series of traditional or imaginary incidents forming the matter of such a narrative; a tale.” “Succession of incidents, ‘plot’ (of a novel, poem, or drama).” “An incident, real or fictitious, related in conversation or in written discourse in order to amuse or interest, or to illustrate some remark made; an anecdote. A good story: often, an amusing anecdote.” Usage: “An allegation, statement; an account or representation of a matter; a particular person’s representation of the facts in a case.” “A mere tale, a baseless report.” “colloq. Euphemism for: a lie.”

So here a story refers to both historical and fictional happenings, it can be used as a synonym of deception/lie but also for a true account.3 3

I refer here to the OED first because it is the definition non-theorists work with. The purpose of this introduction is to show what Tolkien and Pratchett are referring to when they say story, rather than make a long history of the term in the various narrative theories throughout the ages.

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Story is also used as a synonym of narrative among non-literary students. Both these concepts are even more difficult to address when we come to their theoretical, and more technical definitions by literary critics and theorists. For the theorists in general, narrative, story and plot are all different things, whereas the common reader will not even consider the nuances of the terms. If you tell a friend you read a book or watched a film, they will ask you “what was it about?”, meaning “what’s the story?” or “what happened/which events took place?”. However the question is formulated, your answer is likely to be the same: you will tell them about the protagonist and what happened to them; you will possibly add the theme and might even add the genre, which will help your friend map what sort of expectations they should have about your account, and what sort of assumptions they should be making about it. Gerald Prince’s definition of story in his A Dictionary of Narratology tries to define it by opposing “story” to other similarly problematic concepts: Story. 1. The content plane of narrative as opposed to its expression plane or discourse; the ‘what’ of a narrative as opposed to its ‘how’; the narrated as opposed to the narrating; the fiction as opposed to the narration (in Ricardou’s sense of the terms) the existents and events represented in a narrative. 2. The fabula (or basic material arranged into a plot) as opposed to the sjuzet or plot. 3. A narrative of events with an emphasis on chronology, as opposed to plot, which is a narrative of events with an emphasis on causality (Forster): ‘The king died, and then the queen died.’ is a story, whereas ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. 4. A causal sequence of events pertinent to a character or characters seeking to solve a problem or reach a goal. As such, though every story is a narrative (the recounting of one of more events), not every narrative is necessarily a story (consider, for instance, a narrative merely recounting a temporal sequence of events that are not causally related). 5. According to Benveniste, and along with discourse (discours), one of two distinct and complementary linguistic subsystems. Whereas discourse involves some reference to the situation of enunciation and implies a sender and a receiver, story or history (histoire) does not. (Prince 91)

In The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, edited by David Herman, Porter Abbott claims in his essay “Story, plot, and narration” that the reason for so much debate is because: “narrative happens in the mind, with its empirical components, words spoken or printed, pictures on a screen, actors on a stage – transformed by cognitive processes that are still largely mysterious.” (40) He adds that “[s]cholars may not agree that a story must have a beginning or an end, but there is little dispute that a story is composed of action (an event or events) and characters (more broadly existents or entities) and that it always proceeds forward in time” (41). This paper will not discuss the theoretical dimension of story, because my main concern is what creative writers like Tolkien and Pratchett define as “story” and how they treat it. Neither of them is a literary scholar, or a narratologist and, both approach ‘story’ by ignoring as much as possible

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established theoretical discourse, as writers will often do. Furthermore, they seem to make no distinction between “narrative” and “story”. As such, what is common to all definitions is its structure: it is always a narrative structure. So story in this paper is considered as a narrative account of events that happen to someone (a character or characters) and that take place in a certain time and space (and in a certain order, usually linked by cause-effect), and are told by a storyteller (which could be one of the characters as a narrator to other characters) to an audience (other characters, or readers in general), be it of one or many. Although each of these categories – narrative, events, someone, storyteller and audience – can give rise to many theoretical discussions, they function for the specific context of Tolkien’s and Pratchett’s fiction. 1. J.R.R. Tolkien and Story Tolkien was primarily a linguist. He loved stories because they are made up of words. One of his most famous quotes is from Letter 165, written in 1955, “To me a name comes first and the story follows” (Carpenter 218). Words have stories attached to them. For Tolkien, they were the trigger to the imagining of stories. Tom Shippey explains it this way: [Tolkien’s training made him prone] to consider not only what a word was doing in its immediate contexts, but also its roots, its analogues in other languages, its descendants in modern languages, and all the processes of cultural change that might be hinted at by its history. It might be said that to Tolkien a word was not like a brick, a single delimitable unit, but like the top of a stalactite, interesting in itself but more so as part of something growing. (32)

And later he says: “Good writing began with right words.” (65) From this perspective it is easy to understand why Tolkien was so disapproving of literary critics in general. Contemporary to Tolkien are the studies of national folk-tales and fairy tales in general. These studies showed how fairy-tales had common traits everywhere in the world, and were in fact similar not just in structure but also in plot and characters. Vladimir Propp, for instance, studied hundreds of Russian fairy-tales and came up with functions for them. All fairy tales could then be measured up against the 31 functions Propp found that more or less explain the structure of fairy tales. Despite the fact that Propp’s study applied just to Russian fairy-tales, it has since been applied to any narrative of this type. Although this and other similar dissections of tales and their elements showed that there were many common elements in fairy tales all around the world, Tolkien strongly disagreed with this procedure. In On FairyStories, a lecture delivered in 1939, but revised and published in 1947, Tol-

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kien describes this dissection as something like a murder, as an attitude that far from helping us understanding what a fairy-tale is, it blinds us to its very nature and true function because it ignores the essential: “It is precisely the colouring, the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of a story, and above all the general purport that informs with life the undissected bones of the plot, that really count” (39). For Tolkien, the words matter, the details matter, the way the story is told matters. A fairy-story (or any story) is not made up of its individual elements, but of their interplay and how they hang together; it is in the power of the word which a true storyteller knows just how to use: But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faërie is more potent. […] The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power – upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes. (ibid. 41)

How does Tolkien describe story? What is a story for Tolkien, and what is its purpose? Flieger recently published Tolkien’s preface to an edition of George MacDonald’s The Golden Key – an edition that never came to be published – in which Tolkien answers the first question: Whatever you put in front: plain, fairy, historical, ghost, scientific, cautionary, moral, or simply funny, the tale should tell something: a story, of related events, which should interest a listener in themselves as they are arranged in a sequence from the chosen beginning to the chosen end. I say ‘chosen’, meaning ‘by the inventor’, because the beginning and end of a story is like the edges of the canvas or an added frame to a picture, say a landscape. It concentrates the teller’s attention, and yours, on one small part of the country. (Smith 73)

The country he refers to is Faërie, which meant enchantment or magic, and the enchanted world or country in which marvelous people lived, great and small, with strange powers of mind and will for good and evil. […] A fairy tale is a tale about that world, a glimpse of it; if you read it, you enter Fairy with the author as your guide. (ibid. 74)

Tolkien gives a different perspective on story in the following excerpt of The Lord of the Rings: And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like

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us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. [...] I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs and tales. We’re in one, of course; but I mean: put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards. (739)

And later in the same passage, Frodo says: We’re going on a bit too fast. You and I, Sam, are still stuck in the worst places of the story and it is all too likely that some will say at this point: ‘Shut the book now, dad; we don’t want to hear any more.’ Maybe, said Sam, but I wouldn’t be the one to say that. Things done and over and made into part of the great tales are different.’ (739f.)

According to this passage, stories are to be told by the fireside, in a safe environment, adventures to be lived second hand through the magic words of the storyteller. Sam seems to suggest that once things have become part of the great tales, they are not to be feared anymore. What this means is that stories, as awesome, wonderful and fantastic as they are, only become stories once they are done and over with. They make you think, they make you dream of having your own adventures, but you experience them from the outside. However, Sam himself is saying this as he is perfectly conscious of being part of a great tale, almost as if he knew he was just a character in a book and what his function as such is. Tales are used ad infinitum in The Lord of the Rings. Each character is a potential narrator. Stories are used for explaining things that happened in the past or in the present; they are told as memories of things that should not be forgotten; they are told as lessons and as entertainment. In On Fairy-Stories Tolkien asks what purpose story serves, and what it does to us readers.4 Tolkien considers that the most important element in a tale is the use of that language which will enchant the reader/listener of the tale. The reason this is so important is because for Tolkien the function of fairy-stories is the recovery of that land of beauty the reality of industrial revolution and two World Wars had robbed human kind of, the intense focus on realistic stories, which blinded men and women and children to the enchanting world of wonder. In other words, the first function of story is to fill us with awe. Another function of fairy-tale for Tolkien is to escape from this ugly reality, even if that escape is not always to a better world. It is significant that Sam and Frodo are, as Frodo puts it, in the worst part of the story 4

In the essay Tolkien is mainly referring to fairy-tales. I think the concept applies to any story of a fantastic nature, stories that happen in Faërie, as it were, whether we call them fairy-stories or something else. Later in this paper, I will show how Pratchett refers to story without tying it to fairy-tales, but he then only uses examples of well known fairy-stories. Hence both authors are referring to a similar corpus.

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when they discuss the telling of tales. Faërie is not just a pretty place where nice things happen. That is not where its magic comes from, that is not the reason why we are entranced and wonder fills us as we travel through Faërie. An encounter with a dragon may be scary, even fatal, just as it may be wonderful.5 The magic of stories comes from the portal they open into Faërie. For Tolkien the most important function of stories – particularly fairystories – is Eucatastrophe: the consolation of a happy ending. For Tolkien a happy ending in fairy-tales is essential (and this is a bit contradictory, given that he knows fairy-stories are certainly not about sugary, sweet little fairies, and certainly do not all come to a good end. For instance, the little mermaid becomes foam of the sea in some of the original versions, or bubbles of the air in other versions, and certainly neither are happy endings as one would perceive them in the context of the story). The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ […]: this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist’, nor ‘fugitive’. In its fairy-tale – or otherworld – setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace – never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dycatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. (Tolkien, Smith 75)

Hence for Tolkien the function of fairy-tales – and here we can read story/ fantasy – is to provide hope where there is none, to open up the mind to the possibility of better things. The happy ending is important to Terry Pratchett too, although, like Tolkien, nowhere does he suggest it can be taken for granted. In Unseen Academicals, one of his latest books, it is a force that the characters can feel working and imposing itself on them. However, before I go on to Terry Pratchett I must mention the “Cauldron of Story” that Tolkien refers to in On Fairy-Stories (27). The “Cauldron of Story” is the cauldron where the various possible elements of story simmer, waiting for the “Cook”6 to come and ladle out the best combination for the composition of the most palatable menu. The Cook is crucial. He is the sub-creator who gives life to the story. The Cook in Smith of Wooton Major (actually, the ‘prentice who becomes the “Master Cook” for a while) turns out to be the King of Faërie himself. The function of the Cook is to open the door onto Faërie. This sub-creator does not have to be a cook as in Smith of Wooton Major, it can 5 6

The recent film How to Train Your Dragon shows this dubious view one can have of this magical creature: the Vikings as a people fear dragons and attack them, but one of their youngsters discovers that the world of dragons is very different from what the humans perceive. This is how Tolkien refers to the writer in On Fairy-Stories; also an allegorical character in Smith of Wooton Major.

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be an elf, or a hobbit, or even a human. In The Lord of the Rings there are many tales being told that open up the door to Faërie to the other characters, and the narrators vary. Aragorn sings about Lúthien and Beren, Elrond tells the story of how the rings were created – a story that is a legend to his audience, but a lived experience for himself, and these are but two very small examples. They do this even as they are themselves part of Faërie. The fascination and awe of Sam before living elves is a demonstration of how in The Lord of the Rings legend, myth, Faërie meets reality, but it is their reality, not the readers’. The reader in turn comes to layers upon layers of what Tolkien calls the “Perilous Realm” or Faërie (On Fairy 10). 2. Terry Pratchett Story is the foundation of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, the imaginary multiverse in which Pratchett’s novels take place. Story has power in itself to interfere in the lives of the protagonists of the novels, a power similar to Fate/Weird. In Pratchett’s world everything has a story in it, everything is part of a story: “Granny nodded. ‘There’s always a story,’ she said. ‘It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.’” (Hat 338) In The Science of Discworld – a collaboration book between Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen – this is described in the following way: What runs Discworld is deeper than mere magic and more powerful than pallid science. It is narrative imperative, the power of story. […] In the Discworld universe, then, there is narrativium. It is part of the spin of every atom, the drift of every cloud. It is what causes them to be what they are and continue to exist and take part in the ongoing story of the world. […] Narrativium is powerful stuff. We have always had a drive to paint stories onto the Universe. […] Humans think in stories. (10f.)

Saying the narrative imperative runs a story world is not surprising. We all expect the stories we read to follow certain prerequisites: boy meets girl and everybody knows what has to happen; a fight between good and evil can only end one way; Cinderella meets the prince and what conclusion should follow but that they marry and live happily ever after. Even re-tellings that try to stray from the canon versions of fairy-tales still need to obey the same narrative imperative. The most interesting aspect of Pratchett’s perception of the power of story in his imaginary world is contained in that last sentence “humans think in stories”. In Witches Abroad, Pratchett explains his theory more extensively – so much so that the theory of story almost overpowers the actual story in the book. This novel is about three witches who travel from their home in

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Lancre to Genua to do the job of a fairy godmother who passed away before finishing her job. The job of the fairy godmother, a witch that actually does use magic, is to steer the course of her protégé’s story. Witches usually do not use magic, a secret new witches are always surprised to find out. In Witches Abroad the image of the fairy godmother is somewhat subverted, as the ‘happy ending’ means Cinderella should not marry the prince. Instead of a Cauldron of Story, which is full of elements ready to be used by a cook Pratchett shows us a shaping power and this is how he explains it: Because stories are important. People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around. Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power. Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped spacetime, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling… stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness. (Witches Abroad 8)

Pratchett gives story a very different power to what we have seen in Tolkien. It is not a passive tool, ready to be used. Whereas for Tolkien story is like a portal onto a different land, in Pratchett’s writing story intervenes in people’s lives and imposes itself on them, regardless of their preferences, their intentions, their plans. The humans involved in it are not in control. In other words, there isn’t an author/creator in control, a master cook, choosing the right elements from the “Cauldron of Story”. Whereas in Tolkien humans are the creators – sub-creators, as Tolkien calls them – in Pratchett the only people who can be interpreted as an approximation of the cook are the witches. I should add that this doesn’t mean the humans who wander into Faërie in Tolkien have full control over their destiny, but they do have the use of free will, and can choose. This is very important for Tolkien. That Frodo chose to go on his quest rather than being prompted out of the door like Bilbo had been is important. However, Tolkien seems to be more conscious of the storyteller and seems to give him – and he is thinking of a male writer – the power that Pratchett seems to give to story. In Witches Abroad, Pratchett declares that stories provide an insistent pattern that history keeps on repeating, a pattern that grows ever stronger every time new actors “tread the path of the story”. Also in the same chapter, he says that story doesn’t care about the actors themselves and that, once started, the story “takes a shape” and has to run its course. It is the job of witches to change the story when it is running an undesirable course, but it can only be done in the right places. Granny Weatherwax is one of these witches, the one who best knows the power of story and how

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it works. She knows a story can only be changed in the right places in the right way, as Witches Abroad clearly shows. Does this mean that stories do not have human authors? Does Pratchett defend Barthes’ famous theory of the death of the author? Not at all. Stories are the great creation of humans and he explains this in his novel Wintersmith. The plot is, in simplistic terms, as follows: Tiffany, a young witch in training, interferes in the dance between Winter and Summer – elementals, only a step down from gods – taking the place of the Summer lady and causing the Wintersmith to think he’s in love with her. The Wintersmith therefore lingers around until Tiffany discovers how to send him away again. The first step is for Tiffany to understand that the world is made up of stories because humans have made it so. Tiffany is still learning about the power of story, how it works in Discworld and what her role is as a witch. The Wintersmith and the Summer Lady… danced. The dance never ended. […] To animals they were just the weather, just part of everything. But humans arose and gave them names, just as they filled the starry sky with heroes and monsters, because this turned them into stories. And humans loved stories, because once you’ve turned things into stories you could change the stories. […] But the Story had life, too. It was like a play, now. It would roll on around the year, and if one of the player’s wasn’t the real actress but just some girl who’d wandered onto the stage, well, that was too bad. She’d have to wear the costume and speak the lines and hope that there was going to be a happy ending. Change the story, even if you don’t mean to, and the story changes you. (Pratchett, Wintersmith 216-217)

In fact, what Pratchett defends in Discworld is that humans are so powerful they can make things happen just by thinking them. And story keeps everything hanging together, like a glue, providing meaning and structure to the multiverse. Discworld runs on magic, and magic is indissolubly linked to Narrative Causality, the power of story. A spell is a story about what a person wants to happen, and magic is what turns stories into reality. On Discworld, things happen because people expect them to. […] Narrative structure demands it. [...] On Discworld, the narrative imperative is reified into a substance, narrativium [which] takes care of narrative imperatives, and ensures they are obeyed. (Pratchett, Steward and Cohen, Science II 23-24)

The function of story in Terry Pratchett is not just to open the mind onto another world, but to actually create another world, in fact re-create this one too. If it were not for story, nothing would make sense. Although this concept is applied to his very own Discworld, it is a reflection of how humans behave in the “real” world, of how we humans live by the stories we tell. On Roundworld, our world, humans act as if narrativium exists here, too. We expect it not to rain tomorrow because the village fair is on, and it would be unfair (in

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both senses) if rain spoiled the occasion. Or, more often, given the pessimistic ways of our country folk, we expect it to rain tomorrow because the village fair is on. […] Our minds tell us stories about the world, and we base a great many of our actions on what those stories say. [...] In other words, we make up our world according to the stories that we tell ourselves, and each other, about it. We build the minds in our children that way, too. [...] The power of narrativium in Roundworld is immense. Things happen because of it that you would never expect from the laws of nature. [...] If we’d not told ourselves stories about the Moon, there would have been no point in going there at all. [...] The Moon was a story waiting to be finished (‘First human lands on the Moon!’), and we went there because the story demanded it. When Mind evolved on Earth, a kind of narrativium evolved alongside it. Unlike the Discworld variety of narrativium [...] our variety is purely mental. It is an imperative, but the imperative has not been reified into a thing. (ibid. 24; 26-27)

Human beings do not just tell stories, or just listen to them. They are more like Granny Weatherwax, who is aware of the power of story on Discworld, and refuses to be trapped by the story’s narrativium. Instead, she uses the power of story to mould events according to her own wishes. 3. Conclusion One of the interesting aspects of Pratchett’s theory is how close it seems to be to the recent narrative theories, in particular the cognitive ones. The questions narrative theories now aim to answer are: ‘How do formal cues in narratively organised discourse trigger prestored knowledge […] in ways that allow people to recognize a story as a story in the first place? What formal cues have to be there for this to happen, and why? Do certain kinds of formal cues facilitate narrative comprehension to a greater degree than others? How does narrative competence pertain to the cognitive, verbal, and interactional skills and dispositions bound up with communicative competence generally?’ […] The root transformation can be described as a shift from text-centered or formal models to models that are jointly formal and functional – models attentive both to the text and to the context of stories. […] At stake, then, is an interplay between the way stories are designed and the processing strategies promoted by their design. (Herman, New Perspectives 8)

Narrative theory is now trying to understand how story works not as a literary mode, but as a tool, a mode of explanation, a way of communication, i.e. the shaping power of story. One part of this concern is the ‘return’ of the author, because the knowledge and experience of the author in the creation of stories and in the understanding of how they work is of great help in the answering of the questions that theorists are concerned with at the moment, because authors have a keen perception of how story works and how readers respond and interpret it.

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In this context, authors like Tolkien and Pratchett are very important because they elaborate on the concept of story in their writings. Between the wonder, awe, escapism, deliverance, consolation and hope in Tolkien and the fatality of treading the path story has marked for us in Pratchett, there is reality. We are more and more aware of how we use stories every day of our lives. Stories are used as therapy in psychoanalysis, and by psychologists. Narrative structure is a balancing element we use to make sense of an otherwise nonsensical world and life experience. The world is made up of stories, in great part because we can only perceive it in narrative terms. And stories change us too, as they become part of our personal experience and inform our future decisions. And yes, we can change the world bit by bit by telling a different story, by changing the story in the right places, but it is a many-layered story that is going on. We cannot change the trajectory of a comet. What we can do is tell the story in such a way that will give us hope and will help us go on, to cope with reality. A comet can become a wishing star, the rocket of a wonderful being on its way home. Fantasy is a very important part of this scheme. Tolkien says: Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. […] If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. […] For creative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it. (Tolkien, On Fairy 65)

Pratchett has added witches to the Discworld because they can defy story. They recognise its power and its role, but are not slaves to it. Pratchett’s extensive explanations about story and its power is an invitation for us to be witches too, to understand how we can defy story. Hence, as Pratchett says in Witches Abroad, stories matter. They matter a great deal. Without them there can be no progress, no development of our species, no hope for the future. We will go on making stories, transforming things into stories so that we can change them by imagining that a different story is possible. And we can all be witches because this knowledge is power. Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter. “Story, plot, and narration.” The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Ed. David Herman. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. Carpenter, Humphrey, ed. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. London: HarperCollins, 1995.

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Herman, David, ed. Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1999. —, ed. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. New York: Cambridge UP, 2008. Pratchett, Terry. Witches Abroad. London: Corgi, 1992. —. A Hat Full of Sky. New York: HarperTempest, 2004. —. The Wee Free Men. London: Corgi, 2004. —. Wintersmith. London: Corgi, 2007. Pratchett, Terry, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. The Science of Discworld. Revised and updated edition. London: Ebury, 2002. —. The Science of Discworld II: The Globe. London: Ebury Press, 2003. Prince, Gerald. A Dictionary of Narratology. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1987. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folk Tale. Texas: U of Texas P, 1968. Shippey, Tom. Road to Middle-earth. Revised Edition. London: HarperCollins, 2005. Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. 1968. One volume edition. London: HarperCollins, 1995. —. Smith of Wooton Major. Edited by Verlyn Flieger. Extended Edition. London: HarperCollins, 2005. —. On Fairy-Stories. Ed. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas Anderson. Expanded Ed. with commentary and notes. London: HarperCollins, 2008. Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.

Grimmerie and Primer Wicked and Diamond Age as Instructional Texts WALLACE T. CLEAVES II Anyone who has had the curious pleasure of teaching composition at the college level has encountered the difficulty of selecting texts that truly engage the budding minds of young students. A few years ago I hit on the somewhat challenging but eventually rewarding prospect of allowing the students to select from two radically different texts: Gregory Maguire’s 1996 novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, and Neal Stephenson’s 1995 work of speculative fiction, The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. The plan was to break the students up into two groups, depending on their selections and to shift between the two groups of students; alternately encouraging their discussions and allowing them time to deliberate over the texts among themselves. Both texts had been taught in other classes at the University of California at Riverside, where I teach, and were readily available in the school bookstore and library. Each of these influential texts explores the role of the fairy tale in the education and development of young female outcasts into powerful and effective leaders. Both novels investigate the pedagogical qualities of the fairy tale as a vehicle to encourage innovation and creativity. I felt that they offered a range of expressive interests, clearly focused on the role of education in the development of a young person with whom the students might be able to identify, and were both popularly and critically well received. They also both worked well together, sharing a number of themes, including an exploration of the power and generative force of the fairy tale. I’ve since tried similar experiments with other texts, and had some degree of success, but have not encountered the overwhelming response these two specific works generated or the kind of synthesis that developed between them. After much pondering, I believe I have an understanding of why these particular texts were so effective, and that success rests on the fact of their respective genres and their development of the essential elements of the fairy tale. Both texts are solidly within the parameters of the

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heading of fantasy or science fiction, but are not exactly typical representatives of those genres. The fractured fairy realm of Oz depicted in Wicked is not a clichéd realm of sword and sorcery, nor is the dystopic near future world of Diamond Age filled with aliens and space travel. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of such departures from the caricatures of the genres, these works realize the essential potential of the genres to continue to inculcate and develop the imaginative faculty, derived from the cultural debt these genres owe to the traditional fairy tale. My experience with these texts leads me to two significant conclusions. The first of these is that science fiction and fantasy texts can be particularly successful in developing critical thinking and critical writing skills among college students. The second observation is that this capacity is directly related to the connections between these genres and the traditional fairy tale. Though there is a long critical history of close association between science fiction and fantasy literature, and clear links between these more modern genres and the traditional fairy tale, such a discussion is beyond the scope of this work.1 However, the common features of world building, social speculation and heroic character development provide a clear basis for linking the genres of science fiction and fantasy with the traditional fairy tale. Additionally, the two texts I will discuss make explicit the connections between their respective genres of fantasy and science fiction with the fairy tale. Both Wicked and Diamond Age consciously explore the power of the fairy tale through the genres of science fiction and fantasy and are conscious (and critical of) the educational role of literature. This textual awareness makes these works the perfect media to explore the relationship between these genres and the traditional fairy tale, and to investigate their (all three types of literature) developmental and educational roles. I will explore the pedagogical message of each of the two primary texts in turn, but it is important to start with a discussion of the formative nature of the fairy tale and its particular relevance in the development of mature social and emotional awareness. The central text for this discussion is, of course, Bruno Bettelheim’s 1975 work The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, the central thesis of which is eloquently stated by Bettelheim in his introduction: This book attempts to show how fairy stories represent in imaginative form what the process of healthy human development consists of, and how the tales make such development attractive for the child to engage in. This growth process begins with the resistance against the parents and fear of growing up, and ends when the youth has truly found itself, achieved psychological independence and moral maturity, and no longer views the other sex as threatening or demonic, but






























































1

The essay collection Intersections: Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by George E. Slusser, deals extensivley with the historical, critical and commercial connections between these genres.

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is able to relate positively to it. In short, this book explicates why fairy tales make such great and positive psychological contributions to the child’s inner growth. (12)

Though the texts of Diamond Age and Wicked would not be considered children’s literature by any stretch of the imagination, each parallels the developmental process described above both narratively and structurally. Both works focus on the development of a young girl from infancy to maturity, going through a process of resistance, self-realization and (though problematic and not nearly as simply as in the paradigm Bettelheim suggests) the formation of social and interpersonal relationships. Farah Mendelsohn addresses this same quality of outward development in her 2009 survey of children’s and young adult science fiction, The Intergalactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children’s and Teens’ Science Fiction. Specifically, in discussing the works of Robert A. Heinlein and Andre Norton, whose works she locates as the primary generators of a market for young adult science fiction, Mendelsohn notes that the primary lesson of these developmental novels is that the character the reader is meant to identify with goes through a realization of his or her own place in the larger world and social continuum: In Heinlein’s and Norton’s worlds, teens change their own lives, and they sometimes change the lives of those around them but part of the lesson they learn is that they are a cog in the universe. This is not to imply that Heinlein and Norton diminish teens; it is that their understanding is that we are all cogs, and as such, are simultaneously vitally important and a very small part of the whole. The plots they generate are plots of socialization, but the target is to encourage both ambition and personal context (I am deliberately avoiding the term teamwork; sometimes that’s a factor, sometimes not). These books, however different, are all concerned with one person’s development: they are all in one way or another, bildungsroman, but they are bildungsroman whose definition of “the man” lies outward with society, rather than at home with family. (17)

This observation clearly describes the same sort of central process of character development found in both Diamond Age and Wicked. This is also much the same process that Bettelheim identifies as the central trope of the fairy tale, here simply extended to reflect the concerns of a young adult audience and expanded accordingly.2




























































2

Mendlesohn’s argument also extends to explore some critical and telling differences between the works produced in the 1950s and young adult science fiction produced in later decades. Most notably, the characters in the novels of Heinlein and Norton, despite their relative youth, are essentially adult and concerned primarily with the character discovering his or her own career path. She notes that “every one of these books is, in some way, structured as a career book, a category which no longer exists but which was very popular in the 1950s, when many teens could expect to be in full-time work by the age of seventeen” (18). I would argue that this is precisely what Diamond Age does, though the career that the protagonist, Nell, chooses is somewhat unorthodox – though ironically quite fitting considering the fairy tale elements in the novel. She literally becomes a princess, head of her own

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It is this quality that makes these works so provocative and productive for the modern college classroom. I hesitate to enter into the fraught discussion of whether young adults have become increasingly infantilized in Western society3 but it is clear that the same process of character development and self-realization that is initiated in the genre of the fairy tale – and perhaps realized in works of science fiction and fantasy – is relevant to college students, heading out into the world on their own for the first time, breaking or at least attenuating ties with family, community and self-identity and forming these bonds and themselves anew. Bettelheim notes that the ultimate goal of the fairy tale is to produce an independent minded and forward thinking individual: “The fairy tale is future-oriented and guides the child – in terms he can understand in both his conscious and unconscious mind – to relinquish his infantile dependency wishes and achieve a more satisfying independent existence” (11). This is curiously close to the underlying ‘purpose’ of much of science fiction literature4 (and to some degree the literature of fantasy). Science fiction attempts to help us consider our future and our place in it, and according to Bettelheim this is essentially the goal of the fairy tale. Bettelheim’s continued discussion of the contemporary importance of the fairy tale even better illustrates the potential value of science fiction and fantasy literature in the college classroom. He discusses the essential failure of modern society to provide children with stories and literature that encourage the kind of internal development necessary to establish a healthy and independent internal life. Today children no longer grow up within the security of an extended family, or of a well-integrated community. Therefore, even more than at the times fairy tales were invented, it is important to provide the modern child with images of heroes who have to go out into the world all by themselves and who, although originally ignorant of the ultimate things, find secure places in the world by following their right way with deep inner confidence. (11)







































































































































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4

autonomous state, recognized by other world leaders and herself the founding mother of an entirely new society. An important discussion of this trend based on comparisons of United States census data can be found in Furstenberg et al.: “[…] the 1960 and 2000 U.S. censuses, illustrates the large decline in the percentage of young adults who, by age 20 or 30, have completed all of the traditionally-defined major adult transitions (leaving home, finishing school, becoming financially independent, getting married and having a child). We define financial independence for both men and women as being in the labor force […] In 2000, just 46 percent of women and 31 percent of men aged 30 had completed all five transitions, compared with 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men at the same age in 1960” (37f.). I will point to the similarity between this definition of the fairy tale and the ‘moderate’ definition given by Isaac Asimov in his discussion of the genre, Asimov on Science Fiction: “Science fiction is that branch of literature that deals with human responses to changes in the level of science and technology” (22).

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It is clear that the conditions Bettelheim is describing at the time of his writing, in the mid-1970s, have only been exacerbated over the last thirty-five years.5 I would, in fact, argue that what Bettelheim is describing is the precise condition in which we currently find our culture, and that his observation, in part, explains the increasing popularity of science fiction and fantasy literature. The socially instructive features of the fairy tale that Bettelheim describes – the stories of “heroes who have to go out into the world all by themselves” and who eventually “find secure places in the world by following their right way with deep inner confidence” – are essential features of the science fiction and fantasy genres, and these themes resonate ever more powerfully in an increasingly complex and distracting world, especially among young adults who may have more tenuous connections with family and community. This state must be most acutely felt during that period of extended adolescence on the cusp of full-fledged adulthood that is the condition of the college student, and it this fact that may explain why the genre is so popular with many young adults.6




























































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6

One clear indication of this trend can be found in statistics relating to the number of multigenerational family households. In 2008, 16.1% of Americans lived in households that contained at least two adult generations, as compared to 1940 when 24.7% of the population fell into this category. Interestingly, the trend has been reversing since bottoming out in 1980 at 12.1%. The causes for this are mostly speculation, but an overview of the trend and some rationale behind its permutations can be found in the Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Report on “The Return of the Multi-Generational Family Household.” The popularity of science fiction and fantasy literature is quite hard to gauge, but it seems clear that the genres are alive and well. Curiously, one of the clearest sources of information I could find on the market share of science fiction and fantasy was from the statistics published by the Romance Writers of America website using data generated by the marketing research firm Simba Information. Science fiction and fantasy do not fair nearly as well as several other major genres, but do at least have the consolation of significantly outselling the curiously vague category of “classic literary fiction”: Romance Market Share Compared to Other Genres: • Romance fiction: $1.36 billion in estimated revenue for 2009 • Religion/inspirational: $770 million • Mystery: $674 million • Science fiction/fantasy: $554 million • Classic literary fiction: $462 million Furthermore, there does seem to be some general consensus that fantasy sells a bit better than science fiction and that young adult oriented titles have been particularly successful. However, difficulties with establishing a consensus definition for the porous bounds between these genres and with discerning what exactly constitutes young adult fiction make this argument a challenge I would as soon avoid for the moment. However, the online article “Industries, Artists, Friends and Fans: Marketing Young Adult Fictions Online” by Leonie Margaret Rutherford provides an interesting overview of observations and scholarship related to the increasing market share of young adult fiction in general, most of which might well be categorized as part of the genres of science fiction or fantasy.

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To move from the general to the particular, it is useful to now begin to specifically explore the individual texts in question. I will begin with Diamond Age, as this work is set in a ‘nearish’ future that in many ways accentuates and addresses these same concerns about the dissolution of society and the increasingly difficulty of the existential struggle to find one’s place in a chaotic and rapidly changing world. 1. Diamond Age Stephenson’s Diamond Age, set in a speculative future where nanotechnology has transformed both economy and society, explores the role of a nearly sentient instructional aide, The Primer, in encouraging the intellectual and moral development of a young girl. Much of the novel takes place within the fairy tale world the Primer appropriates from a mixture of European, Native American and Eastern sources, serving as a powerful pedagogical construct. While the novel Diamond Age is solidly a work of science fiction, the internal “tale within a tale” of the Primer that is told in parallel with the external story of the novel itself is explicitly and definitively a fairy tale. The Primer is actually a fantastically complex interactive computer expressly designed to educate children to be “subversive” individuals.7 The device accomplishes this by providing an immersive fairy tale world within its multimedia pages, replete with princesses, dark castles and, “Lots of unreconstructed Grimm Brothers content” (219). It educates and entertains the children who read it, becoming an almost all consuming, immersive game that shadows and parallels the children’s real life experiences and reproduces them in symbolic and archetypal form within the complex fairy tale narrative it constructs around a princess’ quest to recover stolen magical keys and free her sibling from an enchanted castle.




























































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This term is used repeatedly in the text to denote the special quality that makes individuals unique and successful. “Subversiveness” is equated with rational and directed risk taking, independence and self-awareness. One of the earliest uses of the term appears in the text as the engineer of The Primer, John Percival Hackworth, contemplates his own daughter’s potential future and ponders the project of creating The Primer with its patron and originator, Lord Finkle-McGraw: “How could he inculcate her with the nobleman’s emotional stance – the pluck to take risks with her life, to found a company, perhaps found several of them after the first efforts had failed? He had read the biographies of several notable peers and found few common threads between them. Just when he was about to give up and attribute it all to random chance, Lord Finkle-McGraw had invited him over to his club and, out of nowhere, begun talking about precisely the same issue […] But what is that ingredient? I don’t exactly know, Finkle-McGraw had said, but as a starting point, I would like you to go home and ponder the meaning of the word subversive” (81).

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The work seems almost designed to provoke classroom discussion as Stephenson directly confronts the problems of standard educational methodologies several times during the novel, hinting at a significant disillusionment with traditional pedagogical models. He repeatedly questions the efficacy of structured education, and distinctly prioritizes autodidactic methods of education. In an early expository aside introducing the character who sets the plot of the novel and the project to create the eponymous Primer in motion, Stephenson describes the education of the highly placed and well respected character of Equity Lord Finkle-McGraw thus: “[L]ike many universities at the time, ISU insisted that its students study a broad range of subjects, including arts and humanities. Finkle-McGraw chose instead to read books, listen to music, and attend plays in his spare time” (20). What is particularly noteworthy here is the role of self-direction in a successful education. Finkle-McGraw and almost all of the other interesting and effective characters come to their elevated status in society by paths that are distinct, individual and more than a little indirect. In fact, apart from the self-directed nature of these characters’ developments, the other feature that is most distinct is that the successful figures follow distinctly nontraditional paths to arrive at their respective competencies. In a following conversation between Finkle-McGraw and Hackworth, the engineer who actually designs and programs the Primer, Hackworth reveals that he too comes from a non-traditional educational background (at least for an engineer). In response to Finkle-McGraw’s question about his education as an engineer he responds: “Well, sir, I studied English literature in college.” [Finkle-McGraw responds] “Ah! So you are not one of those who followed the straight and narrow path to engineering.” “I suppose not, sir.” “And your colleagues at Bespoke?” [Ed. The high-end engineering firm Hackworth works in.] “Well, if I understand your question, sir, I would say that, as compared with other departments, a relatively large proportion of Bespoke engineers have had – well, for lack of a better way of describing it, interesting lives.” [… Finkle-McGraw] swept the stick around in an arc that encompassed half the island. “How many of those children do you suppose are destined to lead interesting lives?” (22f.)

These “interesting lives” are what, in Stephenson’s apparent estimation, make for truly successful and useful members of society. It is also worth noting the role that literature plays in the development of these characters. For Finkle-McGraw, his own autodidactic reading seems to have been a key ingredient in his accomplishments. For Hackworth, the insinuation is that by studying literature, he was able to become an even more accomplished and brilliant engineer. The fact that these two

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figures then collaborate to create a pedagogical text designed to not merely teach a child but to encourage independent and innovative thought is a clear evocation of the power of literature to instruct a developing mind. As for the text itself, apart from its fascinating but essentially utilitarian nano-technological properties, it is essentially a book of fairy tales – albeit massively interactive and ramified. The Primer essentially allows for the development of an instructive fantasy fairy tale within the confines of a relatively hard science fiction novel. The curious juxtaposition of these genres speaks to the inherent and complimentary power of each of them, namely, the ability to facilitate, inculcate and encourage the qualities of speculation, introspection and creativity. In fact, the originator of the project, Lord Finkle McGraw, focuses Hackworth’s work on the Primer by asking him to ponder the word “Subversive” and by providing him with Coleridge’s poem “The Raven,” a bizarre revenge fairy tale, and urging him to imitate “unreconstructed” Märchen in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm (81-84). This subversiveness becomes textually synonymous with success. What is particularly striking in this work (indeed, this theme is also present in Wicked and will be dealt with in context later in this paper) is that education acts both to subvert and to reinforce traditional values and ideologies. In Diamond Age, the primer is specifically designed as a panacea to stave off cultural stagnation – both by its initiator, Lord Finkle-McGraw, and by its composer, Hackworth – to instill the quality of subversiveness into the child who uses it. Yet, the primer also instills the nearly crushing neo-Victorian values of the society that engendered it. Much of the text actually centers on the struggle of the protagonist Nell to overcome the implicit shortcomings of the primer and of the neo-Victorian culture in which she has been inculcated. The novel even questions the efficacy of the Primer itself, and its ability to fully develop this essential quality of subversion. One passage in the text that explicitly discusses the gap between education and experience is particularly problematic in that it seems to undermine, internally, the efficacy of the primer and to question the instructive ability of the tale itself. At a critical juncture in the story, the young protagonist, Nell, is confronted by her mentor, Constable Moore. He has become a sort of avuncular figure in Nell’s life, taking on the protective and instructive role from her brother, whom she has so far surpassed that he himself recognizes he can only assist her by stepping aside and removing himself from her life. At this point the constable steps in, a physically and mentally scarred but noble and even heroic mentor figure. He is the archetypal ‘wise old man’ figure who has fully experienced life and adventure, returning to the ordinary world to impart the wisdom gleaned from his

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encounters and to pass on such arcane knowledge to the next generation, in the mode of the Campbellian heroic myth figure.8 The constable succinctly states the limitations of received and structured knowledge, and the inherent inadequacy of what might be termed ‘book learning’. “Nell,” the Constable continued […], “the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations – in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward. “In your Primer you have a resource that will make you highly educated, but it will never make you intelligent. That comes from life. Your life up this point has given you all the experience you need to be intelligent, but you have to think about those experiences. If you don’t think about them, you’ll be psychologically unwell. If you do think about them, you will become not merely educated but intelligent, and then, a few years down the road, you will probably give me cause to wish I were a few decades younger.” The Constable turned around and walked back into his house, leaving Nell alone in the garden, pondering the meaning of the last statement. She supposed it was the sort of thing she might understand later, when she had become intelligent. (283)

At first, it appears that this statement undermines the entire purpose and project of the Primer, but on closer inspection it becomes clear that Constable Moore is only reinforcing the strategic purpose of the Primer as envisioned by Finkle-McGraw and made manifest through Hackworth – to create ‘subversive’ (e.g. independent) individuals. What his statement actually makes clear is that without internal reflection and eventual selfawareness, the education provided by the Primer (and by other sources as well) will be for naught. This is, in fact, pointing out exactly why the Primer is so effective. By using the archetypes of the unreconstructed fairy tale, the book provides Nell with the narrative, imagery, symbolism and knowledge she needs to become a fully realized and psychologically independent individual. Nell’s adventures in the fairy tale world of sorcerers, monsters and heroes found within the interactive pages of the Primer have begun to teach her how to effectively deal with the real world she encounters outside of its pages. However, the Primer, and any text, can only facilitate that process of selftransformation and encourage it. As Bettelheim notes, the fairy tale only has value to a child when that child is able to internalize and relate its message to his own existence.




























































8

This refers specifically to the heroic myth archetype as found in Joseph Campbell’s seminal work, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

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What Diamond Age so effectively points out to the advanced composition student and the aspiring critical thinker is his or her own agency in constructing a meaningful education. The materials provided by the instructor are but grist for the cognitive mill of the mind. This lesson is powerful in that it is at once liberating (giving the agency of education to the students themselves) and burdensome (confirming that they are themselves responsible for their own education). This is precisely the message of maturity, the donning of heavy self-aware responsibility accompanied by the unshackling of the individual from external controls and boundaries. I believe that is why it has proved such an effective text in the classroom. 2. Wicked Maguire’s Wicked is set in the uniquely American fairy tale realm of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, utilizing this culturally evocative context to explore and critique such diverse issues as fascism, racism, sexism and fundamentalism. The text itself becomes instructional, playing on the distance between Baum’s original and complicated appropriation of European folklore and the sanitized reformulation embodied in the classic 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz (Dir. Victor Fleming). This complex relationship is further inflected through the subsequent development of the novel into a hit musical in 2003 that then elided much of the complexity and troubled resolution of Maguire’s book. Through the novel itself, the innocent childhood fairytale is both corrupted and restored. It is not surprising then that one of the central themes of the novel is related to the text of the Grimmerie, a puzzling and troubling pseudo mystical text that leads to the inevitable conflict between Elphaba, who will later become the Wicked Witch of the West, and the Wizard, resulting in her ultimate destruction. The Grimmerie, like the Primer in Diamond Age, is both central and incidental to the development of the protagonist, informing Elphaba and becoming identified with her, but eventually becoming almost superfluous as her own identity surfaces. The character of Elphaba, like Nell in Diamond Age, has an essential relationship with the text, but it does not eventually define her. Likewise, the role of education in the construction of individual identity is as central to the text of Wicked as it is in Diamond Age. In each text, the main character is both constructed and informed by the instructional method. In the case of Wicked, the character of Elphaba is immersed in the more traditional educational setting of the university. There, she encounters instructors and administrators who seem to (sometimes simultaneously)

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both subjugate her and encourage sedition. Her struggle for independence is both informed by her university experiences and a reaction against them. In a discussion with her reluctant roommate and even more inimical friend, Galinda (who will become Glinda in her own intertextual transmogrification), Elphaba discusses the nature of evil and questions the role of religious doctrine and of epistemology in general. “My father taught me a lot,” Elphaba said slowly. “He was very well educated indeed. He taught me to read and write and think, and more. But not enough. I just think, like our teachers here, that if ministers are effective, they’re good at asking questions to get you to think. I don’t think they’re supposed to have the answers. Not necessarily.” (79)

Elphaba resists the very concept of received knowledge, instead preferring to find her own way. This resistance is thematically carried out over the course of the text as Elphaba refuses to conform to any established social or political order, instead pursuing her own internal compass at great personal cost. This makes her relationship with the Grimmerie, a magical book she comes across in her seclusion at Kaimo Ko, the remote castle of her deceased lover and his disaffected harem of wives, quite complicated. Though she recognizes it as a source of knowledge and power, she seems to distrust it from the start. The Grimmerie, in fact, reinforces this uncertainty by scrambling and confusing its own text. In describing it to Sarima, the first wife of Elphaba’s illicit love, she explains that the Grimmerie is: “As I understand it,” Elphie said, “a sort of encyclopedia of things numinous. Magic; and of the spirit world; and of things unseen; and of things once and future. I can only make out a line here or there. Look how it scrambles itself as you watch.” She pointed to a paragraph of hand-lettered text. Sarima peered. Though her skill at reading was minimal, she gaped at what she saw. The letters floated and rearranged themselves on the page, as if enlivened. The letters clotted together in a big black snarl, like a mound of ants. Then Elphaba turned a page […] “And a recipe on this page. It says ‘Of apples with black skin and white flesh: to fill the stomach with greed unto death.’“ (265)

The instability of the Grimmerie reflects and perhaps encourages Elphaba’s own distrust of received knowledge. While she does make use of its arcane secrets, she seems painfully aware that it is a double-edged weapon, equally capable of causing her harm as it is of explicating the world to her. The concluding image of the fairy tale staple, the apple of death, is particularly telling, connecting the Grimmerie, Elphaba and the novel Wicked itself to that generative genre. The book comes to represent the hybrid nature of Elphaba herself, not belonging to any one realm or world, but apart from and outside of any setting or community she inhabits. The reported origins of the book make this clear as Sarima recounts that she was given the Grimmerie by a mysterious stranger from another world.

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“He told me a fabulous tale and persuaded me to take this book from him. He said that it was a book of knowledge, and that it belonged in another world, but it wasn’t safe there. So he had brought it here – where it could be hidden and out of harm’s way.” “What a load of tripe,” said Elphie. “If it came from another world I shouldn’t be able to read any of it. And I can make out a little.” “Even if it is magic as he says?” said Sarima. “But you know, I believed him. He said there was more congress between worlds than anyone would credit, that our world has attributes of his, and his of ours, a kind of leakage effect, or an infection maybe.” (266)

The influence of the Other World, our world, is like an infection, polluting and destroying the fairy realm of Oz. Imagined thus, it becomes tempting to believe that in the world of Maguire’s novel, the fairy tale realm of Baum’s Oz is corrupted, much as a child’s innocence is lost as experience takes its place. Yet the Oz of Elphaba’s youth, before the wizard ascended to power, is hardly perfect. Nor is Baum’s original Oz, for those who have read his tales, the perfect and wonderful world of the MGM film. It is much more akin to the world of those Grimm Brothers’ tales, a fantastic but simultaneously terrifying realm. It is, in fact, a realm that Elphaba, in hindsight, is able to admit she has always longed to leave behind. The discussion of the Grimmerie’s provenance in turn leads Elphaba to be questioned by Sarima about whether she believes in other worlds, and generates a complex and telling response. “I tried to as a child,” said Elphie. “I made an effort. The mothy, gormless, indistinct sunrise of salvation world – the Other Land – I couldn’t get it […] Now I just think it’s our own lives that are hidden from us. The mystery – who is that person in the mirror – that’s shocking and unfathomable enough for me.” (267)

Here is Elphaba’s moment of Bettelheimian realization, her passage into adulthood in its true sense. She has internalized the fairy tale, and realized that the stories only have meaning in that they become part of her own internal landscape and assist her in the never complete passage to selfknowledge and personal awareness. Near the conclusion of the novel, she again reflects on and even longs for the Other World once more. Before talking to Nessarose, her puritanical sister who has become the tyrannical and controlling Wicked Witch of the East, Elphaba again contemplates her longing for a place where she can belong. However, her emphasis is now active rather than passive, seeking to transform the world around her rather than to be assimilated into it. If you could sweep your way to the Other Land on wings, what about a broom? she wondered. And realized she must be very tired; usually she’d cut off senseless speculation about unionist nonsense like an afterlife, a Beyond, and Other Land. I should remember my lessons from that life sciences course, she thought. All the devastating borders of knowledge Doctor Dillamond was about to cross. I almost

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understood some of it. I could stitch wings onto Chistery. He could join me in flight. What a lark. (311)

Here, the symbols most associated with the Wicked Witch, the broom, the flying monkeys, are imagined by Elphaba as tools of transition, ways to cross the boundaries between worlds and to essentially reject the confines of her current existence. This is how she redefines herself, in opposition to a corrupt society. Elphaba has grown up and is ready to confront both the realities of her world and her own place in it. This realization in turn leads Elphaba ever deeper into conflict with the corrupt world around her. Her opposition to the Wizard’s programmatic assumption of totalitarian rule leads to the destruction of her refuge in Kaimo Ko and to the death or capture of her pseudo family. This in turn leads her to further resistance against the Wizard. In a chilling confrontation near the end of the novel Elphaba confronts the wizard, who reveals that the book is an artifact from another world (our world) that was hidden away in Oz for fear of its terrible power. He came to Oz to reclaim it, and built for himself a power base that eventually allowed him to take over the land. At first he does not believe that Elphaba can read the text, but she reveals: “I can read more of it than you suspect,” she said. “I do not know what it all means. I have seen pages about unleashing the hidden energies of matter. I have seen pages about tampering with the orderly flow of time. I have seen disquisitions about weapons too vile to use, about how to poison water, about how to breed a more docile population. There are diagrams of weapons of torture. Though the drawings and the words seem misty to my eyes, I can continue to learn. I am not too old.” “Those are ideas of great interest to our times,” he said, though he seemed surprised that she had taken in as much as she had. (353)

The Grimmerie and the Wizard are thus artifacts of the fairy tale elements of our own world, transplanted to Oz where they hideously transform the true fairy tale realm into a twisted parody of our own world. It is subsequently revealed that Elphaba is actually the Wizard’s daughter, thus allowing her to at least partially decipher the tome. Elphaba’s identity thus becomes, through a kind of textual alchemy, that of an interlocutor nearly synonymous with the Grimmerie, neither fully of Oz nor of the Other World (our own ‘real’ world). She is the ultimate outsider, truly trapped between identities. This explains both her textual personae and uncertain identity, and her appeal for a young adult audience. She is constantly striving to create her own identity in the face of a hostile universe where she can never truly belong. She is both fascinated by and concerned with the consequences of acquiring such knowledge. The amorality of knowledge, the disparate nature of learning and ethics are consistent themes in this novel, as are many

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other contemporary social and political issues that resonate well with the young college student. The dissipation of animal rights, the oppression of the munchkins, the colonization of the Quadlings in the novel serve as powerful metaphors for racially motivated violence, prejudice and oppression in our own world. The text thus turns back on itself and forces us to move from Oz back to our own world of experience, and a student confronted with the Land of Oz inflicted with the diseases of our own time and place is led to contemplate these issues anew. This points to another effective trait of Wicked that is shared with fairy tales and, I would argue, with a great deal of fantasy literature. The metaphoric systems in which these tales operate allow the reader to engage with significant and real world concerns at a safe remove. Wicked may be most successful in developing this specific trait of the fairy tale pointed out by Bettelheim. The fairy tale allows us to confront troubling and complex ideas in a symbolic form where the threat can be elided until the consciousness is ready to deal with it. This cognitive distance enables a reader to contemplate the threatening significance of the issues raised in the fictional work without having to immediately face the consequences of that realization. Of course, the work is only meaningful if that bridge can eventually be crossed, but to be effective that leap must be at the discretion of the reader. This is much the same as Bettelheim’s argument about the soft power of the fairy tale to instruct without force: The figures and events of fairy tales also personify and illustrate inner conflicts, but they suggest ever so subtly how these conflicts may be solved, and what the next steps in the development toward a higher humanity might be. The fairy tale is presented in a simple, homely way; no demands are made on the listener. This prevents even the smallest child from feeling compelled to act in specific ways, and he is never made to feel inferior. Far from making demands, the fairy tale reassures, gives hope for the future and holds out the promise of a happy ending. (27)

Half of this paradigm applies directly to a reader’s progress in Wicked, following the life story of Elphaba as she constructs (however unsuccessfully) her own moral code, resisting the temptations to succumb to the base failings of those around her. Yet the story of Elphaba, and of many of the most compelling works of fantasy (and of science fiction), do not achieve the simple happy ever after of the fairy tale (though I would argue, and Bettelheim likewise later discusses, the tacit acknowledgement of the impossibility of such endings even in fairy tales), and this difference is telling.

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3. A Conclusion on Conclusions The story of Elphaba is not entirely pleasant or even fulfilling, but it works precisely because of the ambiguities present within the story. We are not meant to simply accept Elphaba’s moral or ethical stance, but the reader does – powerfully – identify with her struggle to understand herself and her place in a seemingly hostile and even malevolent world. And here is where the more adult work of science fiction or fantasy may be able to surpass its origins in the fairy tale. Bettelheim notes that the fairy tale refuses to directly moralize: The fairy tale never confronts us so directly, or tells us outright how we must choose. Instead, the fairy tale helps children to develop the desire for a higher consciousness through what is implied in the story. The fairy tale convinces through the appeal it makes to our imagination and the attractive outcome of events, which entices us. (34)

The story of Wicked goes even further than this, constantly questioning and even compromising the moral compass of the characters with whom we, as readers, identify. The main figure of Elphaba does not find a happily ever after ending (at least in the novel, though this is provided in the musical version where it becomes almost parodic of the original story). In fact, she appears to be unintentionally destroyed by an intended act of kindness while in the midst of a homicidal rage. Nevertheless, in fact in spite of this, we do identify with her and she is the heroine of the piece. Moving with her, the reader is encouraged to develop that “higher consciousness through what is implied in the story,” rather than by what is precisely related or through overt symbolism. It is so successful in “the appeal it makes to our imagination” that it does not require “the attractive outcome of events,” and even flouts this with a mock tragic conclusion. Likewise, Diamond Age is often critiqued for its lack of a discreet and clear ending, which precisely misses the point. These works are instructive and force reflection precisely because they do not conclusively end. We, as readers, are made to speculate, to wonder, to develop our own imaginations. This is precisely why these texts are so valuable in the composition classroom where they serve as models of instructive, sophisticated and purpose driven writing, while also encouraging, and even demanding critical thinking and reflection in order to achieve some sort of internal conclusion, a self-generated ending and understanding of the textual message. This is the power of the fairy tale, made manifest and mature in the genres of science fiction and fantasy, to foster the imagination and to encourage us to understand ourselves through our experiences and to look forward to how those lessons may allow us to make ourselves and the world, better.

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Works Cited Asimov, Isaac. Asimov on Science Fiction. Garden City: Doubleday, 198. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage, 1975. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972. Furstenberg, Frank F. Jr., et al. “Growing Up is Harder to Do.” Contexts: by the American Sociological Association 3.3 (2004): 33-41. Maguire, Gregory. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. New York: Harper Collins, 1996. Mendelsohn, Farah. The Intergalactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children’s and Teens’ Science Fiction. Jefferson: McFarland, 2009. Slusser, George E., ed. Intersections: Fantasy and Science Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. Stephenson, Neal. The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. New York: Bantam, 1995. “The Return of the Multi-Generational Family Household.” Pew Research Center, Social & Demographic Trends. 18 Mar 2010. Web. 12 Sep 2010. . “Romance Literature Statistics: Overview.” About the Romance Genre. Romance Writers of America, 2010. Web. Sep. 14 2010. . Rutherford, Leonie Margaret. “Industries, Artists, Friends and Fans: Marketing Young Adult Fictions Online” First Monday. 14 (April 2009): 46. Web. 15 Sep 2010. .

FANTASTIC GENRES: SCIENCE FICTION

The Haunted House of Science Fiction Modern Ghosts, Crypts, and Technologies MINWEN HUANG What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel The future belongs to ghosts. Jacques Derrida, Ghost Dance

1. Introduction: Contextualization of Ghost Narratives A ghost expresses itself in an existence radically different from that of human beings. It is “a spectre, an apparition of the dead, a revenant, the dead returned to a kind of spectral existence – an entity not alive but also not quite, not finally, dead” (Bennett and Royle 133). The in-between status of ghosts disturbs the linear temporal order by dislocating the past in the present and further disrupts the borderlines between the living and the dead, the presence and the absence, which thus arouses a strong sense of the uncanny. Along with this strong sense of the uncanny, the paradoxical existence of ghosts, as a literary motif, has persistently haunted the arena of literature, which even constructs a literary history of ghosts and constitutes the evolution of ghost narratives. The immediate recall of ghosts in literary history likely refers to the Gothic, a literary genre that burgeoned in the 18th century with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764. Its prominent generic features include terror, mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses, Gothic architecture, castles, etc. While Gothic fictions depict a vivid and familiar contour of ghosts and ghost narratives, ghosts in fact express themselves distinctly with the variation of time and space. In other words, the temporal, spatial, and cultural contexts assist in determining the various representations of ghosts, i.e. the contextualization of ghost narratives.

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Rather than adopting the generic essence of Gothic fictions to analyze contemporary ghost stories, this paper would like to propose that science fiction is a literary genre more resonant with the contextualization of the representation of ghosts and spectral narratives in the contemporary era. Science fiction (SF), as a genre of fiction that often involves speculations based on current or future science and technology, seems to contradict the very existence and nature of ghosts. However, it is through the application of modern technologies and media of reproduction that the modern world has become and is becoming more ghostly than ever, as Derrida states: “the existence of ghosts […] is accentuated, accelerated by modern technologies” (61). Therefore, SF, owing to its spectral generic essence that echoes the contextualization of ghost narratives in the modern world, has become a haunted house where various collective/individual unspeakable ghosts or “repressed secrets are passed from one generation to the next if they are ‘encrypted’ as unprocessed and traumatic information”, according to the theory of transgenerational haunting proposed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (cf. Lane 3). In order to grasp the generic position and significance of SF in literary history, this essay thus attempts to examine macrocosmically the spectral generic essence of science fiction grounded in its temporal structure, spatial position, and technological mechanism and to analyze microcosmically the poetical renderings of the spectral narratives of three SF works in the late 20th century as diverse resonances to the ghostliness of science fiction as a genre. The three works to be discussed are “Snow”, written by John Crowley (1985), “The Gernsback Continuum”, written by William Gibson (1981), and Solaris, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972), for the various technologies and media of reproduction, respectively video, photography, and extraterrestrial technology/film, which play an important role in the ghost narratives of the three SF works, implicating a potent involvement of technologies in the modern world. “Snow” reflects upon the phantom mechanism of video and its technological impact on human beings; “The Gernsback Continuum” deals with the question of ‘seeing’ through photography and is itself a critique to the generic development of SF as its title suggests; Solaris as a film, a medium whose existence is grounded in the technology of reproduction, further extends the boundary of linguistic representation to cinematic representation of ghost narratives. They will then be examined in regards to three aspects: (1) Ghosts in SF: origins & traces of ghosts, (2) Crypts in SF: material structure of the haunted space, and (3) Technologies in SF: constant resurrection/actualization of ghosts through media.

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2. Spectral Generic Essence of Science Fiction For most people, one plausible contradiction exists between science fiction and ghosts: that the existence of ghosts seems to contradict the very nature of science fiction, a genre of fiction that often involves speculations based on current or future science and technology. However, the existence of ghosts is in fact closely tied to the genre of SF, due to its generic essence, including its temporal structure, spatial position, and technological mechanism. The temporal structure of science fiction embeds a spectral entity as a disguise to access the inaccessible present. In “Progress versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Fredric Jameson offers a definition of science fiction grounded in its temporal structure: For the apparent realism, or representationality, of SF has concealed another, far more complex temporal structure: not to give us “images” of the future […] but rather to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present, and to do so in specific ways distinct from all other forms of defamiliarization. (286, emphasis in original)

In the mechanisms of SF, the future, therefore, becomes a disguise for the present through the strategy of defamiliarization. What is depicted and portrayed in science fiction refers not literally to the future but to the present, this very moment. But, why do people need this disguise for the present? It is necessary because the present “is inaccessible directly, is numb, habituated, empty of affect” (Jameson 287). People thus need the disguise, “a blind,” to help them witness and tolerate the intolerable present, including time and space, with the naked eye (ibid.). Due to the inaccessibility and intolerability of the present, the retrospective fiction of memory then becomes one strategy of defamiliarization “in order for the intensity of a now merely remembered present to be experienced in some time-released and utterly unexpected posthumous actuality” (ibid.). In other words, it is through experiencing the retrospection of the past and representing the ghosts and spectral narratives in the form of the future that the works of science fiction make the present present. Furthermore, the inaccessibility of the present, depicted euphemistically through spectral narratives in SF, fabricates “crypts” (Lane 5), or spectral dwellings, in certain isolated spatial positions to bury the “encrypted” (ibid. 3) unspeakable secrets/ghosts. In the 20th century psychoanalytic field, Abraham and Torok, two psychoanalytic theorists, proposed a theory of transgenerational haunting. They nominate the indigestible, inaccessible, and incomprehensible – thus unspeakable but not unconscious – secrets as a “psychic phantom,” which dwells in an “inner crypt,” i.e. in “psychic no-man’sland or blind-zones” “completely outside the subject’s range of knowledge and mentalization” (Yassa 2). The ghosts in SF, functioning as a strategy of

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defamiliarization to disguise the inaccessible present in SF, thus are identical to the psychic phantom or unspeakable secrets proposed by Abraham and Torok in their sharing characteristic of secrecy, for they are intimately related to the inaccessible and intolerable present located outside the reach of mass consciousness at a generic level. Due to the inaccessibility and intolerability of the ghosts, crypts, the spectral haunted space constituted and located in an isolated and secluded spatial position, thus insinuate the spectral spatial position occupied by SF as a genre in literature. As the residence of ghosts, crypts are the “sealed-off psychic place[s]” in the ego, “designed to enclose messages – even to ‘seal’ and ‘entomb’ them” (Lane 10). Crypts as strange spaces in the psyche therefore are not truly far away from the conscious, since they are located in the ego, but are blocked off and entombed. They represent themselves as an existence of a gap, like ghosts or phantoms, which embodies “the gap produced in us by the concealment of some part of a loved object’s life […] what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others” (Abraham and Torok 171). The concept of gaps or crypts proposed above thus could assist in examining the spectral generic position of SF as a crypt, which buries the unspeakable secrets/ghosts of the present in the arena of literature. However, what is striking and most spectral is that the psychic phantom can be transgenerationally transmitted; according to Abraham and Torok: “repressed secrets are passed from one generation to the next if they are ‘encrypted’ as unprocessed and traumatic information” (Lane 3). It is due to the intermittent returns of the repressed secrets and ghosts that a sense of the autonomy of ghosts is developed and a history of family secrets is constituted. As a result, the origins and traces of ghosts derive not only from personal or individual hauntings but also from collective ones. Yet, unlike Sigmund Freund and Jacques Lacan, Abrahm and Torok, believing in the curative ability of psychoanalysis “to ‘retrieve’ blocked dimensions of consciousness,” hope that “the treasures which lie buried in crypts will become the delight of their owner and can be made to work for the benefit of us all” (Lane 5). The ghosts in SF, identifying with the unspeakable secrets/psychic phantom or even treasures, thus are entangled with the intolerable present and inhabit the isolated crypts as outwardly projected and embodied in the ghost narratives of SF, waiting to be conjured up in a positive sense. The next question, then, is how ghosts are conjured up in SF. Owing to its phantom structure, the technological mechanism adopted in science fiction, i.e. modern technologies and media of reproduction, functions as a necessary means to conjure up ghosts in order to “see” the intolerable present. In the age of high technology, it is likely people think that no one believes in ghosts anymore; conversely, the world has become

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and is becoming more ghostly than ever. Reflecting on the relationship between ghosts and technology, Jacques Derrida states, Contrary to what we might believe, the experience of ghosts is not tied to a bygone historical period […but] is accentuated, accelerated by modern technologies like films, television, the telephone. These technologies inhabit, as it were, a phantom structure. [...] When the very first perception of an image is linked to a structure of reproduction, then we are dealing with the realm of phantoms. (Public 61)

Hence, modern technologies and media as means of reproduction have turned out to be the magic spells to conjure up ghosts, to retrospect the past and to re-experience the present in SF. Ghosts, revenants of the dead, embody the past and signify the loss. The resurrection and return of ghosts in the future with the help of media thus break the temporal boundary of the past and accentuate the unbearable present in a disguised way. By presenting the inaccessible and intolerable present euphemistically, ghosts have become the core of the genre of science fiction, especially for those works published after the advance of modern technologies and media. Through threading together Fredric Jameson’s critique of the temporal structure of SF, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s theory of transgenerational haunting, and Jacques Deridda’s concept of phantom structure inhabiting modern technology, the generic spectralization of science fiction is realized and resonant with the contextualization of the ghost narratives in the contemporary era. Having examined the spectral generic essence of SF grounded in its temporal structure, spatial position, and technological mechanism on a generic scale, this essay will now analyze the poetical renderings of the spectral narratives of three science fiction works in the late 20th century, i.e. “Snow” (1985), “The Gernsback Continumm” (1981), and Solaris (1972) as diverse resonances to the ghostliness of science fiction as a genre, doing so from the three perspectives mentioned initially: (1) Ghosts in SF: origins & traces of ghosts, (2) Crypts in SF: material structure of the haunted space, and (3) Technologies in SF: constant resurrection/actualization of ghosts through media. 3. Ghosts in SF: the Origins and Traces of Ghosts While the ghosts in SF are identical to the unspeakable secrets of the inaccessible present on a generic level, what are actually and literally the ghosts that have haunted individual SF works? In the contextualization of ghost narratives in SF, the psychic phantoms proposed by Abraham and Torok no longer only exist in a mental state but are endowed with a linguistic or cinematic existence and are projected and brought to life in everyday reality in these three SF works. “Being undigested and indigestible, impossible

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to integrate into the fabric of psychic life” and “maintained intact in isolated psychic regions” (Yassa 2), they are grown out of both the individual and collective memory of the vanishing past or the imagined future or the wanting present that manifests the great loss and the incomplete mourning for one individual or for the whole society. In order to grasp the origins and traces of ghosts in SF as a genre, this section is devoted to excavating the ghosts in each of the three texts, to retracing their personal and collective origins in time, and to probing into the secrets that they entomb. The origins and traces of the ghosts in “Snow” are composed of the personal memory and manifest the personal loss and incomplete mourning for the dead and the vanishing past in a family genealogy. The ghosts who keep returning to the elder Charlie, or more specifically the ghosts he visits via technology, are Georgie and his middle-aged self, along with the elapse of the ordinary, daily life of their pasts. They are filmic ghosts, not only being frozen fresh and green in the past as vivid and colorful filmic entities but also being recorded and phantomized into images and sounds in home videos. That is to say, they are constituted from a recorded collection of their personal fresh frozen past, of their very familiar everyday lives, of “eight thousand hours […] of Georgie: of her days and hours, her comings in and her goings out, her speech and motion, her living self” (592, my emphasis) or “eight thousand hours of her life with me, genuine hours, stored there more carefully than they could be in my porous memory” as the elder Charlie exclaims (594). The juxtaposition of their preserved freshness and their position as past and dead furthermore triggers an anachronistic sense of contradiction and weirdness, which intensifies their spectral existence. Besides, the filmic ghosts in “Snow” are circumscribed in a family genealogy due to the forced inheritance from the dead. Georgie, Charlie’s dead wife, had inherited from her dead first-husband, “an immensely rich and […] strangely weepy guy,” a contract with The Park, a funeral company offering the services of recording, storing and showing home videos of the dead (591). Though Georgie “liquidated” most of what she had inherited from her first-husband, “the Wasp [the equipment for recording Georgie based on the inherited contract] couldn’t really be got rid of” (591). Moreover, because of the prescriptions of inheritance laws, Charlie is now the owner of Georgie’s access to the expensive contract signed by Georgie’s dead first-husband. The constitution and the preservation of the ghosts in “Snow” thus operate via forced legitimate inheritance from the dead, which accentuates the secrecy and inevitability of the ghosts and forms a history of family secrets. However, Charlie does not access his past with Georgie immediately after her death, though the inheritance is enforced by law. This delay in accessing the ghosts reveals two characteristics of spectral beings – their

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being inaccessible/intolerable and their haunting. Due to the sense of grotesqueness and uselessness aroused by death, Charlie is unable to face Georgie as a filmic ghost: “I am only a child of my time, I suppose. Everything about death, the fact of it, seems grotesque to me, embarrassing, useless. And everything done about it only makes it more grotesque, more useless” (593). Hence Charlie postpones his access to the filmic material for nearly two years and when he finally accesses it, he explains: Most because I had forgotten about it: getting that key in the mail was like coming across a pile of old snapshots you hadn’t cared to look at when they were new, but which after they have aged come to contain the past, as they did not contain the present. I was curious. (593)

Charlie’s incapability to witnessing/accessing the presence of Georgie and their shared past as filmic ghosts thus echoes Fredric Jameson’s critique on the inaccessibility and intolerability of the present for its being “numb” and “empty of affect.” What is more, Charlie’s deferred curiosity further intensifies the haunting nature of ghosts and magnifies his hunger for the past: “I felt hungry, suddenly, hungry for pastness, for more” (595). This haunting hunger eventually leads to the epiphany of his aimless waiting: “I had spent my life waiting for something, not knowing what, not even knowing I waited. Killing time. I was still waiting. But what I had been waiting for had already occurred, and was past” (598). Charlie’s absurd waiting for something that “had already occurred” and for something that “was past” thus further signifies the inaccessibility of the past and that of the ghosts. Unlike the ghosts grown out of the personal loss and memory of Georgie and Charlie in the time spectrum of the past in “Snow,” the origins and traces of the ghosts in “The Gernsback Continuum” are composed of the collective memory of a particular generation of people and manifest the incomplete mourning for the imagined future in the 1930s and 40s futuristic architectural ruins in America. The ghosts that haunt the realistic setting in “The Gernsback Continuum” are photographic ghosts, which are provoked in the process of photography and have a visionary existence. They are different from the still, reproduced images of what is photographed in pictures. Based on the ghost narratives in the story, the ghosts could be denominated as semiotic ghosts, futuristic ghosts, and utopian ghosts, all of which entail the very secrets of their origins and traces. Semiotic ghosts, evolved from psychological origins, are the spectral images principally produced from signs, metaphors, signification, and communication within cultural contexts. According to one of Gibson’s characters “semiotic ghost[s]” or “semiotic phantoms” are “bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own” and “part of the mass unconscious, once” (461). The permeability of the spec-

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tral cultural images thus outgrows the spectrality and autonomy of the semiotic ghosts, which originate from “the mass unconscious,” a collective but apparently secluded memory shared by a generation of people. Moreover, while the name of “semiotic ghosts” enunciates their being of “deep cultural imagery” with their psychological origins from the mass unconscious, I would like to refer to them as futuristic ghosts – a term that expresses a strong sense of contradiction of time due to the juxtaposition of what is dead and what is to come and indicates their physical origins from “those odds and ends of ‘futuristic’ Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing” (458). The futuristic ghosts, thus, are constituted through people’s collective imagination of the future: the winged statues, Frank Floyd Wright’s Johnson’s Wax Building, and a particularly grandiose prop-driven airliner – “they were trying to give the public what it wants” and “[w]hat the public wanted was the future” (459). In other words, the mass unconscious or the shared collective memory based on people’s imagination of the future are projected and embodied into futuristic ghosts. Besides, owing to their physical origins in the futuristic objects, the ghosts might also be termed utopian ghosts for they exist nowhere in reality but represent an ideal dream world, “an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come” (463), where “in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose” (464). The ghost inhabitants living “in the Dream” are “smug, happy and utterly content with themselves and their world” (464). Gibson depicts them as the superman figures: “They were the children of Dialta Downes’s ‘80-that-wasn’t; they were Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American” (463). All the previous description then connects America with the Dream(world), which illustrates “the collective yearning of an era” (463). Unfortunately (or fortunately?), the bright future and the utopian world that the public wanted have never become reality except for the 1930s and 40s American ruins, left unnoticed. They have been transformed into the dead objects and the unspeakable secrets preserved and concealed in the inner crypts of the collective human mind of the real world. Furthermore, the ghosts even have their own autonomy in the process of being dreamed, as ghosts “have taken on a life of their own” (461). Abraham and Torok explain that in the secret tombs or inner crypts, “the object lives its secret life, and the subject becomes the guardian of the secret shared with it” (Yassa 8). This is the very reason why the semiotic, futuristic and utopian ghosts have been transgenerationally transmitted and formed family secrets of their own.

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While the ghosts in “Snow” are grown out of the personal loss and memory set in the time spectrum of the past and those in “The Gernsback Continuum” are evolved from the collective loss and memory set in the time spectrum of the future, the origins and traces of the ghosts in Solaris are composed of personal memory and manifest the incomplete mourning for the wanting present in the Solaris space station in outer space. The ghosts, derived from personal memory through the mysterious operation of the Solaris ocean in Solaris, are incarnated ghosts extracted from one’s mind or one’s dream when one sleeps. They are indeed the actualization of the loved objects entombed deeply in the personal memory of the minds of the scientists who work onboard of the station: a young woman extracted from Dr. Gibarian’s memory, a boy from Dr. Sartorius’ mind, and Hari from the psychologist Karl Kelvin’s memory. Distinct from the filmic or photographic ghosts whose existence is intangible in the other two stories, the incarnated ghosts in Solaris have a corporeal existence. Their corporeal bodies offer them the abilities to think and feel like real human beings, which further construct their ghostly autonomy. The most obvious example in the film is Hari, Kelvin’s dead lover. When for the first time Hari is actualized into a human form, she looks at her own reflection in the mirror but is unable to discern who she is and later keeps asking Kelvin where she comes from. She is in fact like a newborn baby, whose subjectivity is still in a fluid state. It is through her constant returns that she starts to construct her identity and autonomy, and gradually becomes more and more humanlike. Concerning spectral origins in time, the origins of the ghosts in Solaris stem not only from the elapsing past as in “Snow,” or only from the imagined future as in “The Gernsback Continuum,” but also from the wanting present, i.e. the absence of the presence which covers the time spectrum of the past, the present, and even the future. Hari, who committed suicide ten years ago but is resurrected to the present on the Solaris space station, is a good example of a ghostly incarnation of the past. The boy, that haunts the space pilot Henri Burton, is an example of a ghost derived from the present, for he is still alive on earth in the present and is corporeally represented as a ghost that haunts Burton on Solaris at the same time. One example of the ghost derived from the future is Kelvin’s prospective return to his homeland on earth, a physical realization of a futuristic event. The over-expansion of ghosts in the spectrum of time both in Solaris itself and in the unit constituted by all three SF works discussed here, i.e. from the past, the present, to the future, thus manifest a contagious circulation of ghosts in time.

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4. Crypts in SF: the Material Structure of the Haunted Space Haunted houses, often regarded as containing the spirits of deceased beings, incidentally leak out the strong affections buried inside. According to the transgenerational haunting theory proposed by Abraham and Torok, “crypts,” endowed with their enigmatic architectural construction and location, are the secret tombs and residence of ghosts, which the unspeakable secrets inhabit. They are transformed into linguistic and cinematic haunted houses in the three texts, where the unspeakable secrets and ghosts of the present are buried and entombed. In order to grasp the essence of the ghosts and that of the unspeakable secrets in SF as a genre, this section investigates the haunted houses/crypts in each of the three works, to locate their secluded spatial positions and to examine their spectral material structures. These haunted houses or crypts include The Park, American futuristic ruins, and the Solaris space station. In “Snow,” the ghosts inhabit The Park, a specific circumscribed region in California. The Park, adopted as an ironical term contrasting with parks set and protected by laws as natural public spaces for human recreation, was located “at the end of a pretty beach road, all alone above the sea” and “looked from the outside like the best, most peaceful kind of Italian country cemetery” (594). Its physical location and appearance, i.e. the secluded sea image and the untroubled cemetery image of The Park, echo Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytic theory in that the location and construction of crypts resemble those of secret tombs, carrying the dead within and lying silently by themselves – seclusion from the reach of mass human consciousness. Owing to its secrecy, one needs the key that is “deeply notched on both sides and headed with smooth plastic, like the key to an expensive car” (593) to access the gate of The Park, which leads one “not to a square of shaded tombstones but onto a ramped corridor going down” (594). Both the use of the key and the underground site of the buried space once more intensify the impression that the existence of those ghosts or secrets in the haunted space is to a certain extent outside of individual and public consciousness – an existence of secrecy. Thus, using the key to open the physical gate of The Park is similar to using the key to open the psychic gate of the inner crypts buried in Charlie’s mind. Besides its physical location and its architectural exterior, the interior structure of The Park further suggests the permeability of the ghosts. Its inner architectural design presents a space containing many corridors which lead to different small screening rooms “where there was a moderate-sized TV monitor and two comfortable chairs; dark walls of chocolate-brown carpeting […and] sweet-sad muzak” (594). Each of the small screening rooms is a private and sealed space for one of the dead to dwell in: “Georgie

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herself was evidently somewhere in the vicinity, in the wall or under the floor, they weren’t specific about the charnel-house aspect of the place” (594). Though the cheap cozy standardized design of each room offers an individual space for the dead and for communion with the dead, the physical contour of each room is in fact unable to confine the permeability of ghosts, which hence intensifies the ghostliness of The Park. Appropriate to the micro and macro material architectural structures of The Park, the disposition/geography of each small screening room and that of The Park represent two kinds of crypts buried inside the human mind: one is the personal one; the other is the collective one. Each small screening room could be viewed as a personal crypt concealed in the mind of each human being. Inside it, one encounters the dead individually. However, as far as the whole disposition of The Park is concerned, the corridors and many small screening rooms then construct the public crypt for human beings as a whole, which also fits The Park’s exterior image as a public cemetery. The material structure of The Park, containing the inner structure of each small screening room, therefore signifies the rigorous guardianship of the crypts and encloses the personal and collective ghosts/unspeakable secrets. Unlike the haunted house described in “Snow” as a suburban public cemetery with underground buried space, the haunted house in “The Gernsback Continuum” refers to American futuristic ruins scattered above ground among cities. Residing among urban and industrialized cities, the demolished physical existence of ruins, the remains of man-made architecture, arduously but ineffectively reminds people of their once having been complete and intact and of their being forgotten and ignored: they are “those odds and ends of ‘futuristic’ Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing” (458). The decline and decay of the architecture, along with its physical yet invisible existence, therefore signifies its continuing loss and its isolated and ignored location, which is identical to that of the crypt in the ego. Whereas the haunted houses in “The Gernsback Continuum” are now preserved as ruins, the design of their physical exterior was based on people’s imagination of the future, as in “the movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious energy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of transient hotels” (458). With the metallic or technological ornament elements generating “potent bursts of raw technological enthusiasm” (459), a sense of a cheap future and technology pervaded and haunted the most everyday places where people came together. These 1930s futuristic architectures, covered with the imagination of the future, nevertheless embed the basic Victorian mechanism: “The change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome

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shell, you’d find the same Victorian mechanism. […] It was all a stage set, a series of elaborate props for playing at living in the future” (458). Implanted with the Victorian mechanism, the futuristic ruins on the one hand designate a time-space wherein lie the events that have not yet occurred or are yet to come and on the other hand embody the loss of time and at the same time signify the past. Due to the contradiction of time, the existence of those futuristic ruins therefore becomes the projection and the realization of the future to come in the past, “segments of a dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present” (458). Resounding with the collective origins of the futuristic ruins, i.e. the imagination of the future shared by a generation of people, the disposition of these diffused futuristic ruins or “segments of a dreamworld” constitutes a collective crypt in the minds of American people in the Thirties and Forties. The surviving futuristic ruins are dusty motels, mattress wholesalers, small used-car lots, gas stations, factory buildings, etc., which stand here and there in cities such as Burbank, Bolinas, Los Angeles, and Tucson. These ruins, located commonly and dispersedly all over America, then strengthen the ghostliness and operate as public crypts to conceal and entomb the collective unspeakable secrets, albeit futuristic or sinisterly totalitarian. Distinct from the haunted houses in “Snow” and “The Gernsback Continuum,” that one in Solaris is a space station, an artificial structure designed for human beings to live in outer space, orbiting Solaris, a remote oceanic planet. The mission of space stations is mainly to explore the unknown of outer space. For the Solaris space station, its mission is to detect dynamic activities of the planet Solaris in an endeavor to understand and communicate with the extra-terrestrial life there. Along with its scientific endeavor, the physical location of the Solaris space station in outer space as an unknown region for human beings thus is analogous to the psychically isolated location of the crypts in the human mind. In addition to its physical location, the material structure of the Solaris space station further intensifies its ghostliness. In order to realize the scientific exploration of outer space, space stations are basically equipped with high-tech appliances; however, the one in Solaris is not so equipped. The Solaris space station in fact is a deserted one in a disheveled and messy state, due to the strange occurrences happening inside. The equipment has become dilapidated and the regular investigations of the space station are suspended, both of which further render the station a dead and haunted place. It is the arrival of the psychologist Kris Kelvin that testifies the Solaris space station as a haunted house and a secret tomb of collective human minds, a crypt carrying unspeakable secrets and lying in remote outer space. Representing the rich fruits of human civilization, the disposition or geography of the rooms in the Solaris space station constructs not only

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personal crypts for individuals but also a collective crypt of human civilization. In order to sustain life in outer space, the space station contains many rooms with various functions to serve the basic needs of living and doing research, including living rooms, bedrooms, a laboratory, a conference room, a library, etc. With the most advanced futuristic fittings, the rooms are engraved with various traces of time. One concrete example refers to the incarnated ghosts produced and inhabiting the bedrooms as personal crypts. With their personal origins and traces, the incarnated ghosts represent a crystallization of various time spectrums. Another example of a communal crypt can be seen by the disposition of the conference room, where we find records of civilizations, including statues, books, paintings, upholstery, crystal lamps, and candles that have originated from different periods of time. The constellation of these objects carved with various traits of time illustrates an epitome of the evolution of human civilizations. The storage of these antique and advanced objects in the Solaris space station in outer space thus silently recounts the unspeakable secrets of distinct epochs entombed in a collective crypt of human civilization. From this examination of the haunted houses in these SF texts, one phenomenon can be detected: the contagious circulation of ghosts in space. The haunted houses and crypts expand themselves vertically and horizontally: from The Park located underground in a specific place in California, to the futuristic American ruins scattered above ground all over America, and further to the Solaris space station in outer space, albeit being uncared for or ignored. This contagious circulation of ghosts in space through examining the expansion of the crypts in the three works, along with the contagious circulation of ghosts in time based on the investigation of the origins and traces of the ghosts, then reveals the haunting and infectious nature of ghosts and further manifests the ghostliness in science fiction as a genre. 5. Technologies in SF: The Constant Resurrection/Actualization of Ghosts through Media While psychic ghosts dwell in the inner crypts of the human mind, they have been conjured up through modern technologies and media to manifest themselves in our daily life. Derrida, when he writes that “I believe on the contrary that the future belongs to ghosts, and that modern image technology, cinema, telecommunications, etc., are only increasing the power of ghosts” (Bennington and Derrida 349), is arguing that the constant resurrection and actualization of ghosts with the help of the media of reproduction then demonstrates the increasing power of ghosts to haunt the

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human world. It is through the operation of media that the reproduction of images reveals the absent presence of ghosts. In the texts discussed here, ghosts are resurrected and actualized distinctly through films, photographs, and the Solaris ocean (after an X-ray experiment). The ghosts in “Snow,” the filmic ghosts, are stored and conjured up by films, which involves two technological mechanisms: one is shooting/ filming/recording and the other is displaying/showing. The first technological mechanism is implemented through the Wasp, an enforced inheritance from a rich dead person, which implicates its origin as both expensive and ghostly. Having a physical insectoid appearance similar to a bug with a sting, reflected in its name, the Wasp is in fact a mini-camera, which flies around the target to record around eight thousand hours of one’s daily life. Precariously, the recording mechanism of the Wasp leaves a fatal impact on the filmed, even though not necessarily on a physical level but much more on an existential level, as indicated by its insect wasp quality: “O Death where is thy sting” (591). This is because the hovering existence of the Wasp as a surveillant makes the filmed self-conscious in the extreme: “they [the filmed] seemed to be constantly rehearsing the eternal show being stored up for their descendants. Their death had taken over their lives, as though they were pharaohs” (593). The deaths thus precede the lives and constitute the ghostliness even when one is still alive physically. After the Wasp eventually runs out, the film of the target will be sent to The Park, which starts the second technological mechanism, displaying/ showing: and there, in privacy, through the miracle of modern information storage and retrieval systems, you could access her [the ghost]: her alive, her as she was in every way, never changing or growing any older: fresher (as The Park’s brochure said) than in memory – ever green. (592)

Thanks to “the miracle of modern information storage and retrieval systems,” the ghosts of the past, though signifying the personal loss of Charlie, are preserved in good condition, “fresher […] than in memory – ever green.” The displaying mechanism of the Wasp, representing a mechanism of communing with the dead, can only be executed in The Park. In each small screening room in The Park, the video of the target can be played by pressing two bars, ACCESS and RESET, which is the way the ghosts in the past are called up by media. The order of playing the video is random, a mechanism designed based on Brownian movement, so that one cannot know which part of life one is going to watch, since the scene always starts in mid-sentence or mid-gesture. In other words, there exists no linear time spectrum in the displaying mechanism: no beginning and no end, which further triggers a fear and “a pang of loss” and paralyzes one’s ability to touch ACCESS for the past was “doubly gone now” (596).

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The technological mechanism of displaying scenes from the subject’s life randomly, sinuately initiates the spectralization of the ghosts. With the increase of playing times, the video starts to lose its definition, as the Director in The Park explains, “there is degeneration. It’s just in the physics. It randomizes a little over time. So you lose – you don’t lose a minute of what you’ve got – but you lose a little definition. A little color. But it levels off” (600). Moreover, one comes to realize that the randomness of the access in fact is “getting less random,” is rather “getting selective,” and “freezing up” (602). The degeneration and freezing up of the video thus make the images of ghosts more phantomlike, which gradually dissolves one’s identity and furthermore accelerates the spectralization of the audience, just as the Director, the only personnel who is responsible for the operation of the Park and watches films constantly due to his work, has been infected by the degeneration and “seemed to have grown colorless himself lately, old, losing definition” (600). In “The Gernsback Continuum”, ghosts, the photographic ghosts, are recorded and conjured up by photographs. The assignment for the photographer in the story is to take pictures of the futuristic 1930s and 40s ruins, “a shadowy America-that-wasn’t,” “a kind of alternate America: a 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams” (460). The working title of the assignment is “The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was,” which is pertinent to an architectural photography project with the aim of constituting an illustrated history of “American Streamlined Moderne” or “raygun Gothic” (457f.). In other words, it is to constitute, through photography, a history of the futuristic architectures, which have never come to be realized, or to photograph basically what is not there. To photograph something-that-isn’t-there is to shoot something invisible or inexistent – to make the invisible visible – as the photographer thought, “It is possible to photograph what isn’t there; it’s damned hard to do, and consequently a very marketable talent” (459). For shooting the invisible, the photographer “moved along these secret ruins,” and waited a lot: Architectural photography can involve a lot of waiting; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal itself in a certain way. While I was waiting, I thought myself in Dialta Downes’s America. (459)

He waits for the ghosts to come, waits for the alternate reality to happen, and waits to penetrate “a fine membrane, a membrane of probability” (460). It is in the process of waiting and shooting that the ghosts reveal themselves again and again. In contrast to architectural photography, the very media and technology that conjures up ghosts in “The Gernsback Continuum,” the other media

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of reproduction can be exercised as the very means to exorcise the semiotic ghosts. “Really bad media can exorcise your semiotic ghosts” (464), another character tells the photographer: “Watch lots of television, particularly game shows and soaps. Go to porn movies. Ever see Nazi Love Motel? They’ve got it on cable, here. Really awful. Just what you need” (464). In other words, it is the bad media that blind the sight of the photographer as he watched Nazi Love Motel, and “kept [his] eyes shut all the way” (465). Distinct from the technological media, i.e. a video or a camera, that conjure up ghosts in “Snow” and “The Gernsback Continuum,” the ghosts in Solaris, the incarnated ghosts, are conjured up by the Solaris ocean after the X-ray experiment. The operation mechanism of radio waves emitted from the Solaris ocean is capable of delving into the very deep and secret area of the human mind to extract images of the beloved when one is asleep. In other words, the operation of the Solaris ocean is to transform the inexistent into corporeal existence and to bring the beloved objects back to life. For example, Hari in fact died ten years ago, but the Solaris ocean is capable of resurrecting her again and again on the Solaris space station, no matter how many times she has died. Being composed of neutrinos, Hari possesses a power of self-healing, which emphasizes the intermittent return of the ghosts. The sense of haunting is extremely striking, especially when the film shows her being brought back to life after she violently committed suicide. In the film, it is said that the operation of the Solaris ocean is similar to that of the human brain. It is a thinking substance capable of realizing thoughts. The bizarre metamorphoses of the Solaris ocean, such as the irregular movement of the sea currents and the strong, fast eddying whirlpools, manifest the activity of the strong affection buried within each human being. The Solaris ocean then could be viewed as the externalization of the human mind that has experienced the strong feelings of loss and incomplete mourning. The constant resurrection and actualization of the dead objects and ghosts then strengthens the ghostliness in SF. Besides the Solaris ocean, there exists another technological medium to conjure up ghosts in Solaris, i.e. the film itself. Unlike the home video described in “Snow,” Solaris as a film attempts to explore the original and artistic elements of cinema, rather then directly adopting the plot from the original novel, Solaris, written by Stanisław Lem in 1961. This also explains why the film instead of the novel is chosen as the discussion target in this article, since cinema as a medium of reproduction itself operates a different mechanism from words, which is more intimate to a phantom structure, as Derrida states. One explicit example that illustrates the artistic mechanism of cinema in conjuring up ghosts is the animation of a still painting. It is through the movement of the camera (zoom in, close-up, and panoramic

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movement) and the playing of soundtracks that the painting of “Hunters in the Snow” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1565 is vividly activated and brought to life. Moreover, it is through this cinematic mechanism that the ghosts composed of the collective memory of arts or human civilizations as designated in Solaris as paintings, books, and so on, are resurrected. Through the evolution of technologies and media of reproduction, the ghosts have undergone a process from spectralization to humanization in the three works discussed. In “Snow” the filmic ghosts, recorded in films, suffer from its spectralization due to the video operation based on Brownian movement; in “The Gernsback Continuum” the photographic ghosts, provoked in the process of photography, strikingly exceed the plane surface of photos and have a visionary existence; in Solaris the incarnated ghosts, composed of neutrinos, have their own corporeal existence and are becoming more human. This bipolar movement of ghosts triggered by various technological mechanisms thus intensifies the ghostliness of science fiction and that of our world by confusing the clear demarcation between ghost and human. 6. Conclusion: SF as a Haunted House in Literature Consonant with the spectral generic essence of science fiction grounded in its temporal structure, its spatial position, and its technological mechanism, the close examination of the haunting phenomena in the three SF works in question as diverse microcosmic resonances confirms the saturated ghostliness of SF, a literary genre resonant with the contemporary contextualization of the representation of ghosts and the spectral narratives. Among the texts, from “Snow,” through “The Gernsback Continuum,” to Solaris, three ghostly movements have been detected. They are (1) the infectious circulation of ghosts in time from the elapsing past, the imagined future, to the wanting present, (2) the infectious circulation of ghosts in space: from a specific circumscribed underground place in California, futuristic ruins dispersed above ground all over America, to the Solaris space station in outer space, and (3) from the spectralization of ghosts in “Snow” to the humanization of ghosts in Solaris, i.e. from filmic ghosts, photographic ghosts, to incarnated ghosts. Evidently, the science fiction world as a haunted house is becoming more and more ghostly than ever. Concerning its generic position in literature, science fiction, being a haunted house, could be viewed as a collective crypt in the mind of literature, where the unspeakable secrets of the present intermittently return in the history of SF in the form of ghosts. As a literary genre, SF has been generally debased, ignored, and excluded from literature, since it is com-

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monly evaluated not as serious works but as popular entertainment (cf. Le Guin 20). Due to this prevalent attitude towards SF, it has been converted into a genre of collective works that constantly recounts unspeakable secrets, but is located outside the reach of the mass consciousness of the academic literature as a literary crypt, a ghettoization of science fiction, as Blish criticizes (118). As the debasement and ignorance of SF testifies to its spectral essence, it at the same time has triggered fierce controversial debates on its perplexing generic position in literature. In “The Many Deaths of Science Fiction: A Polemic,” Roger Luckhurst suggests the impending death of SF and argues that “SF is dying; but then SF has always been dying, it has been dying from the very moment of its constitution” (35). Dying refers to an in-between status to that of a ghost, an in-between status between the living and the dead. The continuous process of dying as the inherent nature of SF thus discloses its ghostly intermittent returns in the history of science fiction and to the realm of literature. However, what kind of role does science fiction actually play in literary history based on its spectral secluded generic position in literature? Being a haunted house in literature, SF has a gloomy and heavy spectral existence as a psychological crypt in literature. Though the debasement and ghostliness of SF seem to intensify its negative effects on literature, it is surprisingly capable of exerting positive effects as Abraham and Torok believe in the curative ability of psychoanalysis “to ‘retrieve’ blocked dimensions of consciousness” (Lane 5), or as Ballard optimistically views his scientific works as “stories of psychic fulfillment” (cited in Pringle and Goddard 40). Through gaining access to the literary crypts of SF and uncovering the entombed unspeakable secrets, the ghosts that lie buried here could be converted into treasures, which “will become the delight of their owner and can be made to work for the benefit of us all” (Lane 5). This positive attitude towards the de-spectralization of SF thus helps to explore its collective unspeakable secrets buried in the realm of literature, which not only to a certain extent unearths the most obscure wounds of contemporary human minds in a collective sense but also restores one’s spectralized and fragmentary individual existence constituted through the technology and media of reproduction to a more natural and intimate connection to oneself and to the surrounding world.

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Works Cited Abraham, Nicolas. “Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology.” The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. 171-76. Bennett, Andrew and Royle, Nicholas. “Ghosts.” An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. Ed. New York: Longman, 2004. Bennington, Geoffrey and Derrida, Jacques. Jacques Derrida. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Blish, James. More Issues at Hand. Chicago: Advent, 1970. Crowley, John. “Snow.” The Norton Book of Science Fiction. Ed. Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery. New York: Norton, 1993. 591-604. Derrida, Jacques. “The Ghost Dance: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” Public 2 (1989): 60-73. Gibson, William. “The Gernsback Continuum.” The Norton Book of Science Fiction. Ed. Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery. New York: Norton, 1993. 457-65. Jameson, Fredric. “Progress versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005. Lane, Christopher. “The Testament of the Other: Abraham and Torok’s Failed Expiation of Ghosts.” Diacritics 27.4 (1997): 3-29. Le Guin, Ursula. “Introduction.”The Norton Book of Science Fiction. Ed. Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery. New York: Norton, 1993. 15-42. Luckhurst, Roger. “The Many Deaths of Science Fiction: a Polemic.” Science Fiction Studies 21.1 (1994): 35-50. Pringle, David and Goddard, James. “Interview with Ballard.” Vector 73 (1976): 24-49. Yassa, Maria. “Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok – The Inner Crypt.” The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review 25.2 (2002): 1-14. Films Solaris. 1972. Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky. Perf. Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk. New York: Criterion, 2002. DVD.

Difference and Resistance in M.T. Anderson’s Feed JACOBO CANADY 1. Introduction The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek starts his Welcome to the Desert of the Real by telling a joke from the German Democratic Republic about a German worker who finds a job in Siberia. Knowing that all his letters will be read by the censors, he decides to create a secret code with his friends: if the letter he sends is written in blue ink, he is telling the truth; if the letter is in red ink, everything in the letter is false. A few weeks after he has left, his friends receive his first letter, in blue ink, in which he explains how wonderful life is in Siberia: “Everything is wonderful here: the shops are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, cinemas show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair – the only thing you can’t get is red ink” (1). What is interesting in this joke, explains Žižek, is that although the worker cannot find red ink, he finds a way of subverting the code by explicitly mentioning the impossibility of lying. This is the situation, claims Žižek, in which censorship works in liberal democracies, one feels free in them, although the only thing one cannot find is ‘red ink’: “we ‘feel free’ because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom” (2). The aim of this essay is to show how this can be applied to the characters in M.T. Anderson’s young adult novel Feed. In the following pages, I will show how the society imagined by Anderson is an example of what Gilles Deleuze called control societies, as opposed to Foucault’s discipline societies. The essay will then examine the way these control societies are related to capitalism, and, finally, Violet’s intention of resisting the feed by being different will be analysed, contrasting Antonio Negri’s defence of difference as resistance in his The Porcelain Workshop and Brian Massumi’s view of difference as a necessary condition for capitalism to subsist. Feed is a satirical young adult science fiction novel in which Anderson describes a society where 73% of the population is permanently connected to a future version of the Internet thanks to a chip they have implanted in their brains. This chip is popularly known as the feed, and has changed

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the way people relate to the world and to each other. In the first place, it has made any external gadget such as TV-sets, VCRs or computers unnecessary. Besides, the feed allows people to chat to each other, no matter the distance between them, and, also, they no longer need to memorize things, since they can recover information from the feed at any moment. This has changed, among other things, the tasks students engage in at school. Since they can immediately retrieve any data from the feed, subjects such as chemistry or history are deemed useless (123), so, instead, they learn only how to use their feeds in order to “find bargains” and “the best way to get a job or how to decorate [their] bedrooms” (123f.). Moreover, their culture is described as “oneiric” (163), since reading and writing have been substituted by images. Their letters, they claim, are “like flocks of doves, released from under [their] hats” (163). It is also a society based on massive and compulsive consumption, where everything has been turned into a commodity. Thus, their advanced technology has allowed them to disentangle themselves from nature: forests have been cut down and substituted by more efficient air factories; the sea is dead; and steaks, and not cattle, are grown in fields. This is the context in which the relationship between two teenagers, Titus and Violet, takes place. They meet on the Moon, during spring break, and one night while they are in a club they are attacked by a hacker. After a few days in hospital, where they start their relationship, they return home and continue seeing each other. Soon Titus realizes that Violet is different from him and his friends, and that she has some political ideas he finds strange. One day, she tells him she has decided to resist the feed. At first, Titus thinks it is a game, and enjoys both the game itself and being with Violet, but soon he finds out that the hacker attack damaged Violet’s feed and that she is going to die if she does not receive help from the company that provides them with the feed, since she is too poor to pay for the repairs herself. Then, what seemed a simple game for Titus becomes a matter of life and death for Violet, since the corporations she has asked for help keep telling her they do not consider her to be a reliable investment. In the following section, it will be seen how the society in which Titus and Violet live can be defined as one of control. The feed does not only provide them with information, but also helps corporations to control their movements. It will be useful to bear this concept in mind as we begin to understand the nature of and the reasons for Violet’s rebellion against the feed.

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2. Control Societies In “Postscript on Control Societies”, Gilles Deleuze maintains that we are moving from Foucault’s discipline societies to what he called control societies. Discipline societies were proper of the first stages of capitalism, during the 18th and 19th centuries, although they reached their apogee at the beginning of the 20th century. They were focused on producing docile bodies by means of confinement: individuals were always moving from one site of confinement to another, from the family to school; then to the barracks; to the factory; and perhaps to prison or to hospital (177). But, for Deleuze, sites of confinement are in crisis and are being replaced by “ultrarapid forms of apparently free-floating control” (178). In these societies, as Brian Massumi explains, confinement is useless and, therefore, not desirable, since in them “the real power starts after you’ve passed […], because you’ve left a trace” (229), the movements of a person are registered and compared to those of other people, which can generate results “very convenient for surveillance or crime investigation, but even more valuable for marketing” (229). The society depicted by M. T. Anderson can be clearly defined as one of control. Precisely, when Violet is trying to convince Titus of the need to resist the feed, she complains that corporations use their feeds to control their movements, their purchases and even their interests in order to gather information about their tastes. The corporations’ purpose is carrying out demographic studies that allow them to divide the population into different types, so they can provide people with personalized advertisements and banners. In this way, “they keep making everything more basic so it will appeal to everyone. And gradually, everyone gets used to everything being basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more simple,”(111) as Violet puts it. One might say, paraphrasing Žižek, that the feed is the ultimate pervert marketing, since “it doesn’t give you what you desire – it tells you how to desire”1. Steven Shaviro, in his essay “The ‘Bitter Necessity’ of Debt: Neoliberal Finance and the Society of Control,” argues that the difference between disciplinary and control societies is one not only of form, but also of a difference in the media that characterize each. Shaviro uses the word ‘media’ in the sense intended by Marshall McLuhan, that is, as “extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical,” that “work us over completely […] leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered” (McLuhan and Fiore 26; cited from Shaviro 2). He goes on arguing that while the effects of the 1

Žižek quoted in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (US 2007, Dir. Sophie Fiennes).

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media proper to disciplinary societies are already well known,2 those of control societies are yet to be seen: In contrast, we do not yet entirely know just how the control society is changing our postures, our gestures, and our perceptions: though the proliferation of screens and data access points throughout private and public space, the growing importance of gestural and tactile interfaces, and the spread of multitasking all provide clues. (2)

The medium that characterizes the society of control depicted by Anderson is, clearly, the feed. It is not only a “means of production and expression,” (Shaviro 2) but works the characters in the novel over completely. As Titus explains, although the feed was presented as an educative gadget, “it’s more now, it’s not so much about the educational stuff but more regarding the fact that everything that goes on, goes on on the feed” (60). That is, those who do not have the feed implanted in their brains are simply left out of ‘everything that goes on.’ This means that, since only 73% of Americans can afford feeds (126), the poorest quarter of the population are not participating in cultural activity. This, added to the facts that people live in floating bubbles and that the news “have been asked to be a little more positive” (125), makes the poor virtually nonexistent. This is what leads Violet to claim that “because of the feed, we are raising a nation of idiots. Ignorant, self-centered idiots” (127). Nonetheless, Violet and Titus get some glimpses of what it means to live without the feed. For instance, Violet’s parents did not have the feed and were at a disadvantage at university because they could not see the holograms professors showed them or recover information from the feed (239); also, when the kids are in hospital after the hacker attack, disconnected from the feed, they do not know what to do with their time, to the extreme of claiming that their “head felt real empty” (58). In any case, the most dramatic example of how the feed is a visceral technology is when Violet finds out that she is going to die because of the malfunctioning of her feed: “the feed is tied in to everything. Your body control, your emotions, your memory. Everything,” so when Titus asks why technicians cannot disconnect it, she simply replies that it is impossible, since “it’s part of the brain” (184f.). Shaviro also explains that in control societies, bodies and objects are abstracted into data, since this way, by manipulating their data, they can command the movements of those bodies and objects (cf. 3), which is precisely the way the feed works: as has been seen above, when Violet explains how corporations use the feed to control people’s movements, tastes and habits in order to divide them into different types or profiles, so they can provide them with personalized advertisements and banners. The conse2

“[C]onsider, for instance, how Taylorism and the assembly line molded the habits of generations of workers” (Shaviro, 2)

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quence of this, according to Violet, is that things are made more and more simple and people, in turn, end up getting used to things being simple. As Massumi argues for todays internet practice already, “it’s no exaggeration to say that every time you click on a link you’re doing somebody else’s market research for them” (230), in this way, daily life becomes a form or “value-producing labour,” which is what Deleuze and Guattari called “surplus-value of flow” (228). And it is, precisely this functioning together of power and economy in order to create this surplus-value of flow that characterizes control societies (Massumi 230). This process ends up turning people into products, in what Massumi calls “the ‘subsumption of life’ under capitalism” (228). This abstraction, this commodification of life, can be seen in Anderson’s novel in the case of Violet: when she is in a coma and Titus visits her, her father tells him: “we Americans […] are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them – he pointed at his daughter – what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away” (304). That is, when corporations create a profile for a person they are turning him into a product, a product that, as Violet said, they can sell to other companies. But, once the product ceases to be profitable, as is the case of Violet, who is not consuming enough partly because she is poor and partly because she is resisting the feed, it becomes disposable. When she and her father send a message to FeedTech, the company that provides her with a connection to the feed, asking for help, they claim FeedTech has to do it because the life of a girl is what is at stake (cf. 233). Nonetheless, FeedTech rejects their petition, since they “don’t feel that [Violet] would be a reliable investment at this time,” though, of course, they might reconsider their position if after a period of six months checking “great bargains”, they can create a consumer profile for her that would interest other corporations (261). But, if the “subsumption of life” under capitalism is possible, it is so because neoliberalism has expanded the sphere of the economic until it practically includes everything, which means that all social phenomena and relations, without exception, ‘are analyzed in terms of investment, capital costs, and profit […] on the capital invested’ […]. Even such things as ‘marriage, the education of children, and criminality’ must be conceived this way. (Shaviro 4)

In effect, in Feed every aspect of the characters’ lives has been colonized by capitalism: school is no longer school, but SchoolTM; clouds are CloudsTM; the feed informs them about where and for how much they can buy anything they see; and so on. Thus, it is no wonder that in a commodified world, where everything has a price, life itself has become a commodity,

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too, that the life of a girl can be disregarded if it does not produce economic profit. Yet another characteristic that defines the society depicted in Feed as a society of control is that most of the adult characters’ professions can be defined as immaterial labor:3 Titus’ father does “some kind of banking thing”; his mother is in design; Violet’s father is a college professor (76f.); and the rest are technicians, doctors, clerks, and so on. As Gilles Deleuze explains, the technological development that marks the transition from discipline societies to control societies is a by-product of a mutation of capitalism: 19th century capitalism was based on the idea of production and property, the capitalist owned a factory, the means of production and, in some cases other similarly organized sites, such as workers’ homes or schools. But today, capitalism is no longer directed towards production, but towards what Deleuze calls metaproduction: factories and the means of production are transferred to Third World countries, and corporations no longer buy raw materials and sell finished products, but buy activity and sell services. In effect, in Feed, as Violet’s father explains, people are only interested in consuming, without caring about where things come from or where they go once they are no longer useful or fashionable. To sum up, the society in Feed can be defined as a society of control, as a society where the movements of its members are controlled by corporations that can learn what people might want or need, and, thus, be able to offer them whatever they need. This control is accomplished thanks to the feed, which, besides providing corporations with that information, has also become part of people’s bodies, to the extent that they, literally, cannot live without it. It is, besides, a society where people are reduced to data, to a mere profile. It is precisely against this commodification that Violet is going to rebel, as will be seen in the next section. 3. Difference and Resistance Now that the society in Feed has been characterized as a society of control is the moment to engage in the question of difference and resistance. One of the key moments in the novel is when Violet asks Titus to meet her at a mall, where she tells him about her ‘new project:’ resisting the feed. This is where Violet explains to Titus how corporations constantly survey them 3

For Maurizio Lazzarato, immaterial labor “is defined as the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity” (n.pag.). Lazzarato also argues that although immaterial or intellectual labor has been traditionally opposed to material or manual labor, the differences between the two are becoming more and more blurred due to a ‘great transformation’ that has been taking place since the 1970s.

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in order to reduce them into profiles. She has decided to rebel against this situation, and “create a customer profile that’s so screwed, no one can market to it” (112). To do so, she starts asking about the most diverse and unconnected products and then not buying them. Thus, for instance, they go to a shop, where they ask for searchlights and the possibility of mounting them on her belly; in another shop they make believe to the clerk that they are looking for a dress, in the women’s department, for Titus; and so on. Her strategy, she says, is one of resisting by complicating: once she has become irreducible to a profile, she will no longer be just another consumer, but an individual, which, she expects, will make her invisible to the feed (112-15). Violet’s strategy, that of creating difference as a means of resisting capitalist simplification of people into ‘types,’ is very similar to that advocated by Antonio Negri in The Porcelain Workshop. In this work, Negri argues that in the world we are living in “we have never been told […] what building democracy, freedom, equality and wealth means,” (92) which allows capitalism to think that it can annihilate any possibility of resistance. The main consequence of this is that, since we have not been told how to build democracy, freedom, equality and wealth, it is the task of the people, of the multitude, to work their way towards those goals, goals that can only be constructed if every member of the multitude commits himself to that purpose. Besides, Negri considers that today the “right to resistance is neither absolute nor self-justified,” (110f.) it is built, instead, upon common demands and social cooperation. What is necessary is not only a personal commitment, but also cooperation. But the necessary condition for common demands and social cooperation to exist is the pre-existence of a language that allows the articulation of such demands. And it is exactly this that characters in Anderson’s novel lack. As will be seen, Violet, like the German worker in Žižek’s joke, lacks the language to express her unfreedom, but unlike him, she is unable to find a way of successfully subverting the code. Violet’s lack of such a language is expressed in a double way in Feed. In the first place, it can be perceived in Violet’s inability to make Titus understand what is really at stake. Although she can feel there are things, which are wrong in the way they live, she cannot articulate them in a coherent discourse. That is why Titus thinks Violet’s resistance is just a game, a chance for some fun, in the same way he and his friends think of one of Coke’s promotions as a chance to rip off corporations (172). Thus, when they are at the mall, going from one shop to another, ‘resisting the feed,’ he says: “I was starting to get the picture [of Violet’s purpose] and think it was all pretty funny” (114). Of course, throughout Titus’ narration it is made clear that he and his friends find it extremely difficult to focus for a long time on the same topic: they do not need to memorize information, since

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they can retrieve it at any moment from the feed, but the fast pace at which fashions change and the constant bombardment by information and advertisements they are exposed to makes it difficult for them to analyze things, and, therefore, to think critically. For instance, after visiting several shops, Violet tries to explain to Titus more about how the feed works, but he is not paying attention; when Violet asks him what he was thinking about, he replies that he was thinking whether a story one of the clerks told them was true (116). That is, Violet’s problem is that she cannot divert Titus’ attention from the feed and into the reality of the world she is glimpsing. The second way Violet’s difficulties in expressing her unfreedom are made clear in Anderson’s novel is when it is shown how she cannot divorce herself from the capitalist system: for instance, when she is telling Titus about her project to resist the feed, they start laughing at the stupid things people are buying, but she tells Titus he is not to laugh at them, since he is “wheeling around a wheelbarrow full of a giant hot cross bun from Bun in a Barrow” (110). But, a few moments earlier, when they met at the mall, Titus thought she looked great in the low shirt she was wearing, since it showed her lesion, “because the stars of the Oh? Wow! Thing! had started to get lesions, so now people were thinking better about lesions” (110). The origin of these lesions is never made clear, although pollution seems to be one of the primal suspects, but the characters in the novel have been suffering from them since the beginning of the narration. Still, the lesions have not always been considered as aesthetically pleasing as in the case of Violet in this example. Thus, at the beginning of the novel, shortly after Titus and his friends arrive at the Moon, he considers that the reason why they are not allowed to join a party is that they look horrible, especially because of their lesions (21), and later that night, when they meet Violet, Quendy, one of Titus’ friends, gets upset because she has a spreading lesion on her forehead and nobody warned her about it (31). But, instead of raising any kind of alarm, these lesions are soon commodified, especially thanks to the feed and its shows, whose characters start showing theirs off. Lesions, then, stop being a sign of sickness but rather become a fashionable (and desirable) mark, therefore Violet does not feel the need to hide or disguise hers. Also, when she knows she is going to die, and has made a list of things she would like to do, she realizes, with horror, that all those things, everything she really wanted, her ideal of a happy life, are borrowed from the feed, especially from the opening credits of sitcoms (231). The feed is so much in her that her experience of reality is mediated by it, making it impossible for her to have an original desire, an emotion that has not been modulated or commodified by the feed. But, above all, Violet herself confesses that she craves a life like that of Titus and his friends, since she was raised in a different way, home schooled and not allowed to have plenty of

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things and toys other kids had, because they were either too expensive or against her parents’ beliefs (121). But she claims she now wants to be normal, have a boyfriend, enjoy, let fun come naturally to her, and so on, in short, “be like normal people are” (281, 283). That is: in spite of her convictions, not even Violet can fully escape the fashions of the moment or the life that is sold as happy by corporations. Therefore, it is no wonder that, since she cannot be coherent with her own ideals, she cannot convince others to resist the feed. Brian Massumi provides an explanation for this situation: he considers that “freedom is not about breaking or escaping constraints” (222) but about establishing different degrees of freedom, since it is impossible to fully escape the constraints. This is so because laws determine our identity: “the true power of the law is the power to form us,” that is, power does not make us follow certain paths, but, rather, puts the paths in us, so, Massumi argues, “by the time we learn to follow its constraints we’re following ourselves” (223). This is the case with Violet: the feed, and with it capitalism, is so much in her that it has become intrinsic to her identity. Capitalism has colonized the entire society, and therefore, it is one of the forces that forge people’s identity. There is no location outside capitalism where one can place oneself in order to articulate a coherent critique, a ground for resistance, and propose an alternative. In any case, although flawed, Violet’s resistance takes the form of difference. By creating difference she intends to resist capitalist simplification of people into ‘types.’ She expects that once she cannot be catalogued into a consumer profile, she will become invisible to the feed. Negri maintains a similar position: for him difference equals resistance, since it opposes the homogenization process to which capitalism subjects society, a process that neutralizes the individual. Hence, it is only “through creativity, life styles, and the destruction of all forms of essence” (98) that difference, and therefore, resistance, can be achieved. Furthermore, Negri also considers that “difference correspond[s] to the preliminary moment of constitution of a subjectivity separating itself in order to exist” (98). Which is, precisely, what Violet is trying to achieve: once she has created an impossible profile, once she is invisible to the feed, and is free from its control, she will become an individual, and not a mere consumer. The problem in Negri’s defense of difference as a form of resistance is that it is based in the existing caesura between modernism and postmodernism, which he claims opens up the possibility of a new politics and new forms of power that would allow the multitude to seize the opportunity to fight capitalism. But he does not take into account that, as Deleuze explained, this caesura is partly based in exactly that mutation of capitalism that is driving the transition from discipline societies to control societies.

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Capitalism is no longer interested in promoting regularities, as it was in the case of the 18th and 19th century discipline societies studied by Foucault. Today’s capitalism follows a different strategy, since it has different aims. Massumi, following Deleuze, states that capitalism “has undergone a major reconfiguration since the Second World War,” one that has led from control as ‘power over’ to focusing more on “the transitions between institutions, than on the institutions themselves” (223). As a consequence of this, capitalism no longer tries to promote ‘normalcy’ in Foucault’s sense of the word. But this loosening of normalcy, Massumi warns us, must not be seen as a liberation, but as part of capitalism’s dynamic: “It’s capitalism’s own form of power. It’s no longer disciplinary institutional power that defines everything, it’s capitalism’s power to produce variety – because markets get saturated. Produce variety and you produce a niche market. The oddest of affective tendencies are okay – as long as they pay” (224). That is, in late capitalism creating difference is not, as Negri claims, a way of resisting. It is just the opposite, creating difference is creating new niche markets, new spaces for capitalism to grow and avoid the collapse that market saturation would involve. Still, Massumi agrees with Violet and with Negri’s claim that corporations (as the agents of capitalism) seek to reduce the population into types: as he explains, “individual consumers are being inducted into these collective processes, rather than being separated out and addressed as free agents who are supposed to make an informed consumer choice as rational individuals” (227). In other words, people are commodified by being reduced from their status of subjects to that of consumers. The new form of control is no longer based on repression, as in discipline societies, it is, rather, the barcode or the PIN number. The world is divided into a series of gateways or checkpoints that the consumer must pass, leaving a trace that is gathered and studied by corporations (cf. Massumi 228f.). This is a situation that, as can be seen, is not very different from that described by Anderson in his novel, since in both cases people’s movements are registered, and “those registrations can be gathered to piece together a profile of your movement, or they can be compared to other people’s inputs. They can be processed en masse and systematised, synthesised,” which is very convenient, for in a fluid economy, “based so much on intangibles, the most valuable thing is information on people’s patterns and tastes” (ibid. 229). All this information is to return to the consumer as “advertising, pushing new products” (ibid.). Massumi, therefore, proposes two apparently contradictory versions of the same phenomenon. On the one hand, he sees capitalism as a promoter of difference; and at the same time, he sees it as a promoter of uniformity, of ‘types’ rather than individuals. Christian Klesse provides an

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example of how to overcome this apparent deadlock and understand the double movement in which capitalism works. In his article “‘Modern Primitivism:’ Non-Mainstream Body Modification and Racialized Representation” Klesse discusses the case of the ‘Modern Primitives,’ “a subcultural movement in the intersection of the tattoo, piercing, and sado-masochism scenes” (15). The philosophy of this movement can be summarized in the quotation that he has chosen to open his essay. In it, one of the members of this movement asserts that “I make a statement, I’ve chosen myself. I am part of this culture but I don’t believe in it. My body modifications are my way to say that” (15). That is, the Modern Primitives express their discontent with society by means of what they call body play, “the deliberate, ritualized modification of the human body” (15f.). Therefore, Modern Primitives root their actions in a spiritual quest, since for them body modification is a rite of passage, a step in reaching a higher consciousness and a way of exploring one’s own spirituality (16). The intrinsic irony behind this rejection of consumer culture, of materialism, this quest for spirituality, is that it has become, as Klesse notes, commodified, since “small-scale businesses of professional piercers and tattoo artists have been established in all larger cities and definitively establish a profitable market” (21). What Modern Primitives fail to see is the double movement in which capitalism works: first, it tolerates or, even, promotes difference, it allows these groups to feel they are overcoming capitalism by refusing to be part of the mainstream. But then, once the radical movements are stable, they are re-appropriated by corporations and become profitable markets. Indeed, an example of this can be found in Feed: as was explained above, the characters are suffering some mysterious lesions that they try to hide at first, but that soon are made fashionable by their stars. It was seen how Violet, unlike Quendy at the beginning of the novel, can show off her lesion because they have become commodified and now look “kind of cool” (110). Later on in the novel, Calista, another of Titus’ friends, is wearing her hair up, so that everybody can see her new artificial lesion (197). That is, lesions are no longer an ailment of a ‘sick’ minority, but have been transformed into a technically reproducible and marketable commodity that works as a proof of coolness. The question now would be how to interpret the outcome of Violet’s small-scale revolution. At first, it seems that Anderson is on Negri’s side, since Violet’s resistance will cause her destruction. As seen above, when her feed starts failing, she and her father ask FeedTech for a free repair, but they are told that FeedTech and other companies have reviewed her purchase history and have decided that she is not a reliable investment (233, 261). This might be seen, from Negri’s perspective, as capitalism’s rejection of Violet’s resistance. She has become what Giorgio Agamben

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calls a ‘homo sacer,’4 since corporations will not kill or hurt her, but will do nothing to prevent her death. Nonetheless, as Nina explains, FeedTech’s refusal is based on her not buying things, so she offers Violet the chance of having her case reviewed if after a six month period of ‘great bargains checking’ they can create a consumer portrait for her (261). As Massumi says, the condition for capitalism to accept difference and diversity is that, literally, ‘they pay’ (224). Therefore, Violet’s problem is not that she is different or that she did not match any of their ‘types,’ but that she has not consumed enough. That is, that her life does not pay. 4. Conclusion In this essay I have discussed how M. T. Anderson deals with the possibility of resisting capitalism by creating difference. To this end, I have first explained why the society imagined by Anderson in his novel can be characterized as one of control, as defined by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. For Deleuze, we are moving from what Foucault called discipline societies to a new kind of social configuration, which he terms control societies. These control societies are characterized by a rejection of confinement, which was the defining feature of discipline societies, and a tendency towards controlling the movements of the citizens. Deleuze also relates these control societies to a mutation of capitalism, which is no longer interested in producing, but in selling services. I have shown how these features are present in Anderson’s novel: how the feed can be considered the characteristic medium of that society, a medium that works people over, altering the way they relate to each other and to the world; how people are reduced to consumer profiles by the corporations behind the feed, so they can be marketed more efficiently; and how this reduction also transforms people into products, since their profiles can be sold to other companies and when they are not profitable, like Violet, they can be left to die. Then, to discuss the question of difference and resistance, I have analysed how Violet decides to resist the feed by making a profile the corporations behind it will not be able to handle. Violet explains to Titus that the corporations that run the feed use the information they gather about their tastes in order to divide the population into different types, so they can provide them with personalized products. Violet’s decision has been contrasted with two different views on difference as a way of resisting capi4

The ‘homo sacer’ is a figure of archaic Roman law in which the sacredness and human life are linked for the first time. Agamben quotes a fragment of Festus’ On the Significance of Words, where he defines the homo sacer as he who has been judged for a crime but cannot be sacrificed, though, if someone kills him, it will not be considered homicide (cf. Agamben 93).

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talism: that of Antonio Negri and that of Brian Massumi. Negri considers that difference is the best way to resist capitalism, since it works by annihilating the individual, transforming it into a mere consumer. Massumi, in contrast and following Deleuze, considers that difference, rather than a form of resisting capitalism, is a way of reinvigorating it. In effect, Massumi argues that capitalism depends on the constant appearance of new niche markets, which prevents the system from collapsing. Finally, having contrasted Negri’s and Massumi’s positions, I compared them to Anderson’s novel, concluding that the decision by FeedTech and other corporations to let Violet die should not be interpreted as corroboration of Negri’s views – that is, it should not be assumed that they let her die because she is succeeding in her resistance and poses a threat; on the contrary, corporations refuse to repair her feed, and therefore let her die, because she did not consume enough, so she is, as they claim, not a profitable investment. Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: El Poder Soberano y la Nuda Vida [Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life]. Trans. Antonio Gimeno Cuspinera. Valencia: Pre-Textos, 1998. Anderson, M. T. Feed. London: Walker, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Klesse, Christian. “Modern Primitivism’: Non-Mainstream Body Modification and Racialized Representation.” Body Society 5.2 (1999): 15-38. Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Immaterial Labor.” Generation-online.org. Web. 22 Nov 2010. . Massumi, Brian. “Navigating Movements.” Hope: New Philosophies for Change. Ed. Mary Zournazi. New York: Routledge, 2002. 210-43. McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage. New York: Bantam, 1967. Negri, Antonio. The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006. Shaviro, Steven. “The ‘Bitter Necessity’ of Debt: Neoliberal Finance and the Society of Control.” Shaviro.com. 1 May 2010. Web. 5 Jun 2010. . Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso, 2002.

Disharmony and Dystopia Music in Classic Dystopian Fiction ALLAN WEISS In a paper presented at the World Science Fiction Convention in Australia, I argued that music plays an important symbolic role in utopian fiction. In works like Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), and especially W. H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age (1887), music reflects, embodies, and symbolizes the social harmony that characterizes these imagined societies. What I would like to discuss here is the flip side – the role of music in classic dystopian societies1. While utopian societies feature harmonious relationships among citizens, and between the society as a whole and the natural world, classic dystopian societies are ruled by totalitarian regimes that carefully control the sort of music people may listen to or perform. In utopias, music is an expression of the society; in classic dystopias, music is a tool of the regime to inculcate its ideology, enforce its rules, and reinforce its power. On the other hand, utopias and dystopias are not as different as many believe, and so as we will see the dystopias’ political manipulation of music is not a simple matter of governmental cultural imposition on an oppressed populace. The source text for both utopian and dystopian literature is Plato’s Republic (ca. 380 B.C.). Contrary to popular misconception, Plato did not seek to evict the poets from the ideal society he depicts, but rather to control them. Plato derived his views of the qualities and meaning of music in part from Pythagoras, who introduced the notion that music and musical harmonies can be described in mathematical terms. Harmony, Pythagoras argued, is the product of certain proportions of musical pitch, and harmony extends to the cosmic level in the form of the music of the spheres produced by the motions of Empyreal cycles. The artist in Plato’s imagined society has a well-defined role: to promote harmony, both individual 1

For the distinction between classic and critical dystopias, cf. Moylan; on the background to dystopian literature, see Aldridge, Booker, Eurich, Kumar, and Walsh.

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and social. That role is therefore, to Plato, a utopian one. More specifically, the main social function of music is to strengthen the spirit of the soldiers: I don’t know all the musical modes. Just leave me the mode that would suitably imitate the tone and rhythm of a courageous person who is active in battle or doing other violent deeds, or who is failing and facing wounds, death, or some other misfortune, and who, in all these circumstances, is fighting off his fate steadily and with self-control. Leave me also another mode, that of someone engaged in a peaceful, unforced, voluntary action, persuading someone or asking a favor of a god in prayer or of a human being through teaching and exhortation, or, on the other hand, of someone submitting to the supplications of another who is teaching him and trying to get him to change his mind, and who, in all these circumstances, is acting with moderation and self-control, not with arrogance but with understanding, and is content with the outcome. Leave me, then, these two modes, which will best imitate the violent or voluntary tones of voice of those who are moderate and courageous, whether in good fortune or in bad. (Plato 70)

The social function of music is thus to help soldiers perform their own social function. In the Republic, then, music is a tool used by the society’s leaders to achieve social ends, rather than an artistic expression of the people. Individual musical expression is far less important to Plato than the harmonious operation of society, and so he argues that only certain forms of music should be permitted. Nothing that might endanger the unity and functioning of society, and its authorities, may be allowed. For those favouring artistic freedom, of course, such an approach is truly horrifying. The political use of music by those in authority that Plato advocated appears in every classic dystopia, from what is arguably the foundational text of the genre, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), to such novels as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour (1949), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962). In all these texts, musical composition and performance largely or entirely originate in and are regulated by the people in power. Whereas in utopias music is a generally “natural” expression of the citizens, in dystopias music is artificially or cynically produced, often by machines designed for the task. As in the Republic, music is calculated to create certain desired effects in the populace: heightened martial spirit, obedience, the redirection of emotion away from dissent, or the deadening of feeling altogether. We is to a large extent a cry for artistic freedom in the context of the politicization of art under Lenin and those who followed him. The reader is meant to be appalled by what has happened to poetry, for example, under the OneState regime: D-503 boasts, “we’ve tamed and saddled what used to be the wild nature of poetry. Poetry today is not some impudent nightingale’s piping – poetry is government service, poetry is usefulness” (66f.). As the Benefactor tells D-503, the regime has eliminated people’s

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freedom in order to secure their happiness. Part of that effort is an operation to remove the imagination (207). Individuals no longer create music or indeed most other art; all that is done by machine as directed by OneState. When the workers make their way to their various places of employment, they march in unison to the beat of artificial martial music generated by a factory: As usual, all the pipes of the music factory were singing the OneState March. The Numbers were marching along in step in neat ranks of four. […] And the beat of the brass: tra-ta-ta. Tra-ta-ta. Brass paces gleaming in the sun. And every pace carries you up higher and higher into the dizzying blue… (6f.)

Music in utopias is transcendently beautiful and leads to spiritual enrichment; here we see a parodic dystopian version of the same effect. A further mirroring of the two genres appears during the portrayal of a later march. As we have seen, utopian music is harmonious, and is both a product and a symbol of individual and social harmony. In dystopias, we find many references to “harmony,” but it is a distorted sort. For example, D-503 describes the column of marching Numbers as “the squared harmony of our gray-blue ranks” (7); later, in a passage reminiscent of the opening scenes of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1925), D-503 refers to the marching workers this way: “Harmoniously, four abreast, everyone to the elevators” (34). The term arises again a few pages afterward: “The pipes of the Music Factory were harmoniously booming out the March – the good old daily March. You can’t find words for how charming that is, that dailiness, that repetition, that mirror image” (36). In the novel, the musical “harmony” is mechanical, repetitious, and imposed, not spontaneous and organically emergent as in the utopias. But this is not so much harmony as conformity, and thus it violates the very principle of harmony as described by the ancient philosophers, who spoke of a blending rather than elimination of difference (cf. Philip 123; Kahn 25). In music, harmony is the pleasing combination of musical sounds, which are at suitable intervals, not the playing of a single note; by analogy, a truly harmonious society is one that combines various elements instead of homogenizing them. The mechanization of music seeps into other arts as well: Our poets no longer soar into the Empyrean; they’ve come down to earth. They go along in step with us to the stern mechanical march of the Musical Factory. Their lyre consists of the morning hum of electrical toothbrushes, the spark’s ominous snap in the Machine of the Benefactor, the grandiose echo of the OneState Anthem […]. (67)

And yet it is undeniable that the workers in OneState do form a unified whole, and while their synchronized marching is required rather than inspired, the citizens of OneState have achieved a unity of purpose that Plato and indeed many utopian writers might have admired.

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In a lengthy passage in Record 4, we are presented with a comparison between the music of the novel’s past – i.e., our age – and that of its present, or our future. The comparison is telling in its contrast between our freer, more emotionally rich music and the mechanical, purely mathematical variety that OneState prefers. The passage begins with a typically utilitarian perspective on the relative efficiency of the two methods of composition; the phonolecturer describes the musicometer: Simply by turning this handle, any one of you can produce up to three sonatas per hour. And how much labor such a thing cost your ancestors! They could create only by whipping themselves up to attacks of ‘inspiration’ – some unknown form of epilepsy. (17f.)

He then shows them the monstrosity known as a “grand piano” and obliges them to listen while I-330 plays something “primitive” on it. The audience’s response is worth noting: Like everyone else, I heard nothing more than the stupid vain clattering of the strings. I laughed. Things became easy and simple. The talented phonolecturer had simply given us a too lively picture of that savage epoch – that’s all. After that, how pleasant it was to listen to our music of today. (A demonstration of it was given at the end, for contrast.) Cystalline chromatic scales of converging and diverging infinite series – and the synoptic harmonies of the formulae of Taylor and Maclaurin, wholesome, quadrangular, and weighty as Pythagoras’s pants; mournful melodies of a wavering, diminishing movement, the alternating bright beats of the pauses according to the lines of Frauenhofer – the spectral analysis of the planet … What magnificence! What unalterable regularity! And what pathetic self-indulgence was that ancient music, limited only by its wild imaginings. (19)

As we see, the mathematical “purity” of this music is evident to all, and it evokes admiration and pleasure, not boredom or disgust. As the reference to Pythagoras suggests, this very mathematical music is sublime precisely because it is mathematical and not emotional or imaginative. To these citizens, the music is utopian. In Brave New World, the music is equally artificial. Here, the regime’s purpose is to condition human beings fully, and music is one way to reinforce what it wishes people to be or feel. Once again, machines produce the music: while Lenina changes her clothes, a “Synthetic Music machine was warbling out a super-cornet solo” (39). After work one day, Lenina and Henry attend a show at the Westminster Abbey Cabaret featuring, as its “electric sky-signs” proclaim, “LONDON’S FINEST SCENT AND COLOUR ORGAN. ALL THE LATEST SYNTHETIC MUSIC” (67). There are some musicians, such as Calvin Stopes and His Sixteen Sexophonists: Rich with a wealth of harmonics, their tremulous chorus mounted towards a climax, louder and ever louder – until at last, with a wave of his hand, the conductor let loose the final shattering note of ether music and blew the sixteen merely human blowers clean out of existence. Thunder in A flat major. (68)

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At the literal climax of the performance, the band sings “There Ain’t No Bottle in All the World Like That Dear Little Bottle of Mine.” As the band takes a break, “the Synthetic Music apparatus was producing the very latest in slow Malthusian Blues” (68). The music is designed to encourage sexual activity and discourage thought. This scene is immediately followed by the Brave New World’s version of a religious ceremony, the Solidarity Service. Of course, there is hymn-singing, at the Fordson Community Singery: The President stood up, made the sign of the T and, switching on the synthetic music, let loose the soft indefatigable beating of drums and a choir of instruments – near-wind and super-string – that plangently repeated and repeated the brief and unescapably haunting melody of the First Solidarity Hymn. Again, again – and it was not the ear that heard the pulsing rhythm, it was the midriff; the wail and clang of those recurring harmonies haunted, not the mind, but the yearning bowels of compassion. (71)

The appeal here, unlike that in OneState, is to the body, not the reason. The harmonies reach the listener’s gut, bypassing any emotional or spiritual faculties. At the end of the ceremony, the congregants form a conga line of sorts and the music culminates in a rendition of “Orgy-porgy” (73). The citizens of this world are prevented from thinking on their own or even learning how to think. Yet the goals of OneState and the Brave New World are the same: to create a happy populace through social stability. Anything that would disrupt that stability, such as truly inspiring or emotionally evocative music, must be eliminated. Yet that sort of “primitive” music does exist: on the Reservations. Bernard and Lenina visit a Reservation and, to Lenina’s horror, witness a mirror ceremony in which the John the Savage plays a major part. The dominant sound is that of the drums, and Lenina is not disturbed by them as the rhythm here is much like that of her home: Lenina liked the drums. Shutting her eyes she abandoned herself to their soft repeated thunder, allowed it to invade her consciousness more and more completely, till at last there was nothing left in the world but that one deep pulse of sound. It reminded her reassuringly of the synthetic noises made at Solidarity Services and Ford’s Day celebrations. “Orgy-porgy,” she whispered to herself. These drums beat out just the same rhythms. (94)

She finds the performance so familiar that she even comments to Bernard, “It reminds me of a lower-caste Community Sing” (94). But the performers quickly shift to a more violent ritual, and she becomes truly horrified by the spectacle, above all the crucifixion but also the out-of-control flute and drum accompaniment (94f.). Mindless musical rhythms thus create parallels between these two supposedly different worlds. Another parallel is established between Lenina and John the Savage: each sings when experiencing something like true happiness – or at least as true as their worlds permit. Thinking about John,

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Lenina finds herself singing, “Hug me till you drug me, honey”; meanwhile, the scent organ plays to a finale and is then replaced by another machine: In the synthetic music machine the sound-track roll began to unwind. It was a trio for hyper-violin, super-cello, and oboe-surrogate that now filled the air with its agreeable languor. Thirty or forty bars – and then, against this instrumental background, a much more than human voice began to warble; now throaty, now from the head, now hollow as a flute, now charged with yearning harmonics, it effortlessly passed from Gaspard Forster’s low record on the very frontiers of musical tone to a trilled bat-note high above the highest C to which (in 1770, at the Ducal opera of Parma, and to the astonishment of Mozart) Lucrezia Ajugari, alone of all the singers in history, once piercingly gave utterance. (134)

In the Brave New World, music exists to provoke sexual passion, not express the self or inspire a considered response. Later, when John has exiled himself at the lighthouse, he catches himself “singing, actually singing” (192). Given his martyr complex, he of course stops himself immediately, appalled by the idea of being happy. Whereas the music in Brave New World is intended to be a purely sensual distraction, in Nineteen Eighty-Four it serves a propagandistic and militaristic function. The media in Oceania, operated by the Ministry of Truth, provide its citizens with entertainment as well as ‘information,’ but the arts like the news exist solely to advance the regime’s ideological interests. Party members are obliged to listen to music that is anything but beautiful, and that music changes on a Ministry whim. For example, Winston recalls being in a pub with three officials who are later erased from the records: [F]or perhaps half a minute in all, something happened to the telescreens. The tune that they were playing changed, and the tone of the music changed too. There came into it – but it was something hard to describe. It was a peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering note: in his mind Winston called it a yellow note. And then a voice from the telescreen was singing: Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me: There lie they, and here lie we Under the spreading chestnut tree. (80)

The song foreshadows the betrayal of Rutherford and the others, and the lie that the regime will tell: the three men do not exist and never have. The Ministry serves not only Party members but also the Proles: “There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama and entertainment generally” including “sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator” (45f.). When Winston visits a prole neighbourhood, he hears a woman singing one of these songs, “It Was Only a Hopeless Fancy” (144). Thus, even “folk” or “popular” culture

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is designed and produced by those in power, not an expression of the people. Yet Winston, suffering from a somewhat romantic view of the proletariat, feels that “the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound” (145). The three alliances that dominate the world in 1984 hold on to power by being in a constant state of war with each other. To keep the public supportive of perpetual readiness for and the waging of war, Big Brother, and presumably his counterparts elsewhere, limit musical composition other than banal popular songs to militaristic tunes. At the beginning of the novel, while Winston is at home attempting to escape the eternally vigilant telescreen, we are told that it begins to broadcast “strident military music” (9). The Ministry of Truth creates the Hate Song, the theme song of Hate Week, and it is described as having a savage, barking rhythm which could not exactly be called music, but resembled the beating of a drum. Roared out by hundreds of voices to the tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying. The proles had taken a fancy to it, and in the midnight streets it competed with the still-popular “It Was Only a Hopeless Fancy.” (155)

As in Plato’s Republic, then, the music is created in such a way as to inspire martial feelings and unthinking loyalty to the regime in its time of endless crisis. Note that it is as devoid of thought, individual creativity, and “spirit” (as a Romantic might term it) as the music in OneState and the Brave New World. The regimes’ purposes may vary, but the kind of music they artificially produce is remarkably similar. The only time Winston is free, or so he believes, is when he is in the room above Charrington’s shop, and his sense of liberation is reflected in and symbolized by the song about the bells of St. Clement’s he hums “to an improvised tune” (104). He later recalls when the bells of St. Martin’s had chimed, “You Owe Me Three Farthings” (120). It is thus worth noting that Winston associates periods of freedom with music of the past or that he himself creates. Ultimately, however, he is not at all free; the regime has been watching his every move, through O’Brien, and more importantly Winston has essentially sold his soul to it. His supposed rebellion is half-hearted, and when faced with his greatest fear he readily betrays Julia. Like so many dystopian “heroes,” he is anything but heroic. At the end, he responds with pride and triumphant glee as “A shrill trumpetcall had pierced the air. It was the bulletin! Victory! It always meant victory when a trumpet-call preceded the news.” In his mind he is outside marching with his fellow Party members, singing the praises of Big Brother. In Fahrenheit 451, as in Brave New World, the music is intended to provide mindless entertainment. People like Montag’s wife Mildred put Seashells in their ears, thereby shutting out meaningful human contact and any sort of distressing thought. In Montag’s world, advertising jingles and

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shallow popular songs become the citizens’ sole musical culture. The Seashell isolates the individual, building a wall around her or him as the regime seeks to create a superficial kind of “happiness” based on an absence of disturbing feelings or ideas (11f.). At a number of points in the novel, the music is said to be all-encompassing but not quite transcendent. What comes out of the wall-sized television screens is anything but harmonious: A great thunderstorm of sound gushed from the walls. Music bombarded him at such an immense volume that his bones were almost shaken from their tendons; he felt his jaw vibrate, his eyes wobble in his head. He was a victim of concussion […]. The thunder faded. The music died. “There,” Mildred said. And it was indeed remarkable. Something had happened. […] You drowned in music and pure cacophony. (41)

This is hardly a utopian musical experience. Music is such an integral part of the themes and structure of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange that discussing its role in detail would be impossible in such limited space. What we might note is the role that two distinct musical types play in the novel, as they form contrasting motifs throughout the text. On the one hand is the banal popular/rock music played on the radio and at the record store and milk bars Alex and his friends frequent. Among the offerings are such tunes as “You Blister My Paint” (7) and Johnny Zhivago’s “Only Every Other Day” (24), and singers and groups like “Johnny Burnaway, Stash Kroh, The Mixers, Lay Quiet Awhile with Ed and Id Molotov” (36) and, for a younger audience, The Heaven Seventeen and Goggly Gogol (37). Such youth-centred music is also represented by the Elvis Presley mask that Pete wears during the gang’s home invasions (12). Alex feels nothing but disdain for the mindless, commercial trash that passes for modern music. On the other hand, a popular tune from the past provokes an even more violent response from Alex as he encounters an old man “howling away at the filthy songs of his fathers and going blerp blerp in between as though it might be a filthy old orchestra in his stinking rotten guts”; the song goes: “And I will go back to my darling, my darling, / When you, my darling, are gone” (14). In beating the old man, Alex reacts as much to his victim’s musical tastes as to his age and drunkenness, especially after the love song gives way to a patriotic ditty: “On dear dear land, I fought for thee / And brought thee peace and victory” (15). The other dominant musical form in the novel is classical music, which seems to be the only thing in his life that gives Alex unalloyed, innocent pleasure. In an early scene, Alex enjoys a moment of rapture, perhaps even a kind of spiritual transcendence, as he listens to some classical music:

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Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers. (29)

It is worth noting that the only time he expresses true anger at his torturers is when they deprive him of that one source of joy. The doctors trying to condition him to be socially acceptable – hardly good in a real sense – use the music of Beethoven, among Alex’s favourite composers, as one of their tools of mind control: “Grahzny gratchnies,” I said, like snivelling. Then I said: “I don’t mind about the ultra-violence and all that cal. I put up with that. But it’s not fair on the music. It’s not fair I should feel ill when I’m slooshying lovely Ludwig van and G. F. Handel and others. All that shows you’re an evil lot of bastards and I shall never forgive you, sods.” (91)

For Dr. Brosky and the others, nothing is sacred; everything, including the arts, can be used for utilitarian purposes. They manage to corrupt the one element in Alex’s life that has remained pure. In classic dystopias, then, music is not a cultural expression but a cultural imposition, one designed to fulfill political ends. On the other hand, it must be recognized that, as I have argued elsewhere (cf. Weiss 126ff.), dystopian regimes are not so much imposed from above as invited and welcomed from below. In times of crisis, people willingly surrender their freedom in order to gain security and ‘happiness’: that is, absence of pain and worry. The majority of citizens in OneState, the Brave New World, Oceania, the America of Fahrenheit 451, and the society Alex rebels against gladly exchange artistic freedom for stability and comfort. In these societies, there is more paranoia than harmony among the citizens, and there is certainly no harmony between the societies and the natural world. In fact, OneState even builds a wall to keep the natural world out, and at bay. But while dystopian music may not symbolize or express, or even contain, harmony, it does give voice to the sort of world that these people live in, are complicit in, and, to one degree or another, want.

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Works Cited Aldridge, Alexandra. The Scientific World View in Dystopia. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1984. Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward. Mineola: Dover, 1996. Booker, M. Keith. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism. Westport: Greenwood, 1994. —. Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide. Westport: Greenwood, 1994. Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Ballantine, 1967 Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Eurich, Nell. Science in Utopia: A Mighty Design. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967. Ferns, Chris. Narrating Utopia. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1999. Hudson, W. H. A Crystal Age. London: Dent, 1922. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955. Kumar, Krishan. Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. More, Thomas. Utopia. Mineolo: Dover, 1997. Morris, William. News from Nowhere. Mineola: Dover, 2004. Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder: Westview P, 2000. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin, 1989. Plato. The Republic. Trans. G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992. Walsh, Chad. From Utopia to Nightmare. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Weiss, Allan. “Offred’s Complicity and the Dystopian Tradition in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Studies in Canadian Literature 34.1 (2009): 120-41. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We. Trans. Clarence Brown. London: Penguin, 1993.

Facing the End of the World Margaret Atwood’s Post-apocalyptic Science Fiction ARIANNA CASALI On several occasions following the publication of Oryx and Crake (2003) almost twenty years later than the equally successful The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Margaret Atwood has responded to those scholars and readers who immediately categorized both works as science fiction novels by highlighting her view of the difference between science fiction and speculative fiction. Admitting to being an amateur SF writer, in a well-known essay published in PMLA in 2004, Atwood argued that both her novels belong to the latter category of speculative fiction, since, according to her analysis, these works of fiction simply depict a world where the events have no link with the fantastic but are, rather, the easily predictable results of mankind’s deeds today. She summarizes her standpoint as follows: I said I liked to make a distinction between science fiction proper – for me, this label denotes books with things in them we can’t yet do or begin to do, talking beings we can never meet, and places we can’t go – and speculative fiction, which employs the means already more or less to hand, and takes place on Planet Earth. I said I made this distinction, not out of meanness, but out of a wish to avoid false advertising: I didn’t want to raise people’s hopes. I did not wish to promise – for 1 instance – the talking squid of Saturn if I couldn’t deliver them. (“In Context” 513)

Here, Atwood seems reluctant to admit her ‘beautiful surrender’ to SF and seems to betray a certain degree of prejudice. It is as if she conceives of SF as a mass market entertainment product that would not be totally accepted in some exclusive circle of highbrow culture where speculative fiction seems to be accorded added value in terms of meaning and content. This is doubly amazing since “having had the nerve to win the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction” (ibid. 513), as she recalls in almost surprised tones in the same essay – The Handmaid’s Tale won the 1987 edition of what is universally considered one of the most prestigious recognitions in the SF field 1

In the same PMLA issue, Atwood adds: “some people use both terms interchangeably, and some employ one of them as an umbrella term, under which subgenres may cluster. Speculative fiction may be used as the tree, for which science fiction, science fiction fantasy, and fantasy are the branches” (ibid.).

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– Atwood did not in fact reject the accolade. On this topic, SF writer Ursula K. Le Guin has expressed herself quite clearly, showing an open (and ironic) opposition to Atwood’s viewpoint that she basically labels as a limited definition of SF itself. In a well-known review of Atwood’s latest novel, The Year of the Flood, Le Guin’s words from The Guardian, which deserve to be underlined, sound quite clear: To my mind, The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake and now The Year of the Flood all exemplify one of the things science fiction does, which is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that’s half prediction, half satire. [… Atwood] says that everything that happens in her novels is possible and may even have already happened, so they can’t be science fiction, which is “fiction in which things happen that are not possible today”. This arbitrarily restrictive definition seems designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders. She doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto.

Moreover, literary ghetto aside, I would also add that there are monsters indeed in Atwood’s three post-apocalyptic SF novels referred to here. As a matter of fact, in Oryx and Crake as well as in its more recent sequel The Year of the Flood – maybe better defined as a parallel narrative – the hybrid animals and creatures depicted, the pigoons, rakunks, liobams, and green rabbits, among others, together with the Unbabies referred to in The Handmaid’s Tale – the former the monstrous results of genetic manipulation and the latter of environmental contamination – are undoubtedly more realistic and plausible than “the talking squid of Saturn”, but equally disturbing at the same time. According to Atwood, the presence of believable monsters seems to be the key element differentiating speculative fiction from SF, thus hinting that the former is an intellectually higher literary genre just because of its proven scientific plausibility. By arguing that speculative fiction comes from our real world and today’s scientific and technological knowledge, Atwood actually gives the impression that her real aim is to avoid being associated with a narrative aiming at the readers’ sheer (or superficial) entertainment, something she betrays an evident contempt for, thus denying the added intellectual value of SF itself regardless the presence of fantastic – or realistic – monsters whatsoever. Dealing with SF, its messages and contents from a literary theory perspective, Fredric Jameson’s brilliant intuition revealed to the scholarly world in the early 1980s has undoubtedly helped to clarify a number of issues never clearly faced before in this field. According to Jameson, SF has distinguished itself as a literary mode particularly suitable for calling our present into question by disguising it in the form of a past as seen from an imagined future or futuristic viewpoint. Fredric Jameson’s powerful argument is clear and convincing indeed and provides a basic reference point for all SF critical studies:

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It is this present moment […] that upon our return from the imaginary constructs of SF is offered to us in the form of some future world’s remote past, as if posthumous and as though collectively remembered. […I]ts deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future. (“Progress” 288f.)

The added value of SF as a critical literary tool has therefore been clearly stated, even though Jameson’s emphatic view of our incapacity to visualize and represent our own future has undoubtedly been contradicted in recent times. In point of fact, as Atwood has often stressed, the depicted vision of a predictable future holds the very meaning of speculative – as well as, we argue, of science fiction – texts, in light of the awareness both of humankind’s creative as well as its destructive power. In very specific ways, dystopian – particularly post-apocalyptic – narratives do indeed demonstrate our ability to imagine, visualize and describe, perhaps more impressively than other forms of SF, an empirically and realistically plausible future world. In connection with this viewpoint, in a recent article on Atwood’s latest novel The Year of the Flood written for the London Review of Books, Fredric Jameson himself has revised his previous assumption to encompass the evident link between the post-apocalyptic science fictional world and actuality in the very perspective of a predictable future. He therefore observes that at this moment of time, all fiction approaches science fiction, as the future, the various futures, begin to dissolve into ever more porous actuality: and the end of the world seems to approach more rapidly than the unified world market itself. (n. pag.)

On this point, in her review of Oryx and Crake, significantly entitled “Bioperversity”, Lorrie Moore has commented on the main features of dystopian fiction, observing that, from her viewpoint a dystopian novel is not intended as a literal forecast, or even necessarily as a logical extension of our current world. It is simply, and not so simply, a bad dream of our present time, an exquisitely designed horror show in which things are changed from what we do know to a dream version of what we don’t. (n.pag.)

Nevertheless, whether it depicts a bad dream or does not, the narrative in Oryx and Crake is undoubtedly deeply focused on the (predictable, plausible and possible) dangers of genetic engineering and mirrors its author’s evident concern for this specific issue. In the first pages of her novel, Atwood deliberately sets the disquieting scene of a society where, through a scientific organization called OrganInc, a number of scientists practice indiscriminate genetic manipulation on human beings and animals, pursuing a so called “Operation Immortality” in the insane attempt to overcome the limits of death and disease. Genographers – among them the protagonist’s father – transplant experts and microbiologists are all involved in the “pigoon project”, which aims at growing organs for transplant to humans. The tech-

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nical description of the whole project, although slightly tinged with black humour, is deeply disquieting and suggests an open condemnation on the author’s part: Pigoon was only a nickname: the official name was sus multiorganifer. But pigoon was what everyone said. Sometimes they said Organ-Oink Farm, but not as often. It wasn’t really a farm anyway, not like the farms in pictures. The goal of the pigoon project was to grow an assortment of foolproof human-tissue organs in a transgenic knockout pig host […]. A rapid maturity gene was spliced in so the pigoon kidneys and livers and hearts would be ready sooner, and now they were perfecting a pigoon that could grow five or six kidneys at a time. Such a host animal could be reaped of its extra kidneys; then […] it could keep on living and grow more organs. (22)

Similarly, the Unbabies in The Handmaid’s Tale, the malformed newborns disturbingly described by Atwood, actually represent and underline her apprehension and critical views on the issue of environmental pollution and its devastating effects on human beings. Waiting for one of the handmaids to deliver a new baby, in a state of deep anxiety, Offred, the protagonist and narrator, describes in detail a landscape of destruction where sterility, contamination and genetic deformity are the rule: What will Ofwarren give birth to? A baby, as we all hope? Or something else, an Unbaby, with a pinhead or a snout like a dog’s, or two bodies, or a hole in its heart or no arms, or webbed hands and feet? There’s no telling. […] The chances are one in four, we learned at the Centre. The air got too full, once, of chemicals, rays, radiation, the water swarmed with toxic molecules, all of that takes years to clean up, and meanwhile they creep into your body, camp out in your own fatty cells. (134)

In all cases, regardless of the predictability of these future scenarios, Atwood’s depictions of such (science fiction) worlds to come are but the bleak and pessimistic reflection of her own view of a degenerating humankind. Moreover, putting alleged prejudices against SF aside, her explanation of the (actually very subtle) differences between SF itself and speculative fiction has certainly contributed to opening a new and productive discussion on the topic. Yet it has to be once more emphasized that both prediction and speculation about the future do belong by definition to SF, which is also a way to discuss and comment on our present times – Fredric Jameson docet – and has therefore given Atwood the chance to depict a future world coming from a debatable past, namely our own present. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the barrenness of the new world, seen as the consequence of an irresponsible past and apparently unavoidable choices, is vividly recalled by Offred, the narrator who, once taken with other handmaids inside a mysterious building, supposedly a former school, is faced with the depiction of the dreadful situation on planet Earth, a world where progressive, irreversible depopulation is the symbol of apocalypse: Pulled down in front of the blackboard […] is a graph, showing the birth rate per thousand, for years and years: a slippery slope, down past the zero line of replace-

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ment, and down and down. Of course, some women believed there would be no future, they thought the world would explode. That was the excuse they used, says Aunt Lydia. They said there was no sense in breeding. […] On the top of my desk there are initials, carved into the wood, and dates. […] There are no dates after the mid-eighties. This must have been one of the schools that was closed down then, for lack of children. (123)

Weighing into the never-ending discussion on the very nature of SF in a 2009 article about the best dystopian novels, Michael Moorcock has also commented on Atwood’s stance against SF itself: “Margaret Atwood denies that The Handmaid’s Tale is science fiction, I suspect because, like several others, she has unconsciously reinvented certain familiar SF tropes to serve her purpose” (n. pag.). On this occasion, Moorcock underlines his own reading of The Handmaid’s Tale, a reading that I partially share. According to the British writer, the novel is but a feminist dystopia “in which fertile women become sex slaves in a male-run, pseudo-Christian US now known as Gilead. It’s almost as original and powerful as Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, which has a strong dystopian element but was published as SF and therefore marginalised by the general public.” In certain cases, the SF label in its negative meaning seems a very hard obstacle to overcome. Moreover, Moorcock’s article is just one more instance of a widespread reading of Atwood’s novel in terms of a feminist critical view of a Christian, misogynistic future society, and it has to be pointed out that most critics have decoded the novel from such a perspective. What seems surprising, however, is the fact that all analyses have missed in The Handmaid’s Tale the astounding similarities of Gilead itself with today’s fundamentalist Muslim world2, an impressive number of features that also make of the novel itself, for various evident reasons, an even stronger metaphor – or a prophecy – of Taliban society over ten years in advance of the actual historical events. The novel was in fact published in 1985, while the Taliban took control of the Afghan government in 1996 following the capture of the capital city Kabul. The establishment of a fundamentalist Sharia regime that deleted human – particularly women’s – rights from Afghanistan, plunging it into a culturally and socially backward era, seems to be recalled quite clearly in Atwood’s novel, where fertile women are considered and treated as mere child bearers. Well aware of that, frequently and throughout the narrative, the protagonist states: “I am a national resource” (75), “We are containers, it’s only the insides of our bodies that are important” (107). Obviously, as 2

The only exception to this interpretative trend seems to be an article by Joan Smith, an excellent review of Oryx and Crake, in which the author thematically links Atwood’s SF novels and rightly emphasizes The Handmaid’s Tale as follows: “That novel described a world in which women were reduced to the status of breeders and denied the most basic human rights, a prophecy that came true not in the West, where Atwood set it, but in Afghanistan under the Taliban” (15).

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is typical in a misogynist society, sterility is a charge levelled against women only, as Offred emphasizes tirelessly: “Sterile. There is no such thing as a sterile man any more, not officially. There are only women who are barren, that’s the law” (71). And again: “It’s only women who can’t, who remain stubbornly closed, damaged, defective” (215). In Gilead, women are kept in captivity in empty and anonymous bedrooms and never allowed to go out on their own except under the escort of another handmaid. They no longer even have names of their own3 – as the main character reveals “My name isn’t Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it’s forbidden.” (45) – and they are also forbidden to read and write. Furthermore, a specific kind of clothing is also compulsory: a long, red cloak dress worn together with a kind of nun’s hat with white wings, a kind of horse blinkers, a limiting frame to the wearers’ vision, an outfit easily recalling the main features of the Taliban burkha. In reference to clothing and rules, needless to say, the comparison between the world before and during the new regime in Gilead mirrors and emphasizes the frequently underlined recurrent Muslim beliefs on female freedom: Women were not protected then. […] Now we walk along the same street, in red pairs, and no man shouts obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us. No one whistles. There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it. (34)

On another occasion, while observing some women from a group of tourists, presumably from Japan, Offred comments on their outfits, suggesting the evident awareness of a clash of civilizations: It’s been a long time since I’ve seen skirts that short on women. […] The women teeter on their spiked feet as if on stilts; their backs arch at their waists thrusting the buttocks out. Their heads are uncovered and their hair is too exposed, in all its darkness and sexuality. […] We are fascinated, but also repelled. They seem undressed. It has taken so little time to change our minds, about things like these. Then I think: I used to dress like that. That was freedom. Westernized, they used to call it. (38)

The Handmaid’s Tale is Atwood’s first dystopia that, even though apparently different from the one emphasized in the subsequent SF novels, inaugurates a particularly productive trend for the Canadian writer in the postapocalyptic mode. The evident dissimilarities mirror the different times the novels were written and published, since, as is quite clear, every decade shows its own concerns and obsessions and, therefore, its own apoca3

As an example, two of the handmaids are called Ofwarren and Ofglen, meaning that they are “of Warren” and “of Glen”, a way to state the fact that they actually belong to men named Warren and Glen. Following the same criterion, the protagonist’s name is Offred.

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lypse. As a matter of fact, a few years later, by depicting a number of genetically modified creatures, the disquieting beings populating Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, Atwood shows an evident preoccupation with a new burning issue, the possible dangerous results of uncontrolled genetic engineering if carried out by irresponsible human beings in an eagerness to control life – and death – on Earth by playing God, and thus transgressing the bounds of bioethics. In such a framework, dystopia cannot but prevail. In a column published last year in the British newspaper The Guardian, while listing a number of literary works4 related to the issue of ecological concern and awareness, John Mullan makes a few comments focusing on the very idea of “thinking green”. Among the works of fiction, he refers to Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood at the end of his list: last, but of course, not least. Putting aside any ironic comment that could be made in reference to the obsession of a great number of newspapers and journalists for listing and categorizing literature, Mullan’s general observation on dystopian fiction could not be more appropriate:

To make us green, novelists have invented dystopias. Atwood’s is one of the most recent and most powerful, and describes the world after a catastrophe wrought by genetic engineering and global warming. Our dreams of progress produce apocalypse. (n.pag.)

Undoubtedly, in order to open the reader’s mind on the pressing issues of environmental pollution, the uncontrolled development of science and technology and their long-term consequences, Atwood has chosen to tell shocking tales of apocalypse and destruction with peerless literary skills. The current controversy on the limits of scientific and technological progress has also to be set in the wider context of both the impact of modern biology on our understanding of human relations and politics, and the concern for increasing political controls on science and technology themselves. As a matter of fact, Atwood’s latest post-apocalyptic novels clearly echo a contemporary issue that has recently been treated with impressive insight by Francis Fukuyama, an American thinker who, on several occasions, has widely analyzed and discussed the consequences of the development of modern sciences on human society. In his recent book, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002), dealing with the issue of genetic engineering and biotechnology5, Fukuyama un4

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Besides the already cited Oryx and Crake, and mixing poetry, autobiographical works and fiction, John Mullan’s bizarre list specifically includes the following: “The Deserted Village” by Oliver Goldsmith, A Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne by Gilbert White, “The Prelude” by William Wordsworth, “The Mores” by John Clare, The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, “This Compost” by Walt Whitman, “Binsey Poplars” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walden by Henry David Thoreau, Coming Up for Air by George Orwell. It is interesting and definitely worth noting that Fukuyama himself starts his analysis of scientific and technological evolution by discussing the plots and themes as dealt with in

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derlines the danger for human nature of being altered to the point of plunging the whole of humankind into a post-human era, since, as he rightly stresses, scientists are now not only able to simply alter the genetic structure of man. Furthermore, human behaviour has already begun to be modified not only by scientists’ modern research on its genetic basis but also, through neuropharmacology, by means of psychotropic drugs. According to Fukuyama, by causing unnatural modification of human behaviour, a direct consequence of this latest scientific development is the irreparable loss of human dignity, to the detriment of the very essence of not only human nature but also universal human rights. In reflections focused inevitably on the events of 9/11, Fukuyama again argues that nowadays both technology and science represent our civilization’s key vulnerabilities. Airlines, skyscrapers, and biology labs – all symbols of modernity – were turned into weapons in a stroke of malign ingenuity. […T]he emergence of bioterrorism as a live threat points to the need […] for greater political control over the uses of science and technology. (xii-xiii )

As Atwood stated in a public conversation with Martin Halliwell, conducted in 2003 at the University of Leicester, “Science isn’t the bad thing; the bad thing is making all science completely commercial, and with no watchdogs. […] You are in a world in which ‘Buy a scientist’ is not out of the question at all.” (Halliwell 260f.) Although equally concerned for the future development of science and technology, she does not seem wholly to share Fukuyama’s perspective on the issue of political control, since her depictions of political power seem even more worrying than the lack of control itself. As a matter of fact, besides Atwood’s evident concern about the misuse and abuse of science and technology and about science’s growing uncontrolled power, it is quite evident that her latest post-apocalyptic novels also emphasize a disquieting vision of the other side of the coin. By depicting a human society in which the control over science and technology is not at all a means to protect humankind from terrorism, she therefore exposes the dangers inherent in the misuse of political power. In her novels, the maintenance of law and order and the protective measures implemented by the government actually conceal a totally different aim, namely the definite will to subdue and manipulate humankind in all possible ways. It is no accident that in Atwood’s futuristic depictions political power is wielded by private corporations that have succeeded in relentlessly replacing all two SF novels known worldwide, namely George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). He explains the reasons for his choice thus: “The two books were far more prescient than anyone realized at the time, because they were centred on two different technologies that would in fact emerge and shape the world over the next two generations. The novel 1984 [sic] was about what we now call the information technology […]. Brave New World, by contrast, was about the other big technological revolution about to take place, that of biotechnology” (3f.).

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forms of traditional government through the progressive outsourcing of social services to private contractors. As a matter of fact, the author seems to clearly point out the dangerous limits of politics by suggesting that political power itself is very far from ensuring an adequate control over science and its development. In light of the increasing influence of lobbies of various kinds – linked by conflicts of interest – and because of the impact of private corporations over politics and public life, no real protection can be granted. Whereas in The Handmaid’s Tale the theocracy dominating Gilead – the former United States of America – is depicted as a quite simple form of male dictatorship shrouded in a deceitful aura of religiosity,6 the political system as well as the type of government focused on in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood only few years later, are of a different kind. By involving a deeper discussion on the issue of the prospective evolution of political power in our age, Atwood depicts a modern capitalistic society and its economic system that seem to be on the brink of collapse. Nevertheless, Oryx and Crake’s criticism is perhaps less political and more specifically scienceoriented, since it is mainly focused on the description of a genetically engineered future. Snowman, the male protagonist whose real name, Jimmy, belongs now to the past, shows a vision of politics and power that is quite limited. The reason for this restricted view is that he used to actually live inside and within the fenced Compounds assigned by the regime to the privileged classes, and thus far from the violence-dominated Pleeblands, insalubrious and dangerous areas populated by the poor and society’s outcasts. Therefore, as Frederic Jameson argues on this very topic: Oryx gave us the view of this system from the inside and as if it were from above, even though there really does seem to be no oligarchic ruling elite nor any totalitarian party or dictatorship on the old-fashioned modernist dystopian model; The Year of the Flood gives us the view from below – always, as we well know, the most reliable vantage point from which to gauge and map a society. (“Then you are them” n.pag.)

From the privileged perspective thus underlined by Jameson, therefore, The Year of the Flood immediately appears as more focused on political criticism than its parallel narrative, since it deals more deeply with the depiction of the distinctive features of an oligarchic political model shaping and manipulating society. Ruling a world on the edge of extinction, this oligarchic system is equally doomed to disappear because of a deadly pandemic – the Waterless Flood, bound to wipe out the whole of humankind together with its inhuman political superstructures – but until that moment its control on the social and political system is absolute. Everything is run by a private corporation, CorpSeCorps, that keeps all citizens under control, 6

This seems to be the reason why the novel has been frequently labelled by literary critics and reviewers in almost dismissive terms as no more than a feminist dystopia.

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while supplying them with all they need from food (SecretBurgers, a futuristic franchise recalling MacDonald’s) to sex and wellness (AnooYoo spas provide the achievement of youth and beauty at all costs and HelthWyzer, a pharmaceutical company, produces the best drugs and prescriptions for the élite). Law and order are also strictly maintained through the so called Painball Arena, a facility where criminals, split into two teams, fighting for life and freedom, kill each other to survive, live on TV. This futuristic society is obviously very far from being fair and perfect, hiding as it does its real face of a manipulative totalitarian regime of increasing social inequality, indiscriminate environmental exploitation, and a resulting progressive breakdown of society.7 Nevertheless, in The Year of the Flood, the political power embodied by the CorpSeCorps is disputed and disapproved by small groups of violent people grouping together in gangs and living on the edge of society, but also by a small community of religious environmentalists, God’s Gardeners, silent but active opponents of the dominant way of life. Guided by Adam One, their ecological awareness and opposition to the misuse of science are summarized in the following words: “all those scientists and business people Adam One said were destroying old Species and making new ones and ruining the world” (146). Echoing the striking post-apocalyptic depictions contained in Atwood’s as well as in many other writers’ SF works, nowadays we are undoubtedly already experiencing the devastating effects and consequences of the uncontrolled exploitation of our planet and the catastrophic effects of pollution. Global warming and climate change, as well as the progressive drop in birth rates and the extinction of a number of animal species are just a few of the alarmingly common manifestations of these in our age. Moreover, we also live with the disquieting awareness that we actually created and have at our disposal a number of weapons of mass destruction that could easily lead the entire world to self-annihilation. Today’s disquieting environmental concerns are therefore effectively depicted in Atwood’s novels, where the author gives voice, as is clearly evident, to the ecologist (not too much) hidden in herself and to the worries that haunt our present times: Every novel begins with a what if, and then sets forth its axioms. The what if of Oryx and Crake is simply, What if we continue down the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who’s got the will to stop us? […] ‘Perfect storms’ occur when a number of different forces coincide. So it is with the storms of human history. As novelist Alistair MacLeod has said, writers write 7

The Year of the Flood reveals a number of striking similarities with The Running Man, a 1982 SF novel by Stephen King, who published the book under the name Richard Bachman. An analogous totalitarian dystopia, The Running Man depicts the break-up of society where an economy in ruin and the rise of violence stand out against the backdrop of a severely polluted environment. “The Running Man” is also the name of a TV game show in which competitors fight to stay alive, just like in Atwood’s Painball Arena.

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about what worries them, and the world of Oryx and Crake is what worries me right now. It’s not a question of our inventions – all human inventions are merely tools – but of what might be done with them; for no matter how high the tech, homo sapiens sapiens remains at heart what he’s been for tens of thousands of years – the same emotions, the same preoccupations. (Atwood, “Perfect Storms” n.pag., emphasis in original)

Although among the very latest post-apocalyptic SF works, Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood are not alone, since another writer has recently dealt with a similar topic, namely American author Cormac McCarthy in his novel The Road 8. Published in 2006, Pulitzer prize winner the following year, and thus chronologically in between Atwood’s latest narratives, McCarthy’s novel voices similar environmental concerns, thus following today’s recurrent trend, even though, in his novel McCarthy never clearly depicts or faces the exact causes of Earth’s tragic destruction and depopulation, hinting only vaguely at some kind of environmental disaster, constantly focusing his novel on the tangible results of it on a barely recognizable natural landscape: “The cold and the silences. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void.” (11) And again, in more intensely cruel details: “The weather lifted and the cold and they came last into the broad lowland valley, the pieced farmland still visible, everything dead to the root along the barren bottomlands.” (21) From this perspective, Atwood has undoubtedly been bolder and braver in focusing on the issue of environmental damage and of political criticism of the same with greater openness. She actually names causes and effects, leaving no space for imagination or further speculation, and thus making of her post-apocalyptic SF literature, from The Handmaid’s Tale to Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, an open condemnation of plausible events and real dramatic circumstances leading to a possible future environmental catastrophe. The depiction of apocalyptic events, expressing a certain human need to destroy the world in the attempt to construct it anew, has been a definite literary trend since the early 1880s. Apocalypse and the end of the world as we know it have always been a challenging area for many SF writers. Since the publication in 1805 of the seminal novel Le dernier homme by Jean-Baptiste François Xavier Cousin de Grainville, every decade has had, and still has, its own post-apocalyptic literature representing an autonomous SF tradition and mode. Far from simply being an escape from reality and a form of literary entertainment, SF in general has always been strongly root8

I have recently analysed McCarthy’s novel The Road from the post-apocalyptic perspective in a paper presented at the ICFA 2010. My main point is that post-apocalyptic SF has established itself as an autonomous SF mode influenced by the specific political and social concerns of every age.

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ed in our historical era, as Frederic Jameson has rightly argued, and postapocalyptic SF is no exception, since its ‘end of the world’ setting is actually the literary expression of the fears and concerns dominating definite moments in history. The recurrence of topics such as deadly pandemics as well as natural and nuclear disasters, genetic experimentation and technological and scientific development, right through to today’s environmental issues and ecological concerns, give undeniable evidence of the strong connection between SF itself and the current events of every age. What makes post-apocalyptic SF a different and autonomous writing mode compared to other science fictions is the bleak awareness that the depicted future is not completely unknowable. As a matter of fact, de Grainville’s Le dernier homme, showing as it does the strong influence of a Biblical text, in this case of The Book of Revelation – also known as The Apocalypse of John – gave rise to a new kind of SF literature that has inspired a great number of writers ever since, from Mary Shelley9 on, thus linking transversely SF literature from basically every country and language. Atwood’s SF novels follow a similar pattern, particularly in their focusing on the very idea of lastness, which is strongly emphasized in both Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. Among Atwood’s post-apocalyptic works, The Year of the Flood is the one that particularly stresses, with clear evidence, the issue of the disintegration of a society that, having reached an unbearable level of moral decay and corruption, deserves to be destroyed to be able to start anew, a topic that has exerted an irresistible attraction on many other writers of apocalyptic scenarios. In Atwood’s latest novel, a ravaging, deadly pandemic acts as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Death, killing most of the population of the planet: “A massive die-off of the human race was impending, due to over-population and wickedness.” (Year of the Flood, 47) This is certainly a recurring theme in post-apocalyptic SF that, because of this distinctive feature, can be defined in terms of “literature of crisis, and specifically as science fiction of crisis”10. Having the world reach its negative limits, as such an ideological, political or social crisis implies, the need for a new beginning affirms itself in the science fictional form of apocalypse. In The Year of the Flood, Atwood effectively verbalizes this impending need for global destruction in a language as violent and threatening as a capital sentence:

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Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man, published in 1826, is evidently indebted to Le Dernier Homme, and not only because of the similarities in the title, since it also deals with the ideas of lastness and deadly pandemic against the backdrop of a corrupted human world deserving of destruction. This is my definition of post-apocalyptic SF as expressed in my paper on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

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What is it about our own Species that leaves us so vulnerable to the impulse of violence? Why are we so addicted to the shedding of blood? Whenever we are tempted to become puffed up, and to see ourselves as superior to all other Animals, we should reflect on our own brutal history. Take comfort in the thought that this history will soon be swept away by the Waterless Flood. Nothing will remain of the Exfernal World but decaying wood and rusting metal implements […]. For all works of Man will be as words written on water. (312)

The Exfernal World, as Atwood names it, both external – because unacceptable to our own eyes and difficult to ideologically metabolize – and infernal, in its degeneration and misery, deserves to be annihilated. Similarly, from the beginning of the 19th century to the present time, every decade in history has produced its own post-apocalyptic SF based on and motivated by an age of crisis calling into question socio-political as well as ideological systems.11 The post-apocalyptic science fictional setting materially embodies a feared near future of devastation of our own and it clearly proves, as Teresa Heffernan argues, “both the cultural anxiety that we may have reached, like the dinosaurs, the end of our species and the cultural arrogance, common to apocalyptic narratives, that we live at a unique moment in history” (151). Again, a significant passage in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood underlines this very awareness in clear terms: “we know that Comets and nuclear holocausts are among the possible tomorrows, not to mention the Waterless Flood, that we fear looms ever nearer.” (234) The Waterless Flood is the meaningful name, holding strong biblical echoes, given to a devastating pandemic – a man-generated event, as is frequently suggested throughout the plot – that it is feared will take place in a near future. As a matter of fact, at the beginning of the narrative the irreparable event has already taken place, and the reconstruction of the past by the survivors, Toby and Ren, two young women, is achieved by means of flashbacks rebuilding the story from its ending. In order to reinforce the deep awareness expressed in her novel, in the writer’s customary acknowledgement at the end of the book, Atwood is even more assertive and stresses that “The Year of the Flood is fiction, but the general tendencies and many of the details in it are alarmingly close to fact” (433). The author, who had already made use of a post-apocalyptic setting in The Handmaid’s Tale, dating back to 1985, has then kept following the post-apocalyptic trend with the 2003 novel Oryx and Crake – nothing more than a kind of 11

It has to be pointed out that post-apocalyptic SF is a mode widely crossing and linking American as well as British literature. From its beginnings to our present times, George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949), Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956), J. G. Ballard’s 1960s disturbing novels and short stories, Terry Nation’s Survivors novel, following a well-known BBC TV series in the early 1970s, Stephen King’s The Stand, Margaret Atwood’s already cited works, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, are only a few outstanding examples of the mode itself.

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parallel narrative of The Year of the Flood itself – thus showing an intentional trait d’union among her science fictional works. Criticism of political totalitarianism – in its various forms – exposure of the aberration in the development and application of genetic alteration techniques and technology, as well as environmental concerns all dominate Atwood’s post-apocalyptic novels, which stand out among similar science fictions because of their peerless complexity in structure and richness in cultural references. Nevertheless, in spite of the differences in tone, style and content, it is important to stress that Atwood is linked to other SF writers in the shared emphasis on the post-apocalyptic perspective, and in the mutual contribution in making post-apocalyptic SF an autonomous and definite science fictional literary current and mode. Notwithstanding her position on SF, Atwood has frequently admitted to having found some inspiration in actual SF works such as Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, whose influence seems to have played an important role in the development of The Handmaid’s Tale.12 The key elements characterizing post-apocalyptic SF are all present in the novels of Atwood, who has surrendered, like many other writers, to the fascination of dystopian fiction, an impressively creative vehicle for satire and criticism. The bleak depiction of outer wastelands and inner feelings of loneliness and alienation belonging to ‘the last man on Earth’, the very last human being facing the world’s emptiness and ruination, is equally present in Atwood’s SF novels. Just as it is a typical recurrent theme in all post-apocalyptic SF, so is this fascinating and at the same time repulsive feature a constant element characterizing Atwood’s grim narratives. The devastating image of post-apocalyptic lastness is beyond despair both in The Handmaid’s Tale – where Offred’s deep and devastating loneliness is physically palpable – and in Oryx and Crake, where the grim depiction of the protagonist himself, Snowman, waking up alone in a tree, enveloped in rugs, last human being in a world of genetically modified creatures, is heartbreaking. Again, at the very beginning of The Year of the Flood, Toby, one of the two main characters who has survived “the Waterless Flood”13, also describes her painful thoughts about her unbearable loneliness and her desperate hope of not being alone: “There must be someone else left, though; she can’t be the only one on the planet. There must be others” (5). In the apocalyptic narrative, the presence of a last man, or woman, is the essential feature because humankind needs a witness and a final story12

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In an essay Atwood, recalling her interest for SF literature when she was a young student, also lists a number of well-known SF novels that have made the history of SF itself. Among the writers she cites are Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and others (cf. “In Context” 514). An imaginative name to describe the overall effect of a mysterious deadly virus that has wiped out (almost, as the reader will find out at the end of the novel) all of humankind.

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teller dealing with what has been lost. As Raffaella Baccolini argues, “critical dystopias show that a culture of memory – one that moves from the individual to the collective – is part of a social project of hope” (521). On this point she also emphasizes that in recent dystopian fiction a strong persistence of hope is indeed a tangible factor. As the open and ambiguous ending of Atwood’s novels also suggest, the last witness also bears a necessary hope for the future, because since we have the awareness that the worst in our world deserves destruction, we also know that the best in it, or at least the memory of it, needs to be preserved. Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. London: Vintage Books, 1996. —. Oryx and Crake. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. —. “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake ‘In Context.’” PMLA 119.3 (2004): 513-17. —. “Perfect Storms: Writing Oryx and Crake.” Jan 2003. Web. 3 Nov 2010. . —. The Year of the Flood. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Baccolini, Raffaella. “The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction.” PMLA 119.3 (2004): 518-21. Casali, Arianna. “American post-apocalypse in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: the struggle of the post-apocalyptic mode in science fiction literature and theory.” ICFA 31st International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts, Marriott Orlando Airport Hotel, March 17-21, 2010, Paper presentation. Fukuyama, Francis. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. London: Profile, 2003. Halliwell, Martin. “Awaiting the Perfect Storm.” Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood. Ed. Earl G. Ingersoll. Princeton: Ontario Review, 2006. Heffernan, Teresa. Post-apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth Century Novel. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008. Jameson, Fredric. “Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2007. —. “Then You Are Them.” London Review of Books. 10 Sep 2009. Web. 10 Nov 2010. . King, Stephen (writing as Richard Bachman). The Running Man. New York: Signet, 1982.

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Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood.” The Guardian. 29 Aug 2009. Web. 10 Oct 2010. . McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage, 2006. Moorcock, Michael. “The Best Dystopias.” The Guardian. 22 Jan 2009. Web. 02 Aug 2010. . Moore, Lorrie. “Bioperversity: Margaret Atwood’s genetically engineered nightmare.” The New Yorker. 19 May 2003. Web. 01 Sep 2010. . Mullan, John. “Ten of the Best Green Stories in Literature.” The Guardian. 26 Sep 2009. Web. 2 Aug 2010. . Smith, Joan. “And pigs might fly…” The Observer. 11 May 2003. Web. 02 Aug 2010. .

Is the Scientist Still Mad? Renegotiations of a Cultural Stereotype in New Hard Science Fiction SARAH HERBE In May 2010, one could not read any newspaper, magazine or online journal without encountering headlines or comments such as “Dr Frankenstein or medical revolutionary?” (van Hemert), “‘Maverick Frankenstein scientist’ Dr Craig Venter creates ‘artificial life’“ (Metro.co.uk), or, in the Germanspeaking part of the world, “Ist der Mann ein Konkurrent Gottes? Ein neuer Frankenstein?” (Briseno). These were just a few of the reactions prompted by the announcement that the American geneticist Craig Venter and his team had managed to create synthetic life. If Venter was not called Frankenstein in the headings of reports on his research, this usually followed in the article itself, in the user comments in online newspapers or magazines, or in letters to the editor in print media. Often, Frankenstein would be combined with, or substituted by, “mad scientist”, as in “Has our ‘mad scientist’ really created a Frankenstein’s monster?’“ (O’Toole). The media coverage on Venter’s achievements was one of the many situations in which Frankenstein, one of the prototypical mad scientists, was drawn upon in mass media or popular culture in order to grasp new, and potentially threatening, developments in science. Jon Turney, amongst others, has shown in Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Genetics and Popular Culture that throughout the 20th century, mentioning Frankenstein has served as a handy shortcut in public and popular discussion of scientific discoveries, especially in the field of biotechnology. According to Glen Scott Allen, “the name immediately summons up […] a complex of attitudes about everything from technological arrogance to parental responsibility, from hope in scientific achievement to fear of the consequences that achievement will bring, from fascination with exceptional genius to fear of transgressive hubris” (4). Similarly, referring to someone as a “mad scientist” renders any further detailed descriptions superfluous: It has been shown that, over the past two hundred years, a more or less commonly shared understanding of the “mad scientist” has developed as a reaction

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towards new, potentially alien and threatening developments in science. Since there is some recent critical work on the development and popular representation of the stereotype of the mad scientist, and especially the myth of Frankenstein as a popular cultural phenomenon,1 suffice it to say that many attempts to grasp what is associated with the concept list as central characteristics, “that knowledge must be prized above any human virtues and wealth” (Ringel 67) by such an individual and that mad scientists work in isolation, a feature Allen singles out as central to the constitution of the scientist’s “madness”. The fact that a fictional character is, almost two hundred years after its first appearance in print, used in 21st century discussions of biotechnology proves the idea that images created in science fiction (if we follow Brian Aldiss in his argument that Frankenstein was the first science fiction novel)2 have the power to shape popular images of scientists, and our perception of them and their work, an idea shared by Roslynn D. Haynes. She points out that [p]opular belief and behavior are influenced more by images than by demonstrable facts. Very few actual scientists […] have contributed to the popular image of “the scientist.” On the other hand, fictional characters such as Dr. Faustus, Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Caligari, and Dr. Strangelove have been extremely influential in the evolution of the unattractive stereotypes that continue in uneasy coexistence with the manifest dependence of Western society on its scientists. (1)

In 1975, the journalist Horace Freeland Judson even based his categorisation of scientists, outlined in his article “Fearful of Science”, in which he discusses the ethical problems and dangers of the emergent biotechnology and the role of geneticists, on examples of scientists taken from works of fiction. José van Dijck, in Imagenation: Popular Images of Genetics, generally starts from the assumption that there is “reciprocity between cultural beliefs about science and the popular representation of the scientist”.3 Gregory E. Pence in Who’s Afraid of Human Cloning? more specifically points to the negative influence science fiction characters can have on the public image of scientists: [Pence] contends that the negative image of scientists from the 1970s onwards derived from sf, a genre which systematically updates ‘our fear and distrust of sci1 2 3

See e.g. Allen; Haynes; Schmeink; Skal. In Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction Aldiss argues that Frankenstein is the first science fiction novel because of its innovative aspect, its emphasis on modern experiment and because it anticipated the methods of H.G. Wells (21-9). van Dijck further argues: “Images of geneticists also inevitably elicit archetypal images of scientists; these stereotypes are not created in a single article or account, but no story is uninfluenced by the typical images locked away in our collective consciousness. […] Stereotypes of scientists are often invoked to confirm pre-existing anxieties and hopes” (18).

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entists’ (53) and attributes to them ‘evil motives’ (40). Pence is convinced that sf has sufficient power to mould attitudes, shape and sustain public opinion for a long period of time, even color the statements of famous scientists like Ian Wilmut. In his view, science fiction characters ‘create an indelible impression’ and this ‘lasting impression’ is ‘hard to get past’ (40). (Pastourmatzi 15)

Fintan O’Toole analysed this phenomenon in connection with the reactions to Craig Venter’s achievements pointing out that [t]he problem with all of this is not just the linguistic cliche. It is the way a cliche of language shapes our understanding of an event. In the case of Venter’s achievement, the Frankenstein image lead [sic] to a gross exaggeration, both of the significance of what had been done and of the possible consequences of this alleged example of a scientist “playing God.” (n.pag.)

After all, Craig Venter has only claimed “to have built the genome of a bacterium from scratch and incorporated it into a cell” (Sample, n.pag.), which is not exactly the same as creating Frankenstein’s monster. However, O’Toole further mentions that Venter himself is partly responsible for the Frankenstein/mad scientist association: “In 1999, outlining his plans to unlock the genetic code to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Venter deliberately evoked Frankenstein: ‘Shelley would have loved this!’“ (n.pag.). As Turney has also observed, “[b]iomedical scientists, in particular, have become very conscious of the way their science may be seen in relation to stories of mad scientists, and of the need to develop political strategies for dealing with this” (208). Craig Venter’s initial approach was apparently to take the offensive, but he modified this strategy in more recent statements where he made it clear that his team were not creating new life, but rather reassembling the preexisting building blocks of life (cf. Charisius). In fact, a number of scientists have actively engaged in addressing and counteracting the image of the mad scientist in specialist journals. To give just a few examples: the chemistry team leader Nicola Heron starts her article “Erasing the ‘Mad Scientist’ Stereotype”, published in Chemical and Engineering News in 2001, by referring to the “stereotypical scientist – a wild-haired loner, madly working over a burning candle” that has long “captured the public imagination” (142), only to then distance her profession from this stereotype, pointing out that while the stereotype probably never corresponded to the truth anyway, the skills now needed from professionals in biochemistry importantly involve good communication skills and the ability to work in teams. While Joachim Schummer, a professor of chemistry and philosophy, focuses on the figure of the chemist as central to the emergence of the figure of the mad scientist in the 19th century in an article published in Ambix, the journal of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry, Spencer Weart in “The Physicist as Mad Scientist”, an article published in Physics Today in 1988, traces the development of the popular im-

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age of the mad scientist with a special focus on the relationship between the stereotype and the development of nuclear physics in the 20th century. He ends his article with a plea and suggestions for correcting the ideas about scientists as mad in the public. He acknowledges that the stereotypically mad scientist springs from people’s fear of the advances of science and technology, “therefore the surest way to improve the image of scientists is to make genuine improvements in the ways society puts science to work, beginning with weapons.” (37) What he seems to overlook here is that his argument would imply that scientists themselves are solely to be blamed for the way science is put to work and presented in the public. Further, it is not quite clear whether “scientists” or “society” are in charge of this rather vague and definitely challenging exercise, because he continues: While scientists undertake that long task, they can also attack the stereotype directly, but only with care. Efforts to present scientists as dedicated wonder-workers have proven all too likely to advance the stereotype of the sorcerer. More modest approaches are better. First, there is no reason that scientists, like other groups who have been unfairly stereotyped, should not complain directly on every occasion when the mad scientist appears in the mass media. And second, work should continue to tell the history of real scientists – showing them as people working to improve civilization but not to seize personal control over it, people devoted to their research but not contemptuous of normal human feelings, people pursuing knowledge but not aiming to master cosmic secrets of utopia and doomsday. (Weart 37)

Given the fact that he concentrates on fictional and media presentations of (mad) scientists throughout the larger part of his article, it is strange that Weart fails to make an appeal to writers or film makers to present scientists differently in order to change their bad public image. What I will do in the following is examine how the popular image of the mad scientist figure is dealt with in a selection of new British hard science fiction novels. Skal (18-19) or Schmeink (235), in their discussions of mad scientists in film and fiction, attempt to connect signs of madness displayed by fictional characters with actually existing symptoms typical of mental illnesses, but this is not a territory I will move into. I shall not deal with the question of whether the characters presented in fiction can actually be considered “mad” by any medical standards (cf. also Allen 7; 47f.), nor am I interested in whether the presentation of scientists in new hard science fiction texts corresponds to actual scientists. Therefore, I shall use the expression “mad scientist” as referring to a culturally determined stereotype and not as referring to any actual scientists or actual mental illness. What I am interested in, in the framework of this essay, is how the stereotypical popular image of the mad scientist is self-reflexively employed in new works of hard science fiction. I shall examine how the implicit and explicit employment of the stereotypical popular image of the mad scientist adds

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to the characterisation of scientists in these works, thus moving the discussion about the mad scientist to a new level. I shall examine a selection of new British hard science fiction novels, the writers of which were either trained as scientists themselves or at least subscribe to generic conventions such as scientific attitude, plausibility and rigid extrapolation, which might lead the reader to suspect that they are interested in a differentiated presentation of scientists. In his study Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology, Daniel Dinello perceives the presentation of scientists, and especially geneticists, in contemporary science fiction as overwhelmingly negative. He concludes his chapter on “Engineered Flesh” with the following ideas: Anti-biotechnology themes in science fiction connect back to the whole history of anxiety with science, scientists, and technology. Amplified by the horrors of Josef Mengele, the science fiction geneticist joins a long procession of mad scientists who irresponsibly employ technology in a desire to conquer nature at any cost, while rationalizing death, injury, and unforeseen disasters with pompous rhetoric about perfecting humanity. (222)

That scientists are presented as exclusively negative in new science fiction texts is something I cannot fully agree with. Rather, in recent works of British hard science fiction the idea of the “mad scientist” is openly addressed. Writers are of course aware of the literary heritage of the “mad scientist figure” in science fiction and popular culture, and it surfaces in different ways in many of their works. I shall first deal with examples in which the literary heritage and the cultural stereotype are explicitly or implicitly addressed and then move on to an examination of strategies employed on the level of story and character constellation to counteract the stereotypical image. In Paul McAuley’s White Devils (2004), one of the texts referenced by Dinello, the radical anti-biotech mercenary Cody Corbin refers to Matthew Faber (a scientist who has helped create both the white devils, fierce creatures designed to kill, and the Gentle People, creatures lacking any aggressive potential) and his creatures as “[t]he mad old scientist and his monsters” (252). Faber’s former partner, Dr Lovegrave, says of himself, “When they write my obituary, they’ll say I was a Frankenstein, that I made monsters” (475). When a scientist character inside a science fiction story says such a thing this creates of course an ironic effect and points readers to the conscious use of the stereotype. It is important to note that it is a fervent opponent of genetic engineering who calls Dr Faber “mad” here, and that Dr Lovegrave refers to himself as a “mad scientist” when he thinks about how others perceive him, which emphasizes the idea that the stereotypical Frankenstein image is rather a mould employed to grasp something bewildering and threatening than an objective judgement, and is often made by

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those opposed to the advancements of biotechnology. A character in Brian Stableford’s The Cassandra Complex (2001), an installment of his Emortality Series, points out that “the lone scientific genius making monsters in the basement” is nothing more than “a literary conceit” (230). This can be seen as an attempt to generically rework the stereotypical image of scientists, on the one hand, and, on the other, as an effort to create an awareness of the multiplicity of science and attitudes toward science in general in order to work against an over-simplified, either demonised or glorified, image of science and scientists. The journey of popular images of scientists from fiction into media and the public realm back into science fiction becomes obvious in passages in which characters explicitly refer to public or popular images of scientists. The astronomer Darvin in Ken MacLeod’s Learning the World reflects, before starting his day’s work, that “[t]he popular image of the astronomer as nightly star-gazer had never had much truth in it, and in modern times it had even less” (344). Mariella Anders in Paul McAuley’s Secret of Life contemplates the attitude towards scientists that she experienced during her time at university, a time that, given the setting of the novel in the twenties of the 21st century, almost corresponds to the actual time of the reader: She still remembers the casual slights and sneers of certain pompous art students at Cambridge. […] Proud in their ignorance of science, yet scornful of those who were not interested in the minutia of Renaissance art, opera, or the intricacies of their social seasons. Mariella knows now that their scorn was based on fear. To them, scientists are useful but dangerous, and so must be kept in their place, like Morlocks in the engine room of the world. And most people take their cue from their leaders, believe that science is a conspiracy only the initiated few can understand, something to be feared. It is partly the fault of mediocre scientists, of course, who react to criticism like spoiled priests fearful of defrocking, but it is mostly the fault of those who in their ignorance set themselves as the legislators of science, and those, their prejudices set in stone, who have declared themselves to be its moral superiors. (322f.)

When Mariella hijacks a Chinese space shuttle to bring a sample of Martian DNA safely back to Earth in order to sequence it, she is confronted with an image the media draws of her in the wake of these events, and for which once again the familiar, stereotypical moulds are used: “The unsympathetic majority portray her as a reckless scientist willing to risk anything to fulfill a godless craving for knowledge” (274). Addressing the popular image of the mad scientist does thus not necessarily involve an explicit mentioning of “mad scientist”, but can be effected by displaying features usually associated with the stereotype. Generally, characters are never referred to as “mad” or are assigned behaviour typically associated with mad, single-minded scientists by an uninvolved heterodiegetic narrator; they are always called mad by other

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characters in the novels, or, if they refer to themselves as “mad”, they do so in connection with pondering how the public, how the others do or might perceive them. An awareness of the literary heritage of mad scientists is also sometimes expressed with the help of intertextual names. Jafri Biasiolo, a character in Stableford’s Architects of Emortality, goes by the pseudonyms “Rappaccini” and “Dr Moreau”. The fact that they are pseudonyms imply that the Creatonist geneticist Biasiolo wants to make a telling statement by calling himself after literary characters reputed for dangerous experiments and commonly listed in the family tree of mad scientists (cf. Allen 27; Haynes 89). Both pseudonyms are hints at his activities: he lives on a remote island where he designs fantastic animals and creates flowers as murder weapons. While the character Biasiolo thus basically fits the stereotypical mould of the mad scientist, the pseudonyms add a level of reflection to his actions on the intradiegetic level of characters: He knows that what he does is commonly perceived as mad, he is not so cut off from society as to be unable to reflect on what he is doing and he is aware of how he will be received. Further, the stereotypical mad scientist here even works as a model of identification. The case of Biasiolo also presents a case of communication between writer and reader: the use of the pseudonyms in connection with the scientist character pointing out that the writer consciously makes use – and fun – of the prototypical mad scientist in his work. The protagonist of McAuley’s White Devils is called Nicholas Hyde. That his last name should recall Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by pure coincidence is unlikely. It turns out in the course of the novel that the name is an adopted name. Though Nicholas Hyde is not a scientist, the adopted name serves to point towards his unusual origin (he is his brother’s clone, and human cloning is popularly associated with mad science). The fact that it is an adopted name further shows that Nicholas himself is uneasy about his origins (he wants to keep them hidden) and he is aware of the popular image of a geneticist as potential mad scientist. Further, as a last name usually indicates family relationships, Nick’s adopted name emphasises his having been brought to life by such a person who is potentially seen as possessing attributes of a mad scientist. It is mentioned that Nick’s mother had him cloned with the help of an Italian doctor, and although he is not named, it can be assumed that this character was inspired by the real-life Italian doctor Severino Antinori, who, around the turn of the 21st century, claimed that he would be the

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first to clone a human being, which of course marked him as a mad scientist in public discourse.4 The fact that the characters on the intradiegetic level of new hard science fiction novels are aware of the stereotypical mad scientist image through which the public popularly perceives them and their work leads to situations in which characters try to defend themselves against any such accusations and to justify their work by explaining their motives to other characters (and thus the reader). Dr Faber in White Devils tries to alleviate the charges that could be brought against him by explaining his reasons for recreating an extinct species, pointing out that it was not done just in order to ‘play god’, and emphasising the ethically sound motives for his research: The point was that producing creatures with traits intermediate between humans and the rest of the primates would yield immensely useful ethical benefits. The ridiculous absolutist idea that humans are special, that they should be venerated because they possess some kind of special moral worth that distances them from the rest of the animal kingdom has been able to flourish only because the intermediates between modern humans and the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees and bonobos are all conveniently dead. […] If we’d have been able to finish our work […] the Gentle People would have shown up absolutism for what it is: incoherent, illogical, and based upon unreasoning prejudice. They would have changed the public attitude towards other species, would have demonstrated the insignificance of the racial and cultural differences that have caused so much suffering. It could still happen […] if the hysteria about gengineering recedes. Perhaps humans will realize that the Gentle People aren’t monstrous freaks spawned by perverted and misguided science, they’ll be treated as individuals with individual worth … (170)

This could be seen as an example of what Dinello terms “pompous rhetoric”, but seeing it in a less judgmental light it could be said that there is no fast condemnation of the apparently ‘mad’ scientist on the grounds of the devastating outcomes of his experiments (the white devils turn out to be fierce killers), as the scientist’s own view and his motives are given. This is generally the case with ‘mad scientist’ characters in new hard science fiction. The same holds true for example for Conrad Helier, the inventor of the artificial womb in Brian Stableford’s Emortality series. In Inherit the Earth Helier is finally revealed to have spread the plague that has led to the sterility of humans intentionally in order to avoid overpopulation in a world that has invented successful longevity techniques (which sounds a lot like playing God). It is argued that Helier did not simply act to promote his invention, but with the longterm good of humanity in mind. One of his colleagues explains: “We never aimed to occupy the vacant throne of God 4

Cf. Drux: “[D]er italienische Gynäkologe lässt seit Beginn des Jahrtausend mit dem Gestus eines ‘mad scientist’ keinen Zweifel daran, dass nunmehr der erste geklonte Mensch anstehe” (172).

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– we just decided that we had to do our bit to help compensate for its vacancy” (293), which, however, betrays a contradictory impulse and therefore does not fully serve the purpose of justifying the scientists’ actions. Another of Helier’s colleagues points out: “What we did, we did for the common good” (134). When Helier’s latest plan – designing “para-DNA” and presenting it as an alien threat in order to unite humanity against a common enemy – is revealed, his colleague Silas Arnett is “quick to retort” that “Conrad’s not mad” (297). The scientist characters here evoke the stereotype of the mad scientist in order to distance themselves from it. Characters are often distressed by the negative image that the public has of them and that they sometimes strive to work against these images, not wanting to let themselves be reduced to stereotypes. Whether or not this is a successful strategy is subject to debate: it could just as well be read as a sign of potential unreliability when one has to emphasise how one is ‘not mad’, a strategy uncomfortably reminiscent of the prototypically unreliable narrator of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”.5 This does not, however, alter the fact that the characters’ awareness of the stereotypical image of the scientist as mad and their wish to distance themselves from it casts them not only as scientists who care about science, but as characters who at least worry about their images and thus show interest in the rest of the world and in how their work is publically perceived – they attempt what Weart has suggested, namely, they try to present themselves and their work in a more positive light. Another attempt at doing so can be noticed when scientist characters try to describe themselves to others as ‘normal human beings’: When Dr Mariella Anders in The Secret of Life is told by Glory Dunn, an FBI agent, that she has “some odd affiliations for a scientist” because she is a member of a local drumming group and regularly visits exotic fairs, she retorts, “I dislike irrationality in all its forms, from deliberate distortion of statistics to fortune telling. […] But I’m human too, as human as the next woman” (108). Dunn’s remark illustrates ex negativo the idea of anti-social scientists who are only devoted to their work. After the sequencing of the Chi, the Martian DNA, one of Mariella Anders’ colleagues emphasises: “As scientists, we might think that sequencing the Chi’s genome is sufficient unto itself. But we’re also human beings, with all the moral responsibility that implies. We must also think of the power that knowledge about the Chi might give us” (380). Silas Arnett in Inherit the Earth assures his foster son Damon “I don’t want to be a god and I certainly don’t want to be a devil. I’m a man, like other men. So is Conrad […]” (293) and adds that “[b]eing men like other men, Conrad and I don’t always get things right” (ibid. 294). 5

Cf. Nünning 84.

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Dr Matthew Faber in White Devils has, however, indeed become pathologically ‘mad’, but it turns out that his multiple personality syndrome was brought about on purpose by his former colleague, Dr Lovegrave, with the help of manipulated neuronal patterns, so-called “engrams”. That his actual ‘madness’ is motivated and technically induced further modifies the cliché of the mad scientist. His split personality, though its emergence is here scientifically explained, ties in once more with another prototypical mad scientist whose presence in McAuley’s novel is already invoked by the protagonist’s last name. According to Weart, The division of the dangerous character into two parts, a Dr. Jekyll and a Mr. Hyde, reflected a Western cultural tradition. In the 19th and 20th centuries particularly, many people spoke as if humans were split into halves, with a strict and rational side keeping precarious control over murky urges. This idea was central to stories where fictional scientists tried to suppress their emotions and concentrate on research, only to find their evil desires set loose on their creatures. (33)

This idea of being split into two parts, whether they are rational vs. irrational or good vs. bad, is re-embodied on the one hand in Dr Faber himself, who turns into the uncontrollably raging “Dr Dave” when he has a bad phase, and on the other hand by his two-fold creation: he has created the fierce “white devils” as well and the “Gentle People”, who are peaceful and lack any aggressive urges. Another strategy that counteracts an undifferentiated presentation of scientists as mad is constituted by the fact that those scientists who are perceived as ‘mad’ by their environment, who operate illegally or seem to be driven by dubious motives are usually balanced by an array of scientists who work scrupulously and whose work is based on high scientific and ethical standards. Dr Matthew Faber is, for example, balanced by his sane, social and scrupulous daughter Elspeth, who is also a scientist. Further, it is attempted to show scientists in nets of relationships. As I have shown elsewhere (cf. Herbe), this is true of the presentation of all characters in newer works of hard science fiction, so it cannot exclusively be seen as an attempt to work against the stereotypical presentation of scientists. However, I would argue that the mere inclusion of scientists among those characters presented in nets of social, familial and professional relationships works to counter the stereotypical presentation of the mad scientist as socially isolated. For example, in The Secret of Life, Mariella Anders, who is first depicted riding her horse in her free time, has an array of friends and neighbours who are not connected in any way with her work. She is part of a drumming group and she stays in close contact with her neighbours and their daughter while she is on Mars. The fact that Mariella is a widow is, however, emphasised throughout the novel, so while she is equipped with a varied social and professional life, she is not granted marital happiness,

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and she is not the only scientist denied this in new hard science fiction novels. Scientists in most cases still do not seem to be able to maintain fully functioning (family) relationships and, even though most of them are shown in different social contexts and in interaction with different groups of people and individuals, they still often live alone or have dysfunctional relationships. They are, however, increasingly shown to be team workers. In the mid-1980s both Paul A. Carter and Gregory Benford remarked that despite collective scientific group efforts such as the Manhattan Project and the fact that real-life scientists “have become collaborators, even team players, in this century” (Benford 88), such groups of scientists were not increasingly to be found in science fiction. Benford sees one reason for this phenomenon in narrative conventions: After all, for writers it is difficult to deal with figures who do not dominate the foreground, as would the lone investigator, without slipping automatically into the reverse – the cliché scientist who is narrow, specialized, alienated, a cog in the machine (a New Wave staple). Literature has few depictions which do not lapse into these ritual roles. Authors who are perhaps wary but not basically supportive of science usually unconsciously choose the first posture, the scientist as noble pseudo-artists. (88f.)

And while it is true that some eminent scientist figures are usually singled out also in new hard science fiction novels, there are now certainly examples of the depiction of group efforts. Though Conrad Helier is credited with the invention of the artificial womb in Inherit the Earth, his efforts to save humanity from catastrophic overpopulation are made in a team of scientists. In White Devils, Dr Lovegrave’s and Dr Faber’s efforts to recreate extinct hominids are based on the results of an “American team [that] had already reconstructed the common-ancestor genome” (104). In The Secret of Life, teams of scientists are shown to work together in sequencing the Chi. In The Cassandra Complex, one of the central problems derives from the fact that the geneticist Dr Miller has not shared his research with his colleagues, which leads to the wrong assumption that he has discovered a life-prolonging method only available for women which he does not want to distribute before an equal one for men is discovered; had he worked together with his colleagues on his project, he would not have been abducted (his research assistant is among the radical feminist kidnappers). This leads me to the last point I want to make: many of the scientists depicted in new hard science fiction are women. While the overall distribution of male and female characters is not equal, (usually, there are more male characters, for example, in The Secret of Life, only twenty of the sixty characters are women), the gender distribution among scientists is. Further, when women scientists are featured, they are usually among the protagonists of the novels, as in The Secret of Life or River of Gods. This is re-

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markable when one considers the influence depictions of scientists in science fiction can have on the public image of scientists in general, and since the mad scientist is traditionally a male character (cf. Schmeink, n. 4), casting many scientists as women in new hard science fiction novels might well be seen as a strategy to work against the stereotypical presentation of the scientist as ‘mad’. Explicit and implicit references to prototypical mad scientists can be seen as a method of characterisation in new hard science fiction novels and the obvious self-reflexivity and awareness of cultural stereotypes displayed in the texts makes it impossible to take over received stereotypical representation uncritically and unquestioned, even if they are not fully revised even in the newer works of hard science fiction. Also, as the novels discussed here lack the audience of blockbuster movies and mass media, their differentiated and partly subtle play with the stereotypical presentation of the scientist as mad will not have too much impact on the news coverage of Craig Venter’s (and his colleagues’) future achievements, but the examination of how a popular cultural stereotype that was decisively created by works of (science) fiction found its way back into new works of science fiction, and has been transformed in the process, contributes to the estimation of the pervasiveness and power of this stereotype. Works Cited Aldiss, Brian W. and David Wingrove. Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. Thirsk: Stratus, 2001. Allen, Glen Scott. Master Mechanics & Wicked Wizards: Images of the American Scientist as Hero and Villain from Colonial Times to the Present. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2009. Benford, Gregory. “Is There a Technological Fix for the Human Condition?” Hard Science Fiction. Eds. Eric S. Rabkin and George E. Slusser. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1986. 82-98. Briseno, Cinthia. “Erster künstlicher Organismus: ‘Sie sollten tun was wir wollen.’“ Spiegel Online. 21 May 2010. Web. 21 Sep 2010. . Carter, Paul A. “‘You Can Write Science Fiction if You Want To’.” Hard Science Fiction. Eds. Eric S. Rabkin and George E. Slusser. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1986. 141-51. Charisius, Hanno. “Craig Venter spielt Gott.” Sueddeutsche.de. 21 May 2010. Web. 21 Sep 2010. .

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van Dijck, José. Imagenation: Popular Images of Genetics. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Dinello, Daniel. Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology. Austin: U of Texas P, 2005. Drux, Rudolf. “Retortenzeugung und Maschinengeburt: Fakten und Fiktionen der Reproduktionsmedizin in Romanen der 80er Jahre.” Utopie, Antiutopie und Science Fiction im deutschsprachigen Roman des 20. Jahrhunderts. Ed. Hans Esselborn. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003. 169-77. Haynes, Roslynn D. From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1994. van Hemert, Steven. “Dr Frankenstein or Medical Revolutionary?” Times Live. 04 May 2010. Web. 21 Sep 2010. . Herbe, Sarah. Characters in New British Hard Science Fiction with a Focus on Genetic Engineering. Heidelberg: Winter, 2012. Heron, Nicola. “Erasing the ‘Mad Scientist’ Stereotype.” Chemical & Engineering News 79.13 (2001): 142. Judson, Horace Freeland. “Fearful of Science.” Harper’s Magazine March (1975): 32-41. MacLeod, Ken. Learning the World: A Novel of First Contact. London: Orbit, 2005. “‘Maverick Frankenstein Scientist’ Dr Craig Venter creates ‘artificial life’.” Metro.co.uk. 20 May 2010. Web. 21 Sep 2010. . McAuley, Paul. The Secret of Life. New York: Tor, 2001. —. White Devils. London: Schuster, 2004. McDonald, Ian. River of Gods. 2004. London: Pocket, 2005. O’Toole, Fintan. “Has our ‘mad scientist’ really created a Frankenstein’s monster?’“ Irish Times.com. 20 May 2010. Web. 21 Sep 2010. . Nünning, Ansgar. “‘But why will you say that I am mad?’: On the Theory, History, and Signals of Unreliable Narration in British Fiction.” AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 22.1 (1997): 83-105. Pastourmatzi, Domna. “Science Fiction in the Biotech Age.” Biotechnological and Medical Themes in Science Fiction. Ed. Domna Pastourmatzi. Thessaloniki: University Studio P, 2002. 11-26. Pence, Gregory E. Who’s Afraid of Human Cloning? Lanham: Rowman, 1998. Ringel, Faye J. “Genetic Experimentation: Mad Scientists and The Beast.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 2 (1989): 64-75. Sample, Ian. “Craig Venter creates synthetic life form.” Guardian.co.uk. 20 May 2010. Web. 21 Sep 2010. .

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Schmeink, Lars. “Mythos und ‘Madness’: Der Wissenschaftler in Shelleys Frankenstein und Atwoods Oryx and Crake.” Wahnsinn in der Kunst: Kulturelle Imaginationen vom Mittelalter bis zum 21. Jahrhundert. Eds. Susanne Rohr and Lars Schmeink. Trier: WVT, 2011. 225-50. Schummer, Joachim. “Historical Roots of the ‘Mad Scientist’: Chemists in Nineteenth-century Literature.” AMBIX 53.2 (2006): 99-127. Skal, David J. Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture. New York: Norton, 1998. Stableford, Brian. Architects of Emortality. New York: Tor, 1999. —. Inherit the Earth. New York: Tor, 1998. —. The Cassandra Complex. 2001. New York: Tor, 2002. Turney, Jon. Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Genetics and Popular Culture. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. Weart, Spencer. “The Physicist as Mad Scientist.” Physics Today 41.6 (1988): 28-37.

Utopian, Dystopian and Subversive Strategies in Recent German Alternate History Fictions INGO CORNILS 1. Introduction With the integration of its core themes, images and narrative strategies into the literary mainstream in recent decades, science fiction in its traditional sense appears to have lost its competitive edge and its innovative potential (cf. Philmus xiv; Rose 23). Frederic Jameson recently described this trend as a “rapprochement between high and low culture […], and the blurring of distinctive generic characteristics” (68). However, the genre’s utopian, subversive and critical elements have survived in the field of alternate history fictions, and have even experienced a comeback in recent years. Alternate history can be defined as a subgenre of science fiction that is set in a world in which history diverges or has diverged from the actual history of the world. As a narrative form it is related to fictions of time travel and parallel worlds. It tends to focus on ‘turning points’ in history, and how they affect individuals, groups and societies. It has a range of functions, e.g. entertainment, philosophical debate, escapism, political satire and social criticism. Most importantly, “the alternate history reminds us that we all change the world” (Duncan 218). Alternate histories are of course well established in Anglo-American literature – e.g. Philip Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962); Keith Roberts’ Pavane (1968); Richard Harris’ Fatherland (1992); Kim Stanley Robertson’s The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) – but less so in German literature, where the division between high and popular culture has been maintained far longer and where the need for an alternate history tended to concentrate on and emanate from the traumatic experience of the Third Reich (cf. Friedrich). It wasn’t until Carl Amery’s Das Königsprojekt (1975) that German writers discovered the potential of alternate history fiction for cultural criticism (cf. Böll), and much later until it escaped the confines of the label science fiction.

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In this essay I will explore three recent examples from German-language literature. My objective is to show how a classic device of fantastic literature is employed in the mainstream to introduce utopian/dystopian elements and subvert traditional reading habits. 2. Into the Heart of Darkness Christian Kracht is well known for his novels Faserland (1995) and 1979 (2001). Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (2008), the third novel by this Swiss writer and globe-trotter, starts with a simple yet fundamental retrospective change to world history: Lenin never left Switzerland in 1917 but stayed on and, together with Kropotkin and Bakunin, established a Swiss Soviet Republic. In the year 2013, this state has been engaged in almost 100 years of war with fascist Germany and Britain. Warfare has not advanced much beyond World War I airships, bombs and gas, but is nevertheless conducted with fanatic efficiency. To hold its own, the Swiss Soviet Republic has resorted to colonising the greater part of Africa, spreading its unique blend of efficiency and communist ideology, and recruiting there its cannon fodder (and, increasingly, its officers) for the forever war. The unnamed narrator is one such black stranger in a strange land, a political commissar charged by the Swiss supreme soviet with the capture of Oberst Brazhinsky, an officer gone rogue. The commissar encounters a war-torn, desolate country full of minefields and desperate survivors, including a mysterious dwarf named Uriel (an allusion to the archangel of the apocrypha) who rescues him from certain death. Eventually, he reaches the gigantic alpine Réduit, a vast underground shelter below the Alps that has proven impenetrable for the German bombs. Here Brazhinsky holds a position of mysterious influence much like that of Mr Kurtz in Josef Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) or Colonel Kurtz in Francis Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now (1979). In spite of moments of sanity when he looks after the wounded and practises a newly developed ‘Rauchsprache’ that enables him to read his enemies’ minds and force his will upon them, Brazhinsky eventually goes mad, blinds himself and dies miserably. The commissar escapes a coordinated attack on the Réduit by German airships and slowly makes his way back to his native Malawi, shedding on the way the ideological indoctrination of his youth. As the remnants of Swiss colonial power disappear under the returning jungle, the ex-commissar disappears into the African vastness. Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten is an extremely rich novel, a fact attested to by countless reviews in the German-speaking press.

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In the following I will touch briefly on three aspects that illustrate its complexity and currency: the curious case of Swiss colonialism, the commissar’s encounter with Oberst Brazhinsky, and the Réduit as a metaphor for Western moral decay. The reader slowly gathers clues that explain how the Swiss Soviet Republic managed to colonise Africa: Swiss workers, engineers, scientists and soldiers embarked on a massive infrastructure programme to build roads, schools, hospitals and universities. The anonymous commissar was born near the border to Mozambique and attended a Swiss military academy where he has not only been convinced of the superiority of the white colonisers, but encouraged to emulate them to such an extent that he is, at the beginning of the novel, a much more fervent believer in the Swiss/ Soviet cause than its original inhabitants. The commissar speaks about “unser Weg” (34) and utters phrases like “die Stärke der SSR war ihre Menschlichkeit” (20). He is proud of “unsere Revolution” (49), and stoically ignores the taunts of lower ranking white soldiers. It takes a major shock for the commissar to realise that the utopian dream of a perfect socialist world was simply a vehicle for domination, and that he needs to sever his allegiance to a dead ideology. It is his encounter with Brazhinsky that provides this shock. He begins to question his orders, to doubt whether he and the Swiss are indeed brothers. He also begins to reflect on his past as a black officer ordering black soldiers to go over the top and into certain death, while the white officers and soldiers remained behind. Nothing makes sense in the Réduit. Brazhinsky, who brutally murdered other soldiers sent out to arrest him, works as a healer, treating wounded soldiers. He has dozens of Nicholas Roerich’s ‘visionary’ paintings on his walls, depicting an idealised idyllic mountain world that no longer exists. The commissar takes ‘magic mushrooms’ to enable him to learn the ‘new language’ that is supposed to create empathetic understanding and to manipulate the enemy. Brazhinsky admits that all the talk about last ditch ‘Wunderwaffen’ is propaganda, that the remnants of the great Swiss Soviet Republic can’t defend themselves. In their final encounter he denies that he is a counterrevolutionary: Ach, hören Sie doch auf. Konterrevolution, Häresie, das sind alberne Kindereien. Erziehen Sie sich selbst. Sie sind ein Sklave, Kommissär, begreifen Sie das? Sie sind ein Sklave der Schweiz, geboren, gedrillt und gemacht. (128)

With the Réduit Kracht alludes to the complex and ambiguous role of Switzerland in WWII. Never occupied, its economy, society and culture were nonetheless severely and lastingly affected. The country aided the Nazis by stopping Jewish refugees from Germany at its borders and turning Jewish gold into hard currency. ‘Geistige Landesverteidigung’ meant the silenc-

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ing of dissenters. When the Swiss army was mobilised on 2 September 1939, elaborate strategies were put in place should Nazi Germany attack. Fortifications were built at Sargans, Saint-Maurice und Gotthard, and in the spring of 1940 detailed plans were produced for the Réduit National, a giant refuge that would allow the Swiss to defend themselves to the end. Kracht explores the Réduit not only as a repository of Swiss identity, but also as a metaphor for moral and spiritual decay, literally ‘Ausgehöhltheit’, as its inhabitants succumb to introspection, delusion, drugs and disease. The end cannot come too soon for this dead end of history, and when it comes, Kracht gives it the full Technicolor treatment: Den Balkon betretend, sah ich das erhabene Bild Dutzender deutscher Luftschiffe, die den Himmel über meinem Kopf füllten. Und während vor den runden, gläsernen Scheiben der Gasmaske die Sonne orangerot und wundervoll glühend hinter den Alpen versank und unsere Scheinwerfer wie weisse Nadeln den Abendhimmel durchstachen, begann erneut das infernalische, monströse Bombardement des Réduits. (132)

As for the black commissar, he turns his back on the imploding utopian dream: Ich warf meinen schweren Soldatenmantel und Brazhinskys kranke Lektionen weg, und ich benutzte die Rauchsprache nicht mehr […]. Es war die Sprache der Weissen, ein Idiom des Krieges, und ich brauchte sie nicht. (138)

Literary critics in Germany had a difficult time with Kracht’s novel. It wasn’t until Dietmar Dath’s review that the German Feuilleton realised that Christian Kracht had once again wrong-footed the literary establishment. Dath correctly identifies the blind spot Germany’s professional critics have when it comes to the popular, and that Kracht’s “[i]n sich ruhender Größenwahn” (n.pag.) caused them to ignore the most obvious question that needed to be asked, namely: why does Kracht need the victory of Bolshevism in Switzerland? Dath supplies the answer himself: communism kept the capitalists honest. Following the collapse of communism, the world has turned into a madhouse, a fact that both fascinates and appals a writer with a global outlook. It is no surprise that critics have such problems with Christian Kracht, who is notorious for his tongue-in-cheek comments on his own work (cf. Conter and Birgfeld). In an interview broadcast by the ARD, the premier German public television channel, Kracht suggested that the Swiss were both colonisers and colonised in respect to their neighbour Germany: Die Schweiz wird ja heute beherrscht von Deutschen – ausschließlich. Dort gibt es also deutsche Kellner, deutsche Ärzte, die Deutschen machen die ganze Arbeit, die die Schweizer nicht mehr machen möchten, und das finden wir Schweizer natürlich etwas suspekt. (transcript of an interview; ARD)

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In the same interview, he ambiguously talked about the “Aushöhlung der Schweiz” (the hollowing out of Switzerland), which can refer to the building of tunnels under the Alps but also the political and moral vacuum at its centre. With his typically deadpan statement “Die Ästhetik der Moderne ist ein Irrtum” (ibid.) he has provided scholars and critics with material for years to come. It is interesting to note that, as befits a master storyteller, Kracht’s focus remains on our use of language. In the Swiss Soviet Republic of Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten, the written language has been replaced by oral communication. The commissar’s old-fashioned notebook is seen as an anachronism, only the dwarf Uriel still reads a book, the Bible. In a recent interview Kracht confirmed: Sprache an und für sich ist ein Thema des Romans: Sprache als Waffe, Sprache als Virus und als Symptom einer Welt voller Drogen, voller Halluzinationen. Nichts ist, wie es scheint. […] In dem Roman kommen verschiedene Sprachen und verschiedene Kulturen in einer vom Krieg versehrten Welt zusammen, man verbündet sich oder kämpft gegeneinander, man redet buchstäblich aneinander vorbei. (Kedves und Schuler, n.pag)

The brooding atmosphere (introduced with the title, taken from the Irish popular song “Danny Boy”) and the many cultural cross-references in Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten make the novel an ideal target for dramatisation. In 2010, Corinna von Rad directed her version at the Schauspielhaus Basel, and Armin Petras premiered his version for the Schauspiel Stuttgart and the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin. Early reviews indicate that the Basel production was well received while the Stuttgart event was disappointing as it turned a “trashige Dystopie” into a “müde Parabel” (Martin Halter zit. in Pavlovic, n.pag; cf. Dürr). Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten has disturbing qualities. It gets uneasily close to our own seemingly endless wars and pursuits of mad individuals hidden in deep caves under mountains. It uses estrangement to remind us of the power of the failed socialist dream but also of the horror of its consequences. Is there any possibility of redemption for imperialists? Does neutrality keep your conscience clear? Kracht seems to say that even our best intentions and the proverbial Swiss perfectionism cannot ward off the corroding effects of totalitarianism. If Josef Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was a criticism of the ideology of imperialism, Christian Kracht’s Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten can be read as a criticism of the imperialist nature of ideology, and an imaginative engagement with the psychology of the colonised mind. Kracht does not deny his commissar dignity and culture, but in the end these European attributes are discarded. The dream of a world without racism is as ephemeral as snow in Africa.

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In spite of the brooding atmosphere, the book has a utopian edge. Kracht uses the means of estrangement inherent in alternate histories to attain the freedom that allows him to comment on questions of postcolonial mentality, the danger of ideological control inherent in utopian euphoria and the deep seated mindset of superiority – the root cause of inequality and war that is still prevalent in our society. By referencing Conrad/Coppola, he cleverly links his work with two influential instances of cultural critique, be it of the original hubris of Western colonialism or of American imperialism. His fiction however targets the much more complex question of what happens when the colonisers are also the colonised (a reflection on global migration), and the question of the extent to which identity can be maintained and/or created in such a world. Through the protagonist’s journey from Swiss ice to African heat, from seclusion to open spaces, from endless war to peace, Kracht constructs a utopian space where the arrogance of people who claim to know what is good for the rest is questioned while the sense of solidarity/empathy that neoconservatives and neoliberals lack is retained. I would argue that we cannot fully understand this book until we place it in the context of the wider tradition of alternate histories. Kracht hides a reference to Philip Dick’s classic The Man in the High Castle in his text. Science fiction readers will appreciate this brief intertextual acknowledgement; other readers will miss it or dismiss it. Small wonder, perhaps, that, in spite of all the publicity, Kracht has so far only picked up one prize for his novel, the Phantastikpreis der Stadt Wetzlar in 2009. 3. Does Anyone Know What the Future Will Bring? Wolfgang Jeschke’s novel Das Cusanus Spiel (2005) is a sophisticated exploration of the outer limits of fantastic literature, mixing alternate history, time travel and parallel world narratives, and combining the very latest scientific theories on the nature of time and space with medieval religious philosophy. Like Christian Kracht, Jeschke is well aware of the alternate history tradition: in the acknowledgements he cites Jack Finney’s Time and Again (1970), Arkadi and Boris Strugatzki’s Hard to be a God (1964), and specifically Carl Amery’s Das Königsprojekt. In 2052, climate change has become harsh reality: Southern Europe is covered by sand blown across the Mediterranean from the Sahara, the migrating masses from North Africa are forcibly kept away from ‘Fortress Europe’, and neo-Nazis hunt those who slip through the net. Due to global warming the sea levels are rising: while huge dams have been built along the coastlines of Europe, large areas of the poor countries of Asia are

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flooded, leading to yet more migration. The European Union has disintegrated. Following the explosion of a French nuclear reactor in 2028, large parts of central Europe have been radioactively contaminated and are now virtually uninhabitable. As a result of the radiation, species extinction has been accelerated by the rapid spread of genetically mutated plants. In this bleak future, the young Italian botanist Domenica Ligrina finds a job at the Instituto pontificale della Rinascita della Creazione di Dio, a scientific department of the Vatican. Scientists there have developed a process that allows them to send agents into the past to collect genetically intact plants, which will be used to repair the damage in the present. After her initial training, Domenica travels through contaminated Germany. In the chapter “The Inner Circle of Hell” Jeschke confronts the reader with the reality of the quarantined world, where decades of decontamination work have left a wasteland: Ich blickte aus dem Fenster unseres Abteils. Das Land wurde buchstäblich geschunden, seine grüne Haut abgeschält bis aufs Geröll der rheinischen Schotterzunge. Riesige Bulldozer schoben den Ackerboden vor sich her wie braune Wogen. Schwarzen Dieselrauch senkrecht in den Himmel röhrend, stemmten sie das Erdreich auf gigantische Laster, die es dann in würfelförmige Betoncontainer kippten. Diese wurden versiegelt quer durch Frankreich an die Küste transportiert, wo das kontaminierte Erdreich dazu verwendet wurde, den neuen Europadamm aufzumauern. (440)

Domenica is sent to the year 1451, where she collects hundreds of plant seeds, but is arrested in Cologne. She is accused of heresy, of dealing with the devil and eventually tried as a witch. In desperation Domenica writes a series of letters from her prison cell to the German Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (aka Cusanus, 1401-1464), of whom she knows that he travelled via Cologne in 1451/52. This constitutes an ‘illegal’ intervention in history, and a series of breaks in the timeline occur, which in turn open a series of parallel worlds. In a first timeline Cusanus rides on, and Domenica is burned in public (74). In a second timeline Cusanus returns to Cologne to talk to her (188-201), she is released and can return to her own time. In a third variant the letters have disappeared, but Cusanus hears a rough summary and decides to ask the archbishop of Cologne for a postponement (467). In each case Cusanus learns something about the future, as Domenica’s letters reveal details of his cosmological and scientific work that at this point in time exists only in his head. As a result of these messages from the future, an alternate course of history is created which the omniscient narrator describes as the ‘Cusanian Acceleration’. This (accelerated) history of the last five hundred years is meticulously described by the omniscient narrator (cf. 337), beginning with the letter from Cusanus to Pope Nicholas V, in which he proposes the creation of a scientific academy at the Holy See which would deal specifically

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with unusual natural phenomena and the revival of humanistic heritage. In this science-friendly atmosphere a new type of engine, the “Brennkreisel” (338), is invented as early as 1478, which revolutionises trade and transport. Two centuries later, Gottfried Leibniz invents the first functioning calculator. By 1682, the West has secured its access to the oil wells in the Middle East, but because of the intense use of fossil fuels, sea levels already begin to rise in 1825. The first airship crosses the Atlantic in the mid-18th century. In 1908 a ‘radiation sickness’ is discovered near nuclear power plants. Winston Churchill is celebrated in 1918 as unifier of Europe, and in 1923 Hitler and Ludendorff are killed when their coup attempt fails. In the first half of the 20th century a further development of the embankments against the rising sea levels is agreed, and in 1945 President Charles de Gaulle declares that Europe must become an ‘impregnable fortress’. At this point at the latest the reader begins to realise that Domenica’s reality, which one has until then assumed to be a straightforward extrapolation of our own reality into the future, is in fact one of the parallel worlds that have arisen because of her intervention. In fact, there are more and more clues in the text that the various timelines have intertwined, that history itself has become porous. Despite all this, or maybe because the scientists running the project believe that unsustainable timelines will be ‘brushed out’ anyway, Domenica is allowed a second trip into the past, this time with the objective of preventing the death of her father, who was killed in 2039 in a terrorist attack. Back in 2039 she meets herself as a young girl, thus causing a time paradox which completely throws her out of the ‘reality’ of her own time. The encounter generates an ‘oscillation’. After seeing (though not recognising) her future self, Domenica proves to be highly sensitive to the multiplicity of worlds. Thus, ever since her return from the Middle Ages, she can’t shake off the feeling that her ‘shadow’ sister walks beside her, the one who has sacrificed herself for her on the pyre in one of the timelines: Sie hat Zuflucht und Heimstatt gefunden in mir, in meinem Ich, das sie gerettet hatte, indem sie die schreckliche Alternative auf sich nahm, damit ich das rettende Ufer einer Welt erreichen konnte, in der ich nicht zum Hexenbrand verurteilt wurde. Nur, wo lebte ich? In der Welt, aus der ich einst kam, oder hatte ich mich in eine alternative verirrt? (626)

As the attempt to save her father has several possible outcomes, the timelines turn into an inextricable knot. The scientists in Amsterdam take this calmly. According to their theories time has an organic nature. Like a selfoptimising computer program, it will ‘brush out’ timelines that cannot stabilise themselves (496). Jeschke skilfully references Stephen Hawking’s theory of time, Hugh Everett’s super string theory and quantum cosmology. To this mix he adds his own, fantastic variant, the “Solitone” (496). These

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waves run from the beginning to the end of time, then change their direction and move back towards the past. Time travellers can ‘surf’ these waves, without having to understand the process: “Genau besehen sind wir in der Rolle von Hunden, die es gelernt haben, mit der U-Bahn zu fahren.” (310). This ‘surfing in time’ is represented in the novel quite poetically: Das Soliton war in Richtung Vergangenheit durchgelaufen. Es war aus der Zukunft herabgerollt, hatte uns mit seiner Universen zermalmenden Kraft so sanft berührt, dass wir seine Nähe nur indirekt bemerken konnten. Es hatte die Membranen unserer Wirklichkeit umspült und sie für einen Moment durchlässig gemacht, hatte uns durchströmt, wie die Physiker versicherten, weil es alle Dimensionen durchquerte, die entfalteten ebenso wie die im Planckraum eingerollten – wie viele das auch immer sein mochten. (282)

In addition, there seem to be entities that are interested in an undisturbed flow of history. These beings, at once angelic and human, become involved in the fate of ‘stranded’ time travellers like Domenica. Lost and alone, her ghost-like self finds a resting place in “Highgate”: Highgate stand […] am äußersten Rand der Zeit, wo die Solitone herumschwangen, um wieder in die Vergangenheit zu stürzen. Es gab auf dem Planeten so genannte Chronotope, in denen der Zeitfluss sich staute oder ganz zum Erliegen kam. Es waren Gegenden, in denen Berichten zufolge die Sonne seit Jahren nicht mehr untergegangen war, sondern auf erratischer Bahn hierhin und dorthin gezogen sei und immer wieder unschlüssig innegehalten habe, wo ihr Licht wie ein honigfarbener Dunst über dem Land lag und das Felsgestein mit einer braunen Glasur überzog, wo die Natur in traumversunkener Reglosigkeit verharrte. (329f.)

Like H.G. Wells in The Time Machine (1894), the author romanticises in such passages the end of time and the process of time travel itself, bringing categories such as wonder and grandeur into the mix. Sober scientists – and mainstream writers – rarely allow for these contemplative moments, but in science fiction they have been fundamental since its beginning. For the reader this contradiction – on the one hand, the seemingly plausible scientific explanation of unprecedented events, on the other hand Jeschke’s irrepressible storytelling skill – forms part of the aesthetic experience, one that Kurd Laßwitz, the ‘father’ of German science fiction, described in 1895 in his essay “Über Zukunftsträume” as the necessary and adequate stance in the face of the rapid development of modern science.1 With Das Cusanus Spiel Wolfgang Jeschke has introduced new aspects into the venerable tradition of alternate history fictions. There is the confrontation of two imaginary worlds: on the one hand the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, where Cusanus, far ahead of his time, 1

Kurd Laßwitz’ Auf zwei Planeten (1897) can be read as an alternate history, in that the Martians descending to Earth are humanoid and have developed along similar lines as people on Earth, except that they base their decisions on rational thinking (thus becoming the model for the Vulcans in Star Trek); cf. Cornils.

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developed his theory of the coexistence of the real and the possible (the docta ignorantia). On the other hand, we have the world at the middle of the 21st century, where human intervention in the creation can only be repaired by travelling back to this supposedly ‘dark’ time. In a further step, Jeschke integrates this juxtaposition of the real and the possible into the plot, for example in the description of the consequences of the nuclear accident which has turned the survivors into genetic cripples (433). The confidence with which the author seamlessly integrates highly complex quantum physics into his fantastic story is certainly impressive, particularly as the fate of his characters always takes precedence over boyish enthusiasm for technology. The reader suffers with Domenica, and participates in her gradual dissolution in time. Jeschke’s suggestion that there are people who can somehow ‘feel’ alternate worlds is of course not so very far from everyday experience anymore, particularly in an age accustomed to virtual and second ‘realities’. In addition, the experience of a split personality resonates with our experience of a fragmented world. Although the notion that the world could disintegrate into different ‘realities’ whenever we make a decision is initially confusing, it also opens up endless narrative possibilities that appear particularly fascinating in times of crisis. Given the dystopian reality of her world, Domenica does not have a problem with the possibility that her actions in the past might cause history to take a different course: Vielleicht einen besseren. Eine Welt ohne Hexenwahn, eine hellere, eine vernünftigere, den Wissenschaften eher aufgeschlossene Welt. Vielleicht wäre sie gut genug, um in den Corpus des Multiversums aufgenommen zu werden. (622)

4. Welcome to the Revolution With his striking ‘detective novel’ Das Magische Jahr (2008), Rob Alef provides a satirical view of what might have happened had the West German student movement been successful. In this alternate history, the revolution has happened, but the irony is that nothing much has changed. People continue to phone in to radio stations to request a dedication to their grandparents, only now they ask for the songs of the revolution. Everybody has a job, but only because the under-qualified are employed to act as human info booths, reeling off useless information to passers-by. Schoolchildren are brought in to theatres to learn about Marxist dialectics in a Punch and Judy show, and visit museums to study the history of the revolution. Like schoolchildren in the real world, they are bored by the attempts of their (equally bored) teachers to convey to them the significance of the ‘historic events’ that led to the revolution.

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The peace and quiet of the fictional post-revolutionary Berlin is shattered when the internet dealer Prometheus Praumann is brutally murdered. Praumann, once a key member of the movement and a close associate of the great student leader Richard Dubinski (similarities to real persons with the same initials, in this case the German student leader Rudi Dutschke, are intentional), has turned his revolutionary past into a goldmine. He sources and sells ‘historically important’ memorabilia to keen collectors, for example Theodor Adorno’s hole-puncher for € 2000 or Ulrike Meinhof’s toothpick (‘authenticity guaranteed’). In this alternate world, everyone is aware of the cataclysmic change of ‘1968’: “Es war die Zeit der Unruhe gewesen, in jenen Jahren, in denen sich die Dinge verschoben hatten, als alles anders geworden war” (29). The event that turned the tide was ‘the battle for Tegeler’s fleece’, when the students won a major confrontation with the police and public opinion turned in their favour (in reality, the ‘Schlacht am Tegeler Weg’ was the final convulsion of the German Student Movement). The other crucial difference to historic events is that Dubinski was shot dead by an assassin. As a consequence, he is revered as a patriotic hero and martyr, and every year there is an official victory celebration, where the fleece (nothing more than the seat warmer in a police car belonging to a police sergeant called Karl-Heinz Tegeler) gets paraded around the streets of Berlin as the “Geburtsurkunde unsres neuen Gemeinwesens” (64). Only when three further former members of the commune are killed does the investigating detective realise that the murderer is looking for a photograph to prevent a long-held secret becoming public: contrary to official history, Dubinski had not been in Berlin on the decisive day, but, an avid fan, had travelled to Hamburg to watch the Beatles play. In the end, it doesn’t really matter what happened forty years ago. Different events may have altered the course of history, but, as Alef points out right at the beginning, rivers will never flow upstream. The old order may have been overthrown (139), but the world is the same. Of course, the reader is in on the joke that the former student rebels have had their day, that their continuing attempts to define their legacy have led to a ‘Mythos 1968’. It is this stubborn insistence that theirs was the best of times, and that their utopian dream was so wonderful, that has prevented any historicisation of the era. In fact, ‘the magical year’ continues to permeate Germany’s political and cultural life to this day. At times, Alef undercuts the alternate ‘reality’ by surreal and magical elements: it is deep winter in June, the chief inspector collects snowflakes that do not melt, prostitution is a public service (in the “Kamasu-Tram”; 150), there are daily organised demonstrations on the frozen Müggelsee (benefit claimants get free skates and banners), and the inspector is rescued

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by a team from the “Schneenotrettungsdienst” (203) manned by penguins who speak a Gaelic dialect and are exceedingly fond of whisky. Even the message of the novel, hidden in a sequence of letters linked to each chapter and revealed at the end, is that “DER SCHNEE VON GESTERN IST DIE LAWINE VON MORGEN” (319, capitalisation in the original), a slogan profoundly uplifting for readers of a revolutionary leaning, and absolutely banal for everyone else. As an alternate history, Rob Alef’s Das magische Jahr makes for sobering (if hugely enjoyable) reading. In spite of a more laid-back attitude towards public affairs and prostitution, very little has fundamentally changed in the forty years following the revolution. But that is exactly the point: the reality is that most of the lifestyle and cultural revolution the 1968 movement had demanded has happened anyway, and that the radically different political and economic superstructure they proposed is unlikely to change human nature fundamentally. At any rate, the attraction of the novel lies in the meticulous representation of the jargon, references and mindset of the student rebels. Transported into the (alternate) present, their utopian dream is shown as an anachronism. 5. Conclusion All the alternate histories discussed in this essay deal with “Schnee von gestern” (‘old news’), something that is no longer relevant. All are designed to show their readers the effects of ways of thinking that are no longer relevant, a direct response to the reluctance of the political elites in Germany and Switzerland to respond to the intellectual and practical challenges of recent years. Christian Kracht’s Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten targets the utopian dream of equality and contrasts it with persistent colonial attitudes of the West. Wolfgang Jeschke’s Das Cusanus Spiel challenges our faith in technological progress that we hope will save us from ecological disasters, even though these disasters were caused by technology in the first place. Rob Alef’s Das magische Jahr lampoons the members of the protest-generation, whose lives have become as ‘spießig’ as the generation they rebelled against, and who have held onto their myth too long. And yet, in each of these alternate histories, ‘yesterday’s snow’ has the potential to become an avalanche, to cause fundamental change or upset. To stretch the metaphor somewhat, it is more a question of deciding whether to wait for the avalanche to come down on its own, or to trigger a controlled one. There is hope for a concrete utopia, Ernst Bloch’s elusive ‘noch nicht’. Christian Kracht’s black commissar breaks his colonial and ideological shackles and returns to a life that is both self-determined and in line

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with his traditions. Wolfgang Jeschke’s doomed heroine may find refuge at the end of time, though no amount of tinkering with the timelines can fundamentally alter the course of history.2 Rob Alef’s satire is ambiguous about a positive outcome. It is entirely plausible that even the most successful revolution will run out of steam. At the same time, the plausibility of the alternate reality serves as a reminder that a different life is possible, and perhaps desirable. All these alternate histories, these tales of political, social, economic, and ecological hubris poke irreverent fun at received wisdom and predictability, but they also continue an idealistic tradition. They are examples of subversive cultural criticism: in their utopian, dystopian or satirical guise, they radically challenge the status quo, something that science fiction used to excel at. They deliver both a distinctive aesthetic experience (the quality of dissonance) and an intellectual challenge (the game of decoding). Interestingly, none of the texts, whether written by ‘outsider’ or ‘insider’, was sold under the ‘specialist’ label of science fiction or fantastic literature (cf. Hetschko). Does that signify a breaking down of boundaries? I would argue that it does not really matter whether alternate histories have successfully made the transition from fringe to mainstream or whether mainstream literature has absorbed a central device of science fiction. The important thing is that writers on both sides of the divide continue to demonstrate its innovative potential and continuing relevance, and reach new audiences. Works Cited Alef, Rob. Das magische Jahr. Berlin: Rotbuch, 2008. ARD. “Interview mit Christian Kracht.” “Druckfrisch: Neue Bücher mit Denis Scheck.” TV. Erstes Deutsches Fernsehen (ARD). 13 Jan 2009. Böll, Heinrich “Galopp mit der Raum-Zeit-Maschine.” Die Zeit 4 Oct 1974. Canavan, Gerry, Lisa Klarr and Ryan Vu. “Science, Justice, Science Fiction: A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson.” Interview. Polygraph 22 (2010): 201-17. Conter Claude D. and Johannes Birgfeld, eds. Christian Kracht: Zu Leben und Werk. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2009. Cornils, Ingo. “The Martians are Coming! War, Peace, Love, and Scientific Progress in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and Kurd Laßwitz’s Auf zwei Planeten.” Comparative Literature 55.1 (2003): 24-41.

2

This is one of the tenets of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Years of Salt and Rice. Cf. Canavan, Klarr and Vu.

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Dath, Dietmar. “Ein schöner Albtraum ist sich selbst genug.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 15 Oct 2008. Web. 10 Jun 2011. . Duncan, Andy. “Alternate History.” The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 209-18. Dürr, Anke “Yoda in den Alpen.” Der Spiegel 26 Jun 2010. Friedrich, Hans-Edwin. “‘Das deutsche Volk schlief schlecht seit dem größten Sieg seiner Geschichte’: Drittes Reich und Nationalsozialismus im alternativhistorischen Roman”. literatur für leser 4 (2006): 255-73. Hetschko, Holger. “‘Ich bin ein sehr neugieriger Mensch!’: Wolfgang Jeschke im Interview.” Epilog.de. 2005. Web. 10 Jun 2011. . Jameson, Frederick. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005. Jeschke, Wolfgang. Das Cusanus-Spiel. München: Droemer, 2005. Kedves, Alexandra and Edgar Schuler. “Christian Kracht: ‘Ich meine es todernst.’“ Badische Zeitung. 5 May 2010. Web. 10 Jun 2011. . Kracht, Christian. Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2008. Laßwitz, Kurd. “Über Zukunftsträume.” Wirklichkeiten: Beiträge zum Weltverständnis. Berlin: Felber, 1900. Pavlovic, Tomo Mirko. “Der eidgenössische Kreidekreis” Nachtkritik.de. 2 Jul 2010. Web. 10 Jun 2011. . Philmus, Robert M. Into the Unknown: The Evolution of Science Fiction From Francis Godwin to H.G. Wells. Berkley: U of California P, 1970. Rose, Mark. Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981.

CONFERENCE THEME STORY

A Pocketful of Faces PAUL DI FILIPPO 1. The Face on the Kitchen Floor We had to break down the door before the suspect could flush the illegal face. But we had to do it quiet. It would take the perp just a few seconds to deface his twist and dispose of the evidence if he heard or even suspected any clumsy incursion. So two of us – me and Teo – stood back on alert while Claudette jammed the home security circuits and sprayed the area around the door lock with metallophages. In seconds the latch was bug shit, and we were slipping in smooth as a steak off a matrix. Me first: biggest and toughest always leads. And I hold the current precinct record for “sheer presence caused suspect to crap his pants.” Out of the corner of one eye I noted Teo squirting the warrant into the perp’s phone, making us all nice and legal. First room was a fashionable parlor with no one present. I figured we’d try the bedroom next. Bedrooms account for forty percent of facecrime scenes. The law-abiding public might imagine those stats higher, but they don’t reckon with the inventive perversities of the average perp. I’ve arrested offenders in garages, offices, public restrooms and, once, up a tree. I called up the floorplans of the house on my phone and slick-footed toward the bedroom door. Teo and Claudette, wavers drawn, covered my approach and our backs. Most perpetrators of face crimes are meek as house tigers. But some can become irrationally violent when their kinky fantasies get exposed. Bedroom came up empty too. That left the kitchen and bathroom of the small house. On a hunch, I nodded toward the kitchen, and we moved toward the swinging door. I paused a moment, listening: a soft lapping and smacking sound, like cattle at a water hole, accompanied by subdued moans. Here was our guy. I hand-signalled Claudette and Teo, and we bulled in. “APE raid!” I shouted, as the three of us spread wide into the kitchen. And there they were, perp and twist.

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The perp was a dweebish, balding male in his forties, naked and covered in a variety of sloppy foodstuffs: pudding, stew, gravy, noodles. He looked like the newbie at a frat initiation. The edible mess dripped off him and onto the tile floor. The twist was naked too, save for a frilly apron around its waist. Kneeling on the floor, the sexy female figure was lapping at the slops. I could see the Protein Alley tattoo on its rump: corporate logo and serial number. Upon our bursting in, the perp – one Lester Holtzclaw, according to the warrant – vented a loud shout, jumped guiltily to his feet, tried to run, slipped in the comestible mess, and whomped down flat on his back, giving his head what must have been a painful whack on the tiles. It was all I could do not to burst out laughing. If the crime hadn’t been so serious, I would have. My partners holstered their wavers. Lester wasn’t going to offer us any trouble. They moved to upright him and zip-liana his wrists. Meanwhile, the confused twist paused in its servile assignment and swivelled its head around to regard me. The blank, stolid expression on the stolen human female face disconcerted me, as it always did no matter how many times I found myself confronting one. I didn’t recognize this smeared, greasy face as belonging to that of any celebrity I knew, licensed or unlicensed – and I knew plenty, thanks to staying current with APE bulletins on most-boosted faces. So it had to be the face of someone with personal significance to Lester. I winced inside. Those cases were always more pathetic, I thought, more ethically problematical. I can barely empathize with wanting to steal some celebrity’s face, to possess a piece of cultural mana and glamour. We’re all taught and wired to lust after such demigods. But to heist the face of someone you know personally, simply to satisfy your own warped desires – ? That was just plain creep city. Teo and Claudette had Lester on his feet, and were reading him his rights. “We are registered officers from the Aspect Protection and Enforcement Squad. You have the right to remain silent….” While my fellow APES processed Lester, I moved over to the twist. “Stand up,” I said, reinforcing the verbal command with the haptic code tapped onto the underside of its wrist. The twist stood up. I used my phone to photograph the face and check it against the global APE database – Facebook, we called it, after some extinct antique software. The ID came back in a couple of seconds. I turned to Lester, who was hanging his head in shame. “Marsha Mueller. What is she to you?”

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Lester’s voice was weak with defeat. “My boss. For seven hellish years. She blocked all my promotions, fucked with all my projects, slagged me in front of my co-workers. She never let up! I wanted to kill her! But I chose this instead. I’m not a monster, am I? What I did was better than murder, wasn’t it?” “We’ll let the courts decide. Now, where’s the omics stick?” “Inside the toilet tank, in a ziploc.” Teo went to retrieve the stick, and soon returned. I looked at the innocuous ten-exabyte storage device that contained all the omics data necessary to grow a stolen face: phenome, proteome, metabolome, mechanome… Reverse-engineered from Marsha Mueller’s stolen DNA. Then I stuck it in my pocket. “Okay, Lester, we’ve got to take you in now. Let’s get you a bathrobe or coat or something. You’re gonna ruin our cruiser’s upholstery otherwise.” Lester cast a surprisingly tender glance at the patient and immobile twist. The object and focus of his hatred had somehow become so dear and precious to him. I had seen it a hundred, hundred times before. But all the emotion flowed in one direction only: the twist’s limited brainpower, derived from a multispecies melange of animal neurons, registered no anxiety or interest in the proceedings. “What – what will become of her?” “This synthetic human reverts to manufacturer property now. Someone from Protein Alley will be by shortly to claim it, once we log your arrest. But first, we need to remove the evidence.” I suppose I could have waited till Lester Holtzclaw had been bundled off, before I defaced the twist, but I wasn’t really concerned with sparing his feelings. Maybe something inside me even wanted to inflict an extra measure of grief on the perp. Whatever the case, I did the necessary deed, just as I had hundreds of times before today. I slapped a microneedle decoupling patch onto the stolen face of Marsha Mueller. Chemical signals cascaded through the human flesh and its distributed ganglia. Simultaneously a thousand microscopic points of attachment and command – nerves, muscles, anchors – retracted from the synthetic substrate of the twist’s own flesh – a substrate compatible with any human genome, and incapable of immune-system rejection without command. Seconds ago the aspect had been seamlessly, invisibly bonded. But now Marsha Mueller’s face began to detach everwhere at once, and fall off like a soggy washcloth: empty, gaping slots at eyes and nostrils and between the toothless lips.

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I caught the wet, pulpy mass, no thicker than the thickness of my hand (but I’ve got a big hand), in a sterile homeostatic pouch, and sealed up the collapsed aspect. The slick, pin-pricked, blood-stippled, factory-issued face of the twist was revealed as a generic aspect as vapid as that of a crashtest dummy: a sketch of humanity, gender-neutral, rendering the lush female body below it utterly surreal. Lester wailed, and threatened to crumple, but Teo and Claudette upheld him and hustled him out of the house. I led the twist back to its sleeping pallet, bedded it down, and ordered it to go offline. On my way out, I secured the ruined door as best as possible, and branded it with smart crime-scene tape that would broadcast a stand-off warning to any phone, and record any trespass. The time was a little past eleven AM, and we still had two more arrests to make that day. 2. Small Faces You can’t control your DNA. I don’t care if you’re Lark Soule, with all her billions, or some sprocket addict in the gutter. You can’t live in an impermeable bubble, although some famous people try. But you’re shedding skin cells all the time. A hair comes loose from your head and flies off in the breeze. You sneeze into a tissue and throw it away. The pedicurist sweeps up your toenails. It’s the technological equivalent of making a voodoo doll. Anybody from intimate lovers to strangers in the street can lay their hands on your genome with a little effort, and from that cheap and easy acquisition it’s a short step to stealing your face. So aspect protection and enforcement always means trying to plug a dike with myriad leaks. We just can’t stop the crime at the lowest level. All we can do is register in Facebook the biometrics of the face of every citizen, so that we can make positive IDs; bust the black labs that grow stolen aspects; and nail the perps that buy them. My duties for the past three years had consisted of solely the lastnamed task. I was good at it, but it was growing old. Every morning when I arrived at the APE House, I already felt weary and stale and jaded. The prospect of confronting the sordid fantasies of my fellow citizens, as embodied in their twists and stolen faces, had begun to nauseate me. You can imagine how I felt by the end of my shift. So although I was initially reluctant to leave Claudette and Teo – we made a great team, and I didn’t know who my new partner might be – I finally put in for reassignment.

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Approval came through about three months after the Holtzclaw arrest. That morning I got a note on my phone to report to Major Hewitt Askeland, instead of to my usual commanding officer. I was excited, but suddenly apprehensive. Upon my arrival at APE House, everything looked strange and unreal to me. I had a sense that my life was branching down some untraceable path, for good or ill. I had to wait outside Askeland’s office. He was seeing a liason from the Aspect Licensing Agency. We interfaced – if you’ll forgive the expression – with the ALA frequently. They were the folks who collected royalties and fees from legitimate aspect licensing, and disbursed the monies to the copyright holders. It was a complicated system: you paid per unit just to grow a famous face, and then additional fees based on public exposure times of any twist wearing that face. Every time you saw what you assumed was your favorite pop star gamely but moronically smiling and waving at the opening of some mall, while two counties away the identical face on a different twist was doing the same thing, the copyright holder was sitting at home raking in the bucks. Every time you trotted out your twist arm candy wearing a famous sexy face, the possessor of the original aspect collected their cut, after agent’s slice. The legal face market was huge. We were only called in to arrest blatant violators of these standard arrangements. Once inside Askeland’s office, I wrinkled my nose at his endo-scent. He had chosen a perma-cologne expressed in his sweat that reminded me of a cinnamon plantation crossed with a tobacco farm. Maybe his wife liked it. “Detective Smoke,” Askeland greeted me. He dressed sharper than a lustron dandy, but back in the day he had held that same perp-self-befouling record I currently claimed. He stood to shake my hand, and I felt the undiminished strength of his grip. “Have a seat, Isham. We’re sorry to be losing you from the offender squad. But likewise, the lab raiders are getting a good cop.” “I hope to contribute a lot to the cause, Major.” “I’m sure you will. But let me bring you up to speed on the scene. Have you been following the trend in miniaturization and portability of face-growth tech?” “No, not really.” “Well, it’s alarming, and a hell of a headache for us. The era of just a few years ago, when you needed large stocks of special nutrient feed, an uninterruptable power source, and a big culture vat are no more. We don’t find warehouse labs that resemble pirate versions of the corporate facegrowing facilites anymore. Now, all you need is a matrix canister the size of a fire extinguisher that runs off a lithium-air battery, a few bags of sugar, and some amino acids from GNC. It’s a function of home meat produc-

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tion. You can kludge a George Foreman Make-a-Steak device into a facegrowing chamber with minimal smarts. The blueprints are just a download away.” “I get it. Every man his own aspect knockoff artist.” “That’s just it. And, I’m sorry to say, the old-timers among our lab raiders don’t really know the best tactics to track down these one-person operations. They’re still fighting the last war, looking for large-scale crime. That’s why we need your skills. And those of your peers on the force.” “That brings up an important question, Major. Who’s my new partner?” Askeland used his phone. “Detective Roy, can you come in now, please?” Maybe I had seen Velzy Roy around the APE House before, and maybe not. But now, as she walked through the office door, she registered on my alert brain and senses like a terrorist target on a drone’s hot mouse cortex. Nearly six feet tall, long fall of wavy hair with the sheen of a black dahlia in a florist’s window, flawless mochachino complexion, a smart bindi in the shape of a blinking eye, curves like the arc of a swallow in flight. A stunner, a looker. With one exception. Her face was as blank as that of a twist. Oh, all the requisite features for a unique beauty were there. But emotionally, the canvas was empty, frozen. She radiated some kind of suppressed damage, a legacy of hurt, and upon first impression I silently cursed the luck of the draw that had brought us together. Your partner can save your life – or get you dead. You want one who’s always one-hundred percent present in the moment, not off nursing some hidden wound in their happy place. But I let none of my trepidation show as I stood and shook her surprisingly strong hand. “I’ve followed your busts, Detective Smoke.” Her self-possessed and equable voice matched her formidable and striking looks. “You do good field work.” “Isham, please.” “Velzy’s fine then.” “Thanks for the compliments. I’m counting on you to get me up to speed in a new game.” Major Askeland said, “That brings me to a point of tactics, Isham – a matter Detective Roy knows well. I just told you that nowadays the majority of the face cloning is done by individuals. But they’re networked into cells. When someone wants an illegal aspect, they go to a face broker, who contracts out the job.These brokers are insulated by several layers of command. Busting the individual growers is good enough, but ultimately futile. There’s always another low-level scab ready to take their place. But

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anytime you can work your way up the network and take out a broker, you immediately undercut a thousand growers, who all lose their orders.” “I understand.” “Good. Now, I’m giving you and Detective Roy the rest of the day off, to get to know each other and talk about your strategies. Then, tomorrow, I’ll brief you on some open cases.” Velzy and I thanked the Major and left his office. “Manny Almeida’s?” I said. “Suits me.” The bar was just a few blocks from the APE House, and attracted its fair share of off-duty cops in the evening. But in the middle of the day it would be semi-vacant and quiet. They offered a limited but hearty menu of Brazilian churrasco and caipirinhas as subtle and deadly as IEDs. We grabbed an isolated dark booth and ordered food and drinks. While we waited for the grilled meats, we sipped our lime-tinged poison and chatted about nothing much. Velzy was politely friendly and reasonably informative, without really ever opening up. When the fragrant, steaming platters arrived, I was gratified to see her dig in with gusto. She certainly wasn’t acting like any kind of victim, depressed to the extent of having no appetite. And that big lush body of hers needed calories to stay as fit as it evidently was. After our third round of drinks, I started telling her about King, my jacksy. “He’s an unusual transgenic mix. Sixty percent jackal, forty percent husky, instead of the reverse ratio. Best corpse-sniffing animal the local FEMA emergency responders ever had. But King’s retired now. Burned out his nostrils on a suicide victim he tracked down in the middle of a heavily wooded state park. Guy had swallowed a pint of insecticide, and the poison was leaking out of his pores – “ Actually, King had retired due to hip dysplasia before I had adopted him. But the booze made me want to test Velzy with a typical cop’s horror story, to see if I could get her to open up or break down or do something revealing, so that I could gauge her mental condition better. Instead, she calmly set down her fork and regarded me with eyes like steadicams. “Isham, maybe you’re wondering something about me. Wondering what makes me so distant. I try not to lapse into a thousand-yard stare. I socialize as best I can. I don’t think I’m overly preoccupied with my past, or damaged to the point of jeopardizing myself or you during the course of our work. All my skill-sets are intact. I’ll make a good partner for you, just as I have for others. But I am recently recovered from a nervous breakdown, complicated by PTSD. Two years in the past now. Since that

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time, I’ve gotten some regulatory wetware installed that keeps me at an even keel. I never get too excited about anything, good or bad. That’s my story.” “Okay. Understood.” “Fine. Thank you for your empathy.” But like a fool, I couldn’t let the matter go, and after our fifth drink, I said, “Want to talk about what triggered your breakdown?” Velzy’s eyes glittered with an alcoholic sheen, but also with some underlay of pissed-off resentment toward my probing, an emotion kept damped down by her wetware. “You want to hear my story? Okay. I was on the offender squad, just like you. And then I made what turned out to be my last bust. He was a cannibal. You ever meet one of those kinda perps? Buys stolen aspects not in order to sleeve a twist, but for cooking and eating. Broiled faces, a la carte. But this one was a pedophage. Specialized in kids. The faces of toddlers, small as burgers after they had shrunk from cooking. Do you know what a dishful of those smell like, fresh from the stove? If you don’t, count yourself lucky. Because I still smell them every day. Faint and distant, but always at the edge of perception. I came back to APE just to try to make sure no one else ever had to experience what I did.” All words had left me. I stared at the congealed meats on the platter between us. When at last I found my tongue, I said, “You set ‘em up, I’ll knock ‘em down.” Velzy’s lips evinced the thinnest ghost of a smile. “Or vice versa – partner.” 3. Skunk Faced By two AM, the stakeout had already gone on for twelve hours, and the inside of our unmarked car smelled like durian-flavored potato chips, stale coffee, hot pastrami, horseradish and mustard – all of which we had consumed during that interval. Velzy didn’t favor any endo-perfume, but her perspiration was scent-neutral, as was mine. Our methane-suppressing gut flora were working, and we each wore industrial-strength epidermal scrubber bugs. Gone were the days of funky cop sweat and flatulence as background aroma to such assignments. We were parked in the deep shadows at the mouth of an alley, beneath an extinct street lamp, surveilling the front of a large anonymous building that had once been a server farm. Totally unsuited for today’s organic server farms of networked twist brains – or for any other obvious

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commercial use – the building and its worthless contents had been abandoned in place for years, the district around it going steadily to seed. No pedestrians passed, and very few vehicles. The air smelled of the city’s distant river, beyond which a freeway droned. Velzy continued to exhibit a loose-limbed infinite patience, the silhouette of her striking face at ease and unperturbed. But I didn’t have the benefit of her wetware, and was starting to get antsy. “Tell me again about this cara-ladrona we’re waiting for. What makes her so important?” Velzy’s voice was as steady as her statue-like visage. “Rosa Todd. Most people see her as nothing but a party animal. And animal is the operative word, because she’s always sporting some beasty mod or other. She lives off her father’s reputation and trust fund. But she also happens to be one of the best face counterfeiters around. Her work is meticulous – artistic even. The faces she produces never show any malformations from improper use of growth hormones or morphogen gradients. So all the richest and most powerful brokers use her. If we can nab her with an illegal face, we might be able to get to some really important bad guys. But she’s very shifty. Never keeps the matrix containers at home, or with any of her friends. Tracking her here took months.” “And she’s going to show up tonight for sure?” “Word is she’s got a ripe face to harvest for an important client.” “Okay, it’s worth losing another few hours of sleep then.” Velzy suddenly stiffened from her watchful repose and, sotto voce, said, “Won’t have to wait much longer. There she is.” Across the street from us a short compact female trotted down the sidewalk. I say trotted, because her bare legs had been reconfigured into non-human articulation, and she sported a large bushy tail. She wore a torso-covering garment with a little frilly skirt. I had my hand on the car door release, but Velzy stopped me. “Let her get inside. That place is enormous, and we could search all night for the face. We need her to lead us to it, and for her to have it in her possession when we nail her.” We watched as Rosa Todd ducked down the side of the building. I held my phone up toward the old server farm, and the magnified infrared image of her easing in through a side entrance showed clear. We gave her forty-five seconds, and then quickly reached the same door. Inside the windowless building, perfect blackness reigned. We used our phones to navigate. Fifty yards down the ranks of dead storage cabinets, all their unspinning discs holding yesterday’s news, Rosa Todd’s heat blur stood out. She must have been using a similar app – unless her eyes

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themselves had been modded – because she moved without hesitation. But she also never thought to look behind herself. We silently narrowed the gap between us. Todd turned down an aisle. We quickened our pace. We came upon her kneeling, lifting a piece of false flooring, where the cables ran. The face-growing unit stood out as a distinct heat source. “APES,” I bellowed, hoping to scare the shit out of her. “Drop it!” I scared something out of her all right: a burst of skunk juice from implanted glands at the base of her tail. The spray caught me full in the face. While I tried frantically to regain my sight, I heard scrabbling, crashing, yelling and cursing. By the time I could see again, the fight was over. Velzy had Todd in a one-armed chokehold, and was reaching for her liana cuffs with the other. My partner regarded me with no obvious sympathy. “I stood off to one side, so she couldn’t nail us both. She dived down under the false flooring after spritzing you, and we never would have caught her. But I grabbed that idiotic tail and yanked. It’s anchored very well. Do you think you can collect the face, while I zip up Stinky…?” I nodded in mute agreement. My epidermal bugs were already dealing with the stink. Soon I would be back to normal. Humbled, but normal. 4. Smiley Face I would never be able to bring myself to regard Bangor as the nation’s true capital, no matter how many politicians and transplanted landmarks the Maine city boasted. The Washington Monument consorting with Paul Bunyan’s statue just rang false to me somehow. But I was part of only a small minority holding that feeling. Most of the nation had transferred their allegiances from broiling, flooded, ruin-strewn DC to the cooler northern city with no compunctions or unease. Velzy and I had taken mass rail transit from Manhattan and arrived after a pleasant two-hour trip. We talked about the case for the first hour of the journey, and then I dozed for the second. After a full three days of pleasant and mild-mannered interrogation without benefit of sleep or food, Rosa Todd had ratted out her immediate superior, a mid-level face broker named Claire Layton. But when we raided Layton’s last-known address, we came up dry. An APB went out on Layton, but there was little else we could do immediately. Except investigate the face that Todd had been sculpting.

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The face belonged to a dead woman, Joanie Sprawls. Five years ago Joanie had died, apparently of a drug overdose, leaving behind no heirs or immediate family except sister Wynonie. The dead woman’s name would probably have faded totally from consensus memory, except for one thing. Wynonie Sprawls, the living sister, was married to Winfrey Shifflet, a senator from Texas deemed a frontrunner in the next presidential election. Joanie’s tragic death had been a news blip in Senator Shifflet’s career, sad but ultimately inconsequential. Whenever a non-celebrity face was found cloned, we always interviewed the family. The kind of impulses and motivations leading to such an unglamorous counterfeiting were usually very personal. In this case, though, there might also be some political angle. “You think some opponent is out to smear Shifflet through his dead sister-in-law?” I asked Velzy. “Hard to see how.” “Let me work at it.” “Knock yourself out.” That was my cue to nap. At the Bangor train station, Velzy and I looked around for a hired car out to the Shifflet home, just about eight miles south of downtown in the district of Hampden, which had more or less become the Georgetown of Bangor. But on this busy summer Saturday with tourists aplenty, nothing was available except a pricey twist palanquin. “I hate these,” Velzy said. “Me too. But we’ve got no other options.” “The Major will kick at our expense account though.” “He needs some token that we’re not perfect.” Velzy pulled her almost-smile, and we climbed into the luxurious, well suspensioned, transparent box. We braced ourselves as four intensely muscled twists lofted us off the ground and began to trot south in their special lane of the street. I didn’t opaque the cab, as I wanted to see our route. A pack of twists under human supervision were busy excavating the future site of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Their backbreaking labor was perfectly carbon-neutral. The Shifflet mansion, home to the Texas Senator when Congress was in session, was a Gilded Age Italianate building overlooking a luscious green lawn that ran down to the banks of the Penobscot River.While our blank-faced twists crouched in the driveway, sweating and swallowing great gulps of air, we announced ourselves via phone. A maid let us in, and conducted us to a library full of actual analog books. They must have come with the house, because I couldn’t picture a Texas politico holding such a thing.

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To give Senator Shifflet and his wife credit, they kept us waiting only about two minutes. Instantly familiar, the Senator struck me as even more photogenic and charismatic in person than he did in his media appearances. With his trim physique, thick mane of silver hair and boyish face, he combined experience and youthful idealism in one highly electable package. Smiling broadly and a bit automatically, he shook Velzy’s hand first, then took my own in a firm clasp. When he spoke, however, his expression modulated to a somberness befitting the topic. “Welcome, Detective Roy, Detective Smoke. I’m sorry you had to come all this way to our beautiful capital on such a morbid mission. But we’ll do all we can to help you. Now, please allow me to introduce my wife, Wynonie.” Like her formerly beautiful dead sister Joanie, Wynonie Sprawls Shifflet had once been a Texas state beauty queen – but that was a long time ago. Now she weighed about seventy-five pounds more than in her prime, with rolls of fat at neck and paunch. Still, dressed in designer finery, she sparkled becomingly, exuding traditional Southern vivacity, dampened only by the melancholy sentiments raised by the nature of our visit. “I’m very pleased to meet you all. But this awful news – my poor little sister’s face – “ Wynonie Shifflet began softly to weep, and her husband cradled her with one arm while patting her broad rump tenderly with genuine affection. “There, there, dear, these officers will soon have the criminal under lock and key, and there will be no further profanation of Joanie’s memory.” Regaining control of herself, Wynonie said, “It’s only that my poor sister was such an innocent. She was just a troubled soul. The drug use, the unwise choice of partners and friends – Why would anyone want to resurrect her in this vile fashion?” Velzy stepped in. “That is indeed the crux of our visit, Senator. Can you think of anyone who might wish to do you or your career some kind of harm by impersonating Joanie, or raising her up as some kind of specter? Was there anything more to her death than the details that reached public notice?” Senator Shifflet cogitated visibly, as if he had been asked to balance the national budget instantly. “No, no, it was simply the unavoidably tawdry death of a drug addict. No whiff of scandal otherwise. I simply can’t see why anyone would commission a counterfeit of my deceased sister-inlaw’s aspect.” “Mrs. Shifflet?” “No, I – I have no other insights than what my husband offered.”

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Velzy and I noodled around the matter for another half hour, accepted a cold iced tea from the Senator and his wife, promised laughingly to support any future runs for national office he might make, and then departed. In the palanquin, I said, “Only finding out who commissioned that aspect of Joanie Sprawls will let us crack this case.” Velzy’s calm voice nonetheless managed to contain some hint of foreboding, based on whatever her intuition was whispering to her. “Let’s hope nobody else wants to stop us from finding out.” 5. The Man of a Thousand Faces Someone had truly intended to render Claire Layton’s corpse evidentially useless to us. They had sown the dead body – at least I hoped Layton had been dead at the time – with fast-growing mycofibril spores. Her remains, in a transparent quarantine bag, resembled an amorphous fallen tree trunk overgrown with bruise-colored bracket fungi. I didn’t believe Layton’s death had been coincidental. The matter of Joanie Sprawls’ counterfeit aspect had suddenly acquired much larger implications. But I still couldn’t figure out how anyone could have planned to use her stolen face against the Shifflets. I turned away from the disturbing sight and said to Velzy, “What next?” “We need to crack open the level above Layton. I don’t think that whoever ordered the Joanie Sprawls aspect placed the order directly with Layton. She was known for her expertise and contacts downward, among the cara-ladrones, not upward, for her client list. Let’s go see Todd again.” We got from the city morgue to the cells at APE House just in time to find Rosa Todd making bail. Her rich father’s attorneys had finally managed to circumvent the necessary judges. A week behind bars had not improved her disposition. Like some tantrum-prone child unaware of the seriousness of her offenses, Todd stuck her tongue out at us and feinted with her striped tail. I didn’t flinch, because I knew she was still stuffed with jailhouse inhibitors. “You APEs can suck my dick! If I get even ten hours of community service for this charge, I’ll be fucking stunned!” “You have a dick too?” I said. “Is it as rancid as your ass?” Todd’s face burned solar-bright, and then she said, “Eat shit and die! While you’re jerking off at home tonight, I’ll be at Club Mitosis with all my beautiful friends!” She stormed out, insofar as someone weighing about eighty-five pounds and looking like an anorexic chipmunk could storm.

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Velzy regarded me with mild curiosity. “Was that juvenile banter strictly necessary?” I smiled. “It sure was. Now we have ourselves another stakeout. With luck, the bouncers at Club Mitosis will halt people outside in line long enough for us to get a long-range Facebook ID for each one.” *** We ranked the people who had partied at Club Mitosis that night with Rosa Todd in order of interest, and on our third visit we hit paydirt. Bradford ter Peste was a Dutch national currently resident in the USA. He had been a multi-millionaire from his shipping interests in Rotterdam, before that city drowned and his holdings took major hits. Now, he was merely comfortably well-off. His apartment overlooked Park Avenue. The doorman probably made more in tips in a month than Velzy or I did in yearly wages. We rode the elevator to the twenty-first floor. Bradford ter Peste towered six inches above even me, all shaggy blonde hair and ruddy complexion. His English was impeccable, as were his clothes from the trendy new Italian designer, Paola Discepola. “Please come in, detectives. You mentioned something about a stolen face? I can assure you that none from my collection are missing, nor have any been illegally duped. You are welcome to examine them, as well as my ALA licenses.” He thumb-swiped at his phone and squirted us all the proper documents. I didn’t bother studying them that moment, since I was certain he would never have given us forged licenses. “Yes, we’d like to see your library of faces, Mr. ter Peste. Are any of them currently sleeved on twists?” Ter Peste regarded us with elite condescension, as if we were Visigoths crapping in a Roman villa. “I do not believe in having dumb brutes model anything as exquisite as a human face. My collection is all contained in homeostatic display units, where their beauty may truly shine. Please follow me.” We marched through a succession of rooms each twice as big as my whole apartment, before reaching the Dutchman’s library of faces. Subtle low-watt track lighting illuminated a forest of columns, atop each one of which rested a sealed glass cylinder. Inside each life-support unit an invisible armature supported a living face in anatomically correct configurations, feeding it nutrients through capillaries. Of course, each

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face lacked eyes and teeth, but otherwise they were utterly lifelike. The effect was haunting, a gallery of mute and blind observers. Velzy took out her phone. “You don’t mind if I ID each one of these, and compare them against your licenses, do you, Mr. ter Peste.” “No, of course not.” While my partner handled that chore, I sized up ter Peste, looking for some gap in his smug connoisseur’s confidence. “You’re obviously a great appreciator of human beauty, Brad. Is there a Mrs. ter Peste who meets your standards?” “I regret that so far I have not found the perfect woman.” “Is that why you commissioned a stolen aspect of Joanie Sprawls? She was gorgeous, I’ll admit it. At least until the drugs devastated her. Stick her face on the right twist, and you’ve got a knockout piece of tail.” Ter Peste’s expression didn’t change much, but I could tell I had rankled him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, detective.” Velzy continued to flash the faces, seemingly focused on that task, but I could tell she was paying close attention to our dialogue. “Maybe it’s like you said, you don’t ever bother using a twist. Maybe you just have sex with the empty faces. Roll them up into a fleshy tube – “ Ter Peste lost it then, growled and threw a punch. I ducked, but still caught part of his jarring fist on the side of my face. Then he was writhing on the ground under Velzy’s waver beam spotlighting his crotch. I read him his rights as he was recovering, and told him the charge was assault. Now the apartment was a legal crime scene. We started tossing it. My phone picked up a hidden heat source behind a wall. A certain bookshelf swung aside. Inside were several more faces of the illegal kind. One belonged to Wynonie Sprawls Shifflet. “Bingo,” I said. Velzy replied, “This is very disturbing – and puzzling too.” I turned to ter Peste. “C’mon, pal, it’s time for you to take a little ride.” I had a hunch we’d get a name out of the face broker in less time than it had taken to break Rosa Todd. I was right. But I never guessed what name it would be. 6. The Face That Must Die Bangor loomed ahead of the slowing train. The weather outside was grey and drizzling. Same inside our compartment. Velzy and I weren’t talking to each other. Not a good state for partners to find themselves in. Finally she broke the silent impasse.

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“You know I still don’t condone your strategy today. And I could stop you too. I am the senior detective here.” “Velzy, listen to me. This is simple social engineering. It’s something good cops do all the time. I’ll bet you used to do it too. Picking at sore spots until someone explodes. An emotional perp is a careless perp, and that’s the way we like them. They practically fall into our laps. You’d agree, if it weren’t – “ I stopped. Velzy gave me a hard stare. “Weren’t for my wetware. My blocks. Is that what you were going to say?” “Yes. Yes, damn it! I’ve worked with you now for nearly a month. I’ve seen what a good cop you are, what a smart and capable person you are. But you’re like a hobbled thoroughbred – like a racecar stuck in third gear. You can’t run full out. Half our job is feeling stuff, and you’re swaddled in yards of bubble wrap. You’ve got to drop the shields and take a chance on getting hurt again.” “And I suppose you’ll be there to pick up the pieces when I do?” Nobody ever called me a touchy-feely type guy. I hadn’t had a real lover in two years, just sex partners from hookup services. I didn’t want Velzy for a lover now, I told myself. But without planning to, I pulled her to me and held her tight. “Yes,” I said quietly. “Yes, I’ll be there.” She was doing something in my arms, but I didn’t realize what her jerky spasms signalled. At first I thought she was trying to break away. But then I realized what was happening. It was as close as her wetware would allow her to come to sobbing. When she had finished, I let her go. Damp eyes contrasted with her usual stolid expression. “God damn you,” she said. “You’d better be!” The train pulled in, and we got off. I was carrying the veiled homeostatic unit filled with Wynonie Shifflet’s stolen face. This time we found a traditional cab. We passed what seemed to be the eternal twists digging the unchanging hole for the Reflecting Pool. As we pulled up to the front door of the Shifflet mansion, I said, “Remember, this is the only way we can bag our guy today. We’ve got no hard evidence, no financial transactions or video meetings or tapped phone calls. It’s only the word of ter Peste against a respected Senator. You know our case is shit, unless we provoke something.” “I’m onboard.” “Great.”

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No books had been touched in the library so far as I could see. The senator joined us, alone this time. He glanced at my burden, then looked uneasily away. “Senator, we need to see your wife too.” “She’s feeling unwell, I’m afraid.” Velzy said, “We have to insist.” “Oh, all right. Follow me.” In a sun room and conservatory rendered dreary by the weather, we found Wynonie Shifflet half reclining on a couch. When she saw us, her eyes were drawn like steel balls by a magnet to what I carried. She tried to look me in the face, but couldn’t. “Mrs. Shifflet, we found the man who commissioned the aspect of your dead sister. But he wasn’t acting on his own initiative. He was just a broker. Someone placed an order with him. And that person also ordered this at the same time.” I raised the cloth veiling the carrier, and showed Wynonie Shifflet her own stolen face. Velzy’s attention was riveted on the woman, while I observed her ashen-faced husband. But the senator’s wife failed to exclaim or break down, simply asking tonelessly, “And who ultimately ordered these two faces?” “Your husband.” I waited for someone to speak, and finally Wynonie said, “That’s not possible.” I started to refute her when Velzy suddenly made a move. In a blink, she had slapped a decoupling patch to Wynonie’s cheek. The face of the woman began instantly and unstoppably to peel away like the skin off a fruit, until it plopped to the floor. Underneath was the visage of Joanie Shifflet, Wynonie’s dead sister. The immunosuppressive drugs required for a human to wear an aspect are easy to obtain. They’re the same ones that allow beasty mods to be grafted on and prosper. But they do cause decay in the aspect and the need for replacements. And wearing an aspect over your own face around the clock also takes its toll. The thousand piercings of the microattachments, the sequestering of the hidden face from sun and air. Joanie Shifflet looked like an exposed grub or woodlouse. Senator Shifflet began to speak. “You must understand. It was all an accident. I was drunk one night, and Wynonie and I had a fight. She fell, hit her head, and died. Her sister had no real life of her own. She agreed to the masquerade – “ The senator’s wife said, “Tell them the truth, Winfrey.” And then I knew. I hit Joanie’s face with a second decoupler.

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That aspect sloughed off as well, revealing Wynonie once again. But this doubly buried stratum of the woman resembled a pasty, gauntcheeked ghoul more than any living human. When she spoke, the effect was that of a voice issuing from a grave. “He and Joanie were lovers. And I killed her. And took her place to please him. And then she took mine. He knew – but he didn’t know. It was all a fantasy.” The raddled revenant picked up the Joanie face, cupped it gently and crooned, “My sister, myself, my sister, myself – “

Contributors MARLEEN S. BARR is known for her pioneering work in feminist science fiction and teaches English at the City University of New York. She has won the Science Fiction Research Association Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction criticism. Barr is the author of Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory, Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond, Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction, and Genre Fission: A New Discouse Practice for Cultural Studies. Barr has edited many anthologies and co-edited the special science fiction issue of PMLA. PAUL A.J. BEEHLER studied English literature at the University of California, Los Angeles and at the California State University, East Bay where he received a Master’s degree specialized in Shakespeare and 19th century British literature. He completed his doctoral studies in Shakespeare at the University of California, Riverside where, as a lecturer, he now teaches classes in composition, literature, and history. He has published in Revista Alicanto as well as Write It Review and is currently pursuing scholarship that pertains to the supernatural in Shakespeare. ASTRID BÖGER is professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Hamburg. She received her PhD at the University of Düsseldorf in 2000, where she also worked as lecturer until 2005. She held the position of Associate Professor of American Studies at the Radboud University Nijmegen from 2005 to 2009 before taking the position at the University of Hamburg. Her research interests include visual culture, graphic novels and transnational American studies. Her most recent publication is Envisioning the Nation: The Early American World’s Fairs and the Formation of Culture (2010). JACOBO CANADY is a PhD student in literature in English language at the University of Seville. His master thesis was titled “Science Fiction and the Future of the Body: An Approach to H.G. Wells.” At the moment he is writing his dissertation, dealing with the singularity in science fiction novels. At the same time, he is also completing an MA in philosophy, where he is preparing a master thesis on the political ontology in the work of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. ARIANNA CASALI holds a PhD in Literatures in English from Sapienza University of Rome, and a degree cum laude in Anglo-American Literatures from

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the University of Bologna. Her main areas of interest are post-apocalyptic SF, dystopian fiction, as well as Film and Adaptation Studies, and she is currently working on the relationship between dystopian SF and political/ social criticism. Among her publications are “Post-apocalyptic London in the 1970s: Survivors on TV”, published in the Literary London Journal and “I Am Legend by Richard Matheson: the post-apocalyptic setting of human nature from the USA to Italy and back”, in the anthology Translating America: Importing, Translating, Misrepresenting, Mythicizing, Communicating America. WALLACE T. CLEAVES II teaches composition as a lecturer in the University Writing Program at the University of California at Riverside. He has also taught Medieval Renaissance and Native American literature as a visiting lecturer at Pomona College in Claremont at California State Fullerton and at UC Riverside. He is a member of the Gabrielino/Tongva Native American tribe, the indigenous peoples of the Los Angeles area, and has served in a variety of positions on the tribal council and as a member of the shamanic council. INGO CORNILS is Senior Lecturer in German and Director of Student Education in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Leeds, UK. Among his publications are the volumes (Un-)erfüllte Wirklichkeit: Neue Studien zu Uwe Timms Werk (with Frank Finlay, 2006), Baader-Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism (with GerritJan Berendse, 2008), A Companion to the Works of Hermann Hesse (2009) and Memories of 1968: International Perspectives (with Sarah Waters, 2010). He has edited two special issues of the academic journal literatur für leser that focus on German Science Fiction. He is currently working on a volume entitled Alternative Worlds (with Ricarda Vidal) and a monograph on the construction of ‘1968’ in Germany. JUSTYNA DESZCZ-TRYHUBCZAK is Assistant Professor of Literature and co-founder of the Center for Young People’s Literature and Culture at the Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland. She is the author of a monograph on Salman Rushdie, Rushdie in Wonderland: “Fairytaleness” in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction, and has published articles on Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, fairy tales, and fantasy for young adults. Her research interests include children’s literature and culture, utopianism, ecocriticism, young adult fantasy fiction, and media studies. PAUL DI FILIPPO sold his first story in 1977 and is now approaching his 200th publication, many of which have been collected into over 25 books. He is the author of fantasy, science fiction and weird fiction, such as The Steampunk Trilogy (1995), Ribofunk (1996), Fuzzy Dice (2003) and Harsh Oases (2009). He also writes regularly as a critic for the Washington Post and other

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newspapers. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his mate of 36 years, Deborah Newton. LILY GLASNER received her BA from Tel Aviv University, her MA and her PhD at Bar Ilan University, where she currently works as a lecturer in the department of Comparative Literature and World Literature. Her main fields of interests are Christian Literature of the Middle Ages, Children’s Literature and the thought and writings of C.S. Lewis. SARAH HERBE holds a PhD from the University of Salzburg, where she works as Assistant Professor at the Department of English and American Studies. In her PhD thesis she examined characters and methods of characterization in new British hard science fiction novels, with a thematic focus on genetic engineering. Further research interests include women’s life writing and the interrelations between poetry and popular culture. In 2011, she co-edited the collection of essays From the Cradle to the Grave: Life-Course Models in Literary Genres together with Sabine Coelsch-Foisner. MINWEN HUANG is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Leipzig in Germany. She studies the genre of fantastic literature, especially science fiction, with the help of literary imaginary theories and is investigating the writings on artificial man for her doctoral thesis. Her master’s thesis, The Matrix Trilogy as a Postmodern Myth, was published in 2008. ANNE KLAUS studied English and German at the University of Osnabrück. From 2008 until 2011 she was employed as research assistant at the University of Osnabrück, working on a doctoral thesis on savior figures in English fantasy fiction for children and young adults, which she will finish in 2012. Her research interests lie in the field of children’s fantasy fiction, the Victorian era, Shakespeare, and Arthurian romance. Since August 2011 she has started her teacher training at a secondary school. SIMONE KNEWITZ is Assistant Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Bonn, Germany. Her research interests include modernist American poetry and poetics, popular culture, television and new media as well as the intersections of literature, culture, and the economy. She is presently finishing a book manuscript on the modernist poetics of Amy Lowell and William Carlos Williams and working on a new research project entitled “On Private Property: The Rhetoric and Aesthetics of Ownership in the United States, 1865-2010.” Her monograph Making Progress: Pragmatism and Utopia in the Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and John Dewey was published in 2006.

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KARIN KOKORSKI obtained an MA in English and Literature from the University of Osnabrück, where, she is currently working as a research assistant. Her dissertation focuses on war and its justifications in fantastic literature for children and young adults. Her main research interests involve literature for children and young adults, the fantastic, modern fairy tales, gender studies, as well as interfaces between literature and sociology. Her most recent publication is “I Want More! The Insatiable Villain in Children’s Literature and Young Adults’ Fiction” in the anthology Villains: Global Perspectives on Villains and Villainy Today (2011). In 2011, she was a Fulbright Grantee at San Diego State University. CHRISTIAN LENZ is research assistant and lecturer at the department of British Cultural Studies at the Technische Universität Dortmund. He obtained his MA in English and Comparative Literature the Ruhr-University Bochum. His fields of interest are contemporary British fiction as well as horror texts of many sorts – with a special focus on zombies – and he is currently writing his PhD thesis about the connection of trivial literature and cultural geography. MARGARIDA MCMURRY is a PhD scholarship student in English Literature at the University of Oslo, under the supervision of professor Jakob Lothe, University of Oslo, and professor Liza Zunhsine, University of Kentucky. Her thesis combines Theory of Mind and Rhetorical Theory approaches to text analysis. She is also co-ordinating the academic program for the international conference “Return of the Ring”, organised by the Tolkien Society to take place in 2012. JAN CHRISTOPH MEISTER is a Professor for Modern German Literature at the University of Hamburg. His research fields include Narratology and Digital Humanities. He has also taught at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa and the LMU in Munich. Among his recent publications is a volume on Time: From Concept to Narrative Construct. A Reader (together with Wilhelm Schernus, 2011). HANS-HARALD MÜLLER is professor for Modern German Literature at the University Hamburg, where he has been working since 1971. He has been guest professor Washington University in St.Louis, at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, at the University of Rostock and at St. John’s College in Cambridge. His research areas are literary theory, history of the sciences, and fantastic literature. MARKUS OPPOLZER holds a PhD from the University of Salzburg, where he is currently employed as a lecturer (PostDoc) at the Department of English and American Studies. In his PhD thesis he applied Victor Turner’s theory of liminality to a study of early British Gothic fiction. Since then, his

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research interests have shifted to the comparative study of narrative strategies in various media, focusing mainly on comics. CLEMENS RUTHNER is Assistant Professor of German and European Studies at Trinity College Dublin. He holds a PhD from the University Vienna with a thesis on fantastic literature, canon and cultural economics. He worked as a lecturer in Budapest, Antwerp, and has been visiting professor in Canada as well. He serves as academic director of Trinity’s School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies. He has published widely on Austrian literature, on the literary fantastic, on alterity and on Central European and Postcolonial Studies. RENÉ SCHALLEGGER is a research assistant and lecturer for British and Canadian Studies at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria where he studied English and French Literature, as well as at the Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. He received his MA in English with a thesis on “Voices of Authority: A Postmodern Reading of Babylon 5”. He is currently pursuing a PhD on “Joyful Games of Meaning-Making: Role-playing Games and Postmodern Notions of Literature.” His research interests are theory of postmodernism and media studies (games, comics, tv, and film). LARS SCHMEINK is a research assistant and lecturer for American Studies at the University of Hamburg, where he received his MA in 2005. He also holds a Master of Higher Education (2010) from the University of Hamburg. He is currently finishing his PhD at the Humboldt University of Berlin on the posthuman in recent science fiction. He is the president of the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung (GFF), as well as co-editor-in-chief of the Zeitschrift für Fantastikforschung and managing editor of the SFRA Review. BRIAN STABLEFORD has published more than seventy novels, most of his recent productions falling into two series, one consisting of futuristic “tales of the biotech revolution” and the other featuring Edgar Allan Poe’s pioneering detective Auguste Dupin, investigating cases that he stubbornly insists have no supernatural component, although his friends and adversaries sometimes take a different view. He has also published more than twenty collections of short stories, more than twenty non-fiction books and more than eighty volumes of translations from French into English. ALLAN WEISS is Associate Professor of English and Humanities at York University in Toronto, Canada. He is Chair of the Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction, and co-curated the National Library of Canada exhibit on Canadian science fiction and fantasy, “Out of This World,” in 1995. He is also the author of both mainstream and fantastic short stories; his stories have appeared in such journals and anthologies as Fiddlehead,

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Windsor Review, Wascana Review, On Spec, and Tesseracts, and his story collection Living Room (Boheme Press) was published in 2001. AGATA ZARZYCKA is Assistant Professor of Literature and a member of the Center for Young People's Literature and Culture at the Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland. She has published a monograph on role-playing games, Socialized Fiction: Role-Playing Games as a Multidimensional Space of Interaction between Literary Theory and Practice, as well as articles on role-playing games and fantasy fiction. Her research interests include speculative fiction and interactivity in popular culture.