Reading the Fantastic Imagination: The Avatars of a Literary Genre 1443853879, 9781443853873

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Foreword
Introduction: It’s a Kind of Magic • Dana Percec
Part I: Fantasy: Terms and Boundaries
1 Fantasy: Beyond Failing Definitions • Pia Brînzeu
2 Gothic Literature: A Brief Outline • Francisco Javier Sánchez-Verdejo Pérez
3 From Fantastic Twilight to Fifty Shades Fanfiction: Not Another Cinderella Story • Condruţa Goşa
4 Fantasy and the Unicorn in Iris Murdoch’s The Unicornand Tracy Chevalier’s The Lady And The Unicorn • Dana Percec
Part II: Critical Fantasy
5 Dystopian Realms of the 2000s: The Road and Never Let Me Go • Cristina Chevereşan
6 South African Speculative Fiction • Luiza Caraivan
Part III: The Fantastic Imagination on Film
7 Six Impossible Things Before Midnight: Gothic Fantasy in Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland • Daniela Rogobete
8 Son, Lover and Scapegoat: The Progression of Horror in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands • Adriana Răducanu
9 Lady and the Alien: Avatars of an Iconic Duo • Gabriela Glăvan
10 Subjectivity (Un)Plugged: The Matrix (1999) • Eliza Claudia Filimon
Part IV: Vampires and Machines
11 Out of This World:(Arch)Angels as the New Vampires? Nalini Singh’s Angels’ Blood • Andreea Şerban
12 Steampunk: Discovering Old and New Attractions • Andreea Verteş-Olteanu
Part V: Fantasy and Beyond
13 Fantasy Theme Analysis: Rhetorical Visions of Immigration in the British Press • Irina Diana Mădroane
Endnote
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Reading the Fantastic Imagination

Reading the Fantastic Imagination: The Avatars of a Literary Genre

Edited by

Dana Percec

Reading the Fantastic Imagination: The Avatars of a Literary Genre Edited by Dana Percec This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Dana Percec and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5387-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5387-3

TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword ................................................................................................. viii Introduction .............................................................................................. xv It’s a Kind of Magic Dana Percec Part I: Fantasy: Terms and Boundaries Chapter One ................................................................................................ 2 Fantasy: Beyond Failing Definitions Pia Brînzeu Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 39 Gothic Literature: A Brief Outline Francisco Javier Sánchez-Verdejo Pérez Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 57 From Fantastic Twilight to Fifty Shades Fanfiction: Not Another Cinderella Story… &RGUXĠD*RúD Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 77 Fantasy and the Unicorn in Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn and Tracy Chevalier’s The Lady And The Unicorn Dana Percec Part II: Critical Fantasy Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 96 Dystopian Realms of the 2000s: The Road and Never Let Me Go &ULVWLQD&KHYHUHúDQ Chapter Six ............................................................................................. 112 South African Speculative Fiction Luiza Caraivan

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Part III: The Fantastic Imagination on Film Chapter Seven......................................................................................... 132 Six Impossible Things Before Midnight: Gothic Fantasy in Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland Daniela Rogobete Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 156 Son, Lover and Scapegoat: The Progression of Horror in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands $GULDQD5ăGXFDQX Chapter Nine........................................................................................... 169 Lady and the Alien: Avatars of an Iconic Duo *DEULHOD*OăYDQ Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 182 Subjectivity (Un)Plugged: The Matrix (1999) Eliza Claudia Filimon Part IV: Vampires and Machines Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 200 Out of This World: (Arch)Angels as the New Vampires? Nalini Singh’s Angels’ Blood Andreea ùHUEDQ Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 218 Steampunk: Discovering Old and New Attractions $QGUHHD9HUWHú-Olteanu Part V: Fantasy and Beyond Chapter Thirteen ..................................................................................... 242 Fantasy Theme Analysis: Rhetorical Visions of Immigration in the British Press IriQD'LDQD0ăGURDQH

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Endnote................................................................................................... 266 Contributors ............................................................................................ 268 Index ....................................................................................................... 272

FOREWORD The purpose of this collection of essays is that of observing the very hybridity of the fantastic genre, as a typical postmodern form. The volume continues an older project originated by the editor and a large number of the contributors, to investigate the current status of several popular genres. The success of the historical novel and historical narratives was the focus of a volume published in Romanian (Percec 2011). In a second book, the same group of academics mulled over the controversy surrounding one of the most disparaged of genres, romance (Percec 2012). The scrutiny continues in this third volume, dedicated to the fantastic imagination and the plethora of themes, moods, media, and discourses deriving from it. The volume comprises five parts and thirteen chapters, researchers from Romania, Spain, and Turkey investigating the evolution of the fantastic genre from its early days, in the late 18th century, to the contemporary mixed discourses of horror, steampunk, and children’s literature, and from fan fiction to fantasy theme analysis. The contributors invite readers with an interest in fantasy, researchers and students in literary studies to re-read long forgotten stories, to discover British, American, and South-African authors and film directors, and to reflect on the versatility of the fantastic imagination. Pia Brînzeu opens the collection, with a theoretical chapter, Fantasy: Beyond Failing Definitions, which does not offer, despite the title, another definition of fantasy. First, because nobody can provide a universally valid definition of fantasy, of the fantastic, or of fantastic fiction, and second, because a single, stable definition of these concepts is not even desirable. Although scientists have developed sophisticated methods of investigation, formulating theories of high standard, they could neither offer a satisfactory definition of fantasy nor agree on the genres, supergenres, and subgenres of fantasy fiction. Most often such works as The Castle of Otranto, Frankenstein, or Dracula–to use only three of the most famous examples–are approached separately as primary works of gothic, horror, or fantastic literature. Then why do critics strive with so much difficulty to find the right definition of fantasy? And what is the use of a definition? Definitions are needed to delimit or characterize the territories scholars want to explore in their desire to answer one or several of the questions referring to what fantasy and fantasy fiction are, how

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fantasy worlds are created, when and where the action is placed, how the process of (de)familiarization takes place, and why authors write and readers consume fantasy productions. The chapter answers these questions starting from some of the most famous definitions formulated by authors of literary-critical theories and tries to highlight the major characteristics of these troublesome concepts with the help of a larger description. Francisco Javier Sánchez-Verdejo Pérez’s chapter, Gothic Literature: A Brief Outline, offers an outline of classical Gothic fiction elements. In the field of the literary studies, what seems clear at first sight results in being surprisingly difficult to be defined. This is what happens with the so-called Gothic literature, and, in particular, with its specific development in England, a country where its nature can be quite closely limited and its evolution can be tracked, even though it is not the only country that witnessed the enthusiasm of this type of writing. Nowadays, the label “Gothic genre” suggests an immediate reference: a type of literature that spins around the macabre, the mysterious, the fantastic, everything which goes beyond the logical, beyond reason. This literature developed with a lot of profusion in the 18th and 19th centuries. Among Gothic must-haves, critics include the presence of supernatural entities, ghosts, demons, and vampires hidden deep inside the thick, dark plot. A romance would help, and so would religious and mythical beliefs and several taboos. Finally, the events of the story should make the reader wish to explore whatever exists outside the material world. It is without any doubt that writing about vampires can be a lucrative EXVLQHVV +RZHYHU DUJXHV &RGUXĠD *RúD LQ WKH FKDSWHU HQWLWOHG From Fantastic Twilight to Fifty Shades Fan Fiction: Not Another Cinderella Story… writing about sex can be even more lucrative, as the tremendous success of E.L. James’ Fifty Shades-sexually-loaded-fan-fiction trilogy seems to show, at least when it comes to record setting in the number of copies sold or the rush of turning it into a film. And even though the source of Fifty Shades is admittedly the fantastic vampire series Twilight, it explicitly moves away from fantastic to contemporary romance. In the FKDSWHU&RGUXĠD*RúDSURSRVHVDQDQDO\VLVZKLFKKDVDWZRIROGSXUSRVH On the one hand, it aims to document the claim that the main characters in the fan fiction trilogy are implicitly as “fairy-tale” fantastic as those in the source text, in spite of the fact that they are no longer vampires or vampires in the making. On the other hand, it aims to substantiate the argument that it is sex that has contributed crucially to the huge success of the Fifty Shades fan fiction. To this end the chapter explores the strategies that Stephanie Meyer and E.L. James employed when creating their texts. Both series are analyzed comparatively and the analytical framework

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devised draws on several theories of novel construction such as genre, character, plot, conflict setting, narrative technique, and language. Dana Percec’s chapter discusses the cultural heritage of a fantastic figure, the unicorn, and illustrates its function in a comparative study of two contemporary novels employing the metaphor of the mythical creature, Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn (1963) and Tracy Chevalier’s The Lady and the Unicorn (2003). Although neither book belongs to the fantastic genre as such (the former telling a contemporary story which recycles Gothic motifs, in a decade when the second Gothic revival, occasioned, a little later, by popular literature and film industry, was not yet in place; the latter–is a historical novel, the imaginary genesis of a famous work of art), both authors start from the pretext offered by the fantastic creature. The two authors have drawn freely on various postmodern narrative techniques and the conventions of several literary genres in order to incorporate the unicorn into their story. &ULVWLQD &KHYHUHúDQ¶V FKDSWHU IRFXVHV RQ SDUWLFXODU VXEJHQUHV associated with the fantastic and the speculative–the dystopian and the post-apocalyptic–as illustrated by two highly-praised mid-2000s novels, Never Let Me Go (2005) and The Road (2006). The article presents Kazuo Ishiguro’s and Cormac McCarthy’s flirtations with science fiction as ingenious explorations of the potentially disastrous future of humankind, brought about by individual and communal recklessness, unscrupulousness, insensitivity and ambition. While Never Let Me Go investigates the ethical dilemmas of technological advancement, entering the end-of-thetwentieth-century debate on organ harvesting and human cloning, The Road warns against the unavoidable loss of values, principles and humanity in the aftermath of catastrophe. The article analyzes the persuasive rhetoric used by the two mainstream writers, who resort to the challenging inventory of alternative universes in order to expose the flaws and dysfunctionalities of our own and, thus, to articulate a creative and efficient type of social critique. Luiza Caraivan, in South African Speculative Fiction, focuses on South African science fiction starting with the film District 9 (2009) and continuing with Lauren Beukes–Zoo City (2010) and Henrietta RoseInnes’s writings. Science fiction is in its early days in South Africa, as post-Apartheid writers are continually searching for new themes and issues to replace the grand narrative of Apartheid. However, South African science fiction is strongly related to the realities of the Apartheid society, reinforcing the fact that segregation still exists in today’s South Africa. Critics consider that there seems to be a growing speculative fiction movement in South African literature. In this respect, the chapter analyses

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some definitions of this term and how South African writers have managed to adapt the everyday life into their science-fiction screenplays or novels. Two chapters are devoted to American director Tim Burton and his dark filmography, with a focus on Alice in Wonderland and Edward Scissorhands. Already a brand name in the field of black fantasy, Tim Burton has imposed his peculiar manner of combining Gothic elements and bleak perspectives with a strangely fragile sensitivity, an unexpected poetry and an overwhelming imagination. In Alice in Wonderland Tim Burton–renowned for his preference for adaptations and remakes–meets Lewis Carroll on the fantastic grounds of Wonderland. Daniela Rogobete, in Six Impossible Things before Midnight. Gothic Fantasy in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, reviews Burton’s sequel, received with conflicting reviews but acknowledged as an incontestable box office success. The chapter focuses upon the strategies Burton uses in combining elements of Victorian traditional fantasy set against the peculiarities of absurdist and nonsensical fantasy as epitomized by the canonical texts Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass and contemporary Gothic fantasy in an attempt to revisit and reread Carroll. Placed in the context of other numerous adaptations or imitations of Alice, Burton’s sequel seems to best fit Carroll’s vision of a Wonderland that provides self-knowledge, introspection, linguistic and logical thinking. It also breaks with generally accepted social and literary conventions and nourishes unbridled fantasy and at the same time intertextually alludes to contemporary filmic productions and theories in children’s literature. Another viewing of Tim Burton’s creation is offered by Adriana 5ăGXFDQX¶V FKDSWHU Son, Lover, and Scapegoat: The Progression of Horror in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands. Regarded as one of the most significant followers of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) has fuelled multiple debates among aficionados and critics of various formations, thanks to its elusive, slippery features. These are best recognized in the view of the film’s concomitant affiliations to various genres which consequently inspire different interpretations. When discussing Edward Scissorhands, critics generally register an affinity to fairy tale, science fiction, and Gothic romance. As already implied, all these affiliations are problematic and partial, since none of them actually offers exhaustive readings of the cinematic substance. Nevertheless, the avatars of orphaned son, unfortunate lover and dejected scapegoat embodied by Tim Burton’s “dark hero” can be encountered in all the three genres mentioned above, albeit in different disguises. Moreover, the feeling of “horror” which

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accompanies our witnessing the tribulations of such avatars also delineates the common, psychological contours of fairy tale, science fiction and Gothic romance. With these observations in mind, the chapter focuses on a detailed analysis of the protagonist, as well as onto its uncanny resemblance to the figure of Tim Burton, one of Hollywood’s most tormented, as well as most creative directors. *DEULHOD*OăYDQDOVRIRFXVHVRQILOPLQKHUFKDSWHUThe Lady and the Alien. Avatars of an Iconic Duo. From Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking Aliens (1979) to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 1997 Alien Resurrection, the epic journey of Lt. Ellen Ripley and her encounter with the alien monster prompted a connection of great depth and complexity, one that challenges cultural representations and generates a striking dyad in the realm of modern mythologies. Taking into account the different filmic approaches to the story, specific to the three directors of the saga (Scott, Cameron and Jeunet), the chapter follows the underlying structures that turned the Alien franchise into an epitome of SF imagination. A closer investigation of the avatars of this duo is significant from more than one perspective, given the dynamics of recent SF cinema and the continuous metamorphoses of heroic archetypes in contemporary popular culture. The recent explosion in the popularity of vampire stories–from the huge success of Twilight to the ever-increasing celebrity of the Black Dagger Brotherhood collection–has turned the vampire figure into a somewhat overused yet constantly evolving and always compelling type. What Nalini Singh brings new into the equation is a link between sensual, blood-thirsty vampires and higher, celestial creatures that wield an immense amount of power, yet are susceptible to their own flaws–the (arch)angels. Singh’s universe is structured on layers and levels, all of which contain their own predators, be they angels, vampires or humans. Set against the backdrop of an enchanting, futuristic version of New York City, dominated by “Angel Tower”, Singh’s Angels’ Blood (2009) blends two science fiction subgenres (urban fantasy and paranormal romance) and represents the starting point for an unusual and captivating love-story between an immortal, Raphael, the archangel of New York, and a mortal, Elena, a vampire hunter. Therefore, in an attempt to account for the VXFFHVV RI WKH VHULHV $QGUHHD ùHUEDQ¶V FKDSWHU Out of This World: Archangels as the New Vampires? Nalini Singh’s Angels’ Blood, aims to explore, on the one hand, the means used by the writer to convey the otherworldliness of the non-human characters (archangel vs. vampire), while on the other hand, the ways in which sexual tension is written between a human and an Other.

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In Steampunk: Discovering Old and New Attractions$QGUHHD9HUWHúOlteanu tackles a new and fashionable subgenre of fantasy. Steampunk, emerged in the 1980s as a fictional subgenre, once a cultish mix of sci-fi, steam and the Victorian era, can now be seen at play not only in fiction, but also in advertising, music, art, and fashion. The anachronistic fantastic is the recent and successful art of mixing pasts and futures together with visions of the present time. Forecasters claim the relatively new style, a blend between the romantic Victorian London and H.G. Wells and Jules Verne-themed fantasy, is set to perform a huge leap from niche to mainstream. IT and social media experts predict that steampunk will “shift from low-production, high-cost craft manufacturing to mass-production within the next two years,” according to a study published in The Independent at the beginning of January 2013, (Murphy 2013) which found that the amount of online references to steampunk increased 11 times in the period 2009-2012. Presumably, the 19th century is an excellent mirror for the modern period. Moreover, Victorians have been compared with rear-view mirrors–people tend to look forward to see what lies behind; paradoxically, it is the very opposite of what they do when studying history in order to catch a glimpse of the future. The chapter analyzes the reasons underlying the society’s need to suffuse its culture, as well as crafts, with time-travel. In a slightly different register, Irina Diana MăGURDQH¶V FKDSWHU Fantasy Theme Analysis: Rhetorical Visions of Immigration in the British Press, employs fantasy theme analysis, a method grounded in symbolic convergence theory and developed in rhetorical criticism. The meaning of “fantasy” within this frame is not something fictional or unreal, but “the imaginative and creative interpretation of events” (Bormann 1982, 52) in the form of narratives shared by the members of a group, a process that simultaneously shapes a symbolic reality and fosters a common consciousness for the group. She applies this method of analysis to a topical issue in the British press and public space in general: immigration to Britain from the A2 countries, with a focus on Romania. Her chapter discusses the findings from a corpus of news articles published in JanuaryMarch, 2013, in a selection of popular and serious national British newspapers, with both left-wing and right-wing intended audiences. She explores the fantasy themes and types that make up the rhetorical visions of immigration emergent from the two types of newspapers, according to their different ideological orientation. The symbolic realities of immigration and the rhetorical communities constructed around them reveal two distinct immigration dramas, with different heroes and villains (migrants, politicians, the European Union), emotions aroused (fear of or

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sympathy for immigrants), and underlying values (fairness, cultural integration or multiculturalism, or economic development).

Works cited Bormann, Ernest G. 1982. “The Symbolic Convergence Theory of Communication: Applications and implications for teachers and consultants,” in Journal of Applied Communication Research, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 50-61. Murphy, Margi. 2013. “Steampunk! Introducing Britain’s latest fashion craze”, in The Independent. Sunday, 20 January 2013. Available at http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/news/steampunkintroducing-britains-latest-fashion-craze-8458861.html. Accessed 04/20/2013. Percec, Dana (ed.) 2011. 2 SRYHVWH GH VXFFHV 5RPDQXO LVWRULF DVWă]L. 7LPLúRDUD(XURVWDPSD —. (ed.) 2012. Romance. The History of a Genre. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

INTRODUCTION IT’S A KIND OF MAGIC DANA PERCEC There was a time when all literature was fantasy, writes Peter S. Beagle in the introduction to an anthology of fantastic literature (2010, 9). The fine line between fantasy and “actual” literature has begun to become thicker and thicker only in the last few decades, with the development of a number of subgenres and even sub-subgenres. In the 19th century and earlier (and even well into the 20th century), writers of Gothic tales, mysteries, and children’s literature were acknowledged as mainstream authors. While they still hold a place in the literary canon today, they are generally viewed now as classic fantasists. Dickens, Poe, and Wilkie Collins are only a few of the most obvious examples. At the same time, there are works of fiction which are central to western literature (without having ever been regarded as fantastic), in which modern fantasy authors find their most valuable sources of inspiration. While no one would call Shakespeare a genre fantasist, a play such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream contains all the ingredients of a fantasy. It is hard to pin down fantasy as a genre just as it is hard to place the genre (or related genres and subgenres) in an aesthetic hierarchy, according to mainstream highbrow standards. In their attempt to isolate the genre, many theorists have resorted to the term employed by Brian Attebery in his pioneering work on fantasy, a term borrowed from the vocabulary of mathematics, “fuzzy set” (Clute, Grant 1997, viii; Mendlesohn 2008, 183, 273; James, Mendlesohn 2012, 2-3), meaning that fantasy can be defined not by fixing boundaries–which are fluid–but by analyzing the most relevant examples. As a result, an attempt has been made to draw a morphology of fantasy, with the help of taxonomies (Mendlesohn 2008), with an ideal in mind (the so-called “full fantasy” of Clute and Grant 1997), in a search for a comprehensive–if not complete– list of characteristic themes, moods, and metaphors (James, Mendlesohn 2012). Here the efforts of fantasy theorists and critics have been directed at providing descriptive language that branches out from the traditional

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vocabulary of “mimetic” fiction theory and criticism (James, Mendlesohn 2008; Beagle 2010). Another preoccupation for fantasy theorists, an effect of reader-response criticism, has been that of answering a central question: how do we read fantasy? For Gary K. Wolfe (2011, 39) this dilemma is twofold: on the one hand, he thinks we have “unlearned”, over two hundred years of reading literature and its criticism, how to read fantasy as serious literature; on the other hand, the question implies the experience of the reader confronting a text that depicts impossible adventures, environments, or creatures. Similarly, Farah Mendlesohn (2008, xiii) argues that fantasy is a genre, or an area of literature, as she calls it, which depends “on the dialectic between author and reader.” Though this dialectic does not occur only where fantastic fiction is concerned, it is clearly conditioned by genre expectations more than other “areas” are. In experiencing fantasy, readers should position themselves well: as with a perspective puzzle, if they stand in the wrong place, they cannot take in the whole picture. The answer to this question takes us back to Coleridge’s sense of wonder. Mendlesohn defines wonder via genre expectations, arguing that reader and writer work together for the construction of a sense of wonder and of belief. (2008, xiii) In his preface to John C. Tibbets’ collection of interviews with fantasy authors and SF movie directors, Richard Holmes (2011, 10) views wonder diachronically, explaining it as a notion which evolved with knowledge and took the reader into more and more difficult areas: into the beautiful and good, as well as into the terrifying and menacing. Hence we observe the genre instability which is recognized by all theorists. But while some salute this crossing of boundaries, considering it “an exhilarating development, bringing with it a sense of breached ramparts and undiscovered terrain” (Wolfe 2011, 19) and recommending fantasy as a fresh, postmodern instance of interstitial art, which subverts genre expectations and defies literary conventions, others see this as the flaw of a fictional “area” which slips into the commercial and thus forfeits the right to be regarded as a true genre (Beagle 2010, 10). This is, in the latter theorist’s opinion (Peter S. Beagle is also known as a “classical” fantasy author), the reason why some writers identify themselves with fantasy while many others flee from such a classification. James and Mendlesohn describe the fluidity, looseness, and variety of the genre by comparing fantasy to a house: Fantasy is not a mansion but a row of terraced houses, each with a door that leads into another world. There are shared walls, and a certain level of consensus around the basic bricks, but the internal décor can differ wildly,

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and the lives lived in these terraced houses are discrete yet overheard. (James, Mendlesohn 2012, 2)

Similarly, David Sandner (2004, 5) regards fantastic fiction as a literature of fragmentation, harbouring an unresolved paradox: it is avantgarde, because it questions the limits of self and society, and at the same time escapist, refusing reality. He considers this paradox productive for the genre and likely to encourage debate about its meaning and purpose. Speaking of paradoxes, however, fantasy criticism has not reached a consensus when it comes to what Coleridge, again, called “the suspension of disbelief,” the major directive force of a literature of imagination. On the one hand, envisaging a history of fantasy, Sandner argues that the strength of this genre lies in its very skeptical nature, “skepticism appearing after primary belief in the supernatural has waned.” (2004, 6) On the other hand, Gary Wolfe explains the devaluation of fantastic literature in the last two hundred years in terms of the increasing skepticism of an age that measured everything, including literature, in terms of evolution and progress (2011, 21). The result of this devaluation was the transfer of the fantastic into modern popular genres and the diversion of reading protocols into areas conventionally deemed as “minor”–children’s literature chiefly, but also the literature of sensation and others. Nowadays, in the context of considerable talk about the blurring of boundaries between literary genres, but also between literature and other narratives and communication channels or media, the versatility of fantasy, fantastic literature, plus its “companion genres” (Mendlesohn 2008, 102) can prove a rewarding area of investigation. The definition that Clute and Grant give of fantasy, as “a self-coherent narrative” which tells impossible stories that are possible in the “otherworld’s terms” (1997, ix), covers an incredibly wide range (which is expanding as we speak) of discourses, as all aesthetic expressions tell a story, as it were: novels, fairy tales, fables, mysteries, movies, TV shows, comics, musicals, opera, songs, graphic novels, cartoons, commercials, visual presentations and visual art, etc. These discourses are claimed by just as vast a variety of subgenres, species, and trends: allegory and romance, satire and wonderland, horror and science fiction, prophecy and mashup, surrealism and magic realism, steampunk and cyberpunk, etc. Among these subgenres, so hard to pin down that some theorists advise us to call them “clusters” (Mendlesohn 2008), some that are enjoying great popularity today are urban fantasy, dark fantasy, and paranormal romance – though the list remains open.

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Fantasy is a hybrid mode, hybridity being more characteristic of this “area” of literature than of many others. It has, like many others, a specific rhetoric and iconography, and also a specific community of consumers who understand and observe the strategies of reading and writing, viewing and producing fantasy. A generally derided genre, fantasy often reveals complexity and sophistication and, though marginalized as popular, together with its criticism, has been revisited by “serious” critical responses, coming from psychoanalysis (Lacan) and also structuralism and thematic criticism (Tzvetan Todorov), and continues to be valuable material for genre analysis.

Works cited Beagle, Peter S. 2010. The Secret History of Fantasy. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications. Clute, John, John Grant. 1997. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Holmes, Richard. 2011. Preface to John C. Tibbets, The Gothic Imagination. Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. James, Edward, Farah Mendlesohn (eds.) 2012. The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mendlesohn, Farah. 2008. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Sandner, David. 2004. Fantastic Literature. A Critical Reader. Westport: Praeger. Tibbets, John C. 2011. The Gothic Imagination. Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wolfe, Gary K. 2011. Evaporating Genres. Essays on Fantastic Literature. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

PART I FANTASY: TERMS AND BOUNDARIES

CHAPTER ONE FANTASY: BEYOND FAILING DEFINITIONS PIA BRÎNZEU Introduction This introductory chapter is not intended to offer a valid definition of fantasy. Firstly, this is because nobody can provide a universally acceptable definition of fantasy, of the fantastic, or of fantastic fiction. Although scholars have developed sophisticated methods of investigation, often formulating theories of a high standard, they have not been able to offer a satisfactory definition of fantasy or to agree on the genres, supergenres, and subgenres of fantastic fiction. What most often happens is that the same work is approached separately as a primary work of fantastic, gothic, horror, mythic, science fiction, or cyborg literature. This is what has happened to the stories of Frankenstein, Dracula, and Tarzan, or, to give a more recent example, to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), which has been considered a science fiction, utopian/dystopian, feminist, postmodern, historical, and religious novel, depending on the issues focused upon by critics.1 The second reason for my not offering a definition of fantasy fiction in this essay stems from the belief that a stable definition of such a fluid concept is not even desirable. To live in a world of unique terms is overwhelming and intolerable, because, as Vivian Sobczack (1987, 17) observes, “[d]efinitions strive, after all, for exclusivity, for the setting of strict and precise limits which, when they become too narrow, seem glaringly and disappointingly arbitrary.” Since fantasy fiction includes novels as diverse as The Castle of Otranto, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Hobbit, and the Harry Potter series, its boundaries must remain flexible enough to embrace a great diversity of texts. Then why do critics make so many attempts to find the correct definition of fantasy? And what is the use of a definition? Scholars

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frequently enjoy the pleasure of creating, explaining, illustrating, celebrating, contesting, or annihilating definitions. Moreover, even if definitions fail, they support investigators in individualizing their field of research, explaining their point of view, and striving for high academic standards, especially when these scholars want to answer one or several of the following questions: What is fantasy fiction? Which are its main genres? When and where is the action placed? Why do authors write and readers devour fantasy productions? In the present essay, I shall try to answer these questions with the help of some well-known definitions, and, using their common denominators to highlight the major characteristics of fantasy fiction, I shall try to offer a possible insight into what fantasy really is. And this, I hope, will make any new definition superfluous.

What? 2.1. What is fantasy? This question is answered by dictionary definitions in ways that are incomplete, ambiguous, or pleonastic. Take the following examples: in the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (2002, 503), fantasy is seen as “a pleasant, exciting or unusual experience that you imagine is happening to you.” This definition excludes both frightening experiences, which are quite common, and experiences which can be imagined to be happening to other people as well. In The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (1996, 420), fantasy is defined as “an idea that is wild or not realistic; a product of the imagination.” This entry reduces fantasy to an “idea” and considers that it has to be “wild,” whatever that term is supposed to mean. The Random House Dictionary (1968, 478) is more detailed, offering a number of explanations: fantasy is a “mental image especially when grotesque” (why grotesque?), “imagination, especially when extravagant and unrestrained” (what does “extravagant and unrestrained” mean? When is “extravagant” no longer normal and “unrestrained” no longer restrained?), “an imaginative sequence, especially one in which desires are fulfilled,” “daydream,” “hallucination,” “a supposition not based on solid foundations” (does “solid” mean “realistic”?), “caprice, whim,” and “an ingenious or fanciful thought or creation” (to define “fantasy” as a “fanciful” idea is a pleonasm). The Oxford English Dictionary defines fantasy more accurately as the faculty or activity of imagining “impossible” or “improbable” things, “a fanciful mental image with no basis in reality, typically one on which persons often dwell and which reflects their conscious or unconscious wishes.”

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Chapter One

Putting all these definitions together, we reach the following conclusion: fantasy is a mental image or sequence of images, reflecting both conscious and unconscious wishes, satisfied or not, but not very different from daydreaming or hallucination. Based on unrealistic foundations, these mental images may be pleasant, exciting, thrilling, or grotesque. For readers and writers of literature they involve an unfettered freedom of expression beyond the limitations of what is usually known and believed. That is why the majority of scholars accept that the fantastic represents a challenging break from the reader’s established world and that, owing to its unique nature, it finds its natural expression in the realm of the imaginary. From a historical point of view, the word “fantasy” changed its meaning at the beginning of the 19th century: from being related to the Greek words “phantasia” (imagination, appearance) and “phantazein” (to make visible), as indicated also by its Latin translation “imagination,” it came to mean what the verb “to fantasize” still indicates today, i.e., to desire or think of untrue, improbable events. It is with this meaning that fantasy has become a popular topic not only in literary studies, but also in psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and social sciences. Psychoanalysts, and chiefly Sigmund Freud, see fantasy as an “auxiliary construction,” (Freud 1916/1964, 419) a field which prolongs reality as a kind of “screen-memory, representing something of more importance with which it was in some way connected.” (Freud 19091911/1988, 328) Fantasy extends reality by providing new territories necessary for the normal development of a child. Continued as daydreaming, fantasies are grouped together around certain basic childhood wishes and are experienced in a process expressed by children in their playing (Freud 1908, 205-226). Different versions of related fantasies can appear at different developmental stages, but along with the important wishes they contain they invariably include defensive components as well as superego elements. When society exerts pressure, defence mechanisms block off the individual's conscious fantasies and push them out into the subconscious. Here, unconscious fantasy, often spelled “phantasy”, is related to drives and instincts, and appears in dreams, games, and neuroses as imagined fulfilments of frustrated wishes. Being incompatible with a person’s ego, it becomes the seed of later neurotic afflictions. Freud (1915, 190–191) himself acknowledged that some of these unconscious, instinctual impulses display contradictory features. On the one hand, they are highly organized, free from self-contradiction, and can hardly be distinguished from the products of the conscious system; on the other hand, they are incapable of entering conscious life. Freud could not

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resolve this unscientific illogicality inherent in human impulses and neither could his American disciples, Jacob Arlow and Charles Brenner (1964, 4), who complain that one cannot draw a clear line of demarcation between conscious and unconscious fantasies and that, therefore, “our understanding of the role of unconscious fantasy has been hindered greatly by drawing too sharp a distinction between conscious and unconscious.” Still, psychoanalysts acknowledge that both conscious and unconscious fantasies are a constant feature of our mental life: they interact with the real data of experience. Mediated by the various functions of the ego, they have an enormous impact on workplace practices and artistic productions. As recently observed by Valerie Walkerdine (2005, 48), when a person or situation does not meet highly idealized standards, a combination of fantasies offers the perspective of a successful self-made future. A similar imaginary promise of impossible enjoyment provides a fantasy support for many consumer choices, social roles, and political projects. Even political discourse is nothing but the unreal presentation of a future “good life” or “just society” that is claimed to be able to overcome the current limitations of political systems. Freud’s ideas on fantasy and on the fantastic were and have continued to be reformulated by his disciples, above all by Melanie Klein, Carl Gustav Jung, Jaques LacaQ DQG 6ODYRM äLåHN )RU .OHLQ (1975, 290), unconscious fantasies underlie not only dreams but all thoughts and activities, both creative and destructive. They modify external events, investing them with significance: “Infantile feelings and phantasies leave, as it were, their imprints on the mind, imprints that do not fade away but get stored up, remain active, and exert a continuous and powerful influence on the emotional and intellectual life of the individual.” Jung believed that the fantasies of the unconscious mind are related not only to the individual unconscious, where people store their unique life experience, but also to a collective reservoir of unconscious mental forms. They appear in people's minds as innate or inherited shapes, without having been experienced before in any way. Jung (1953/1996, 43) called these pre-existent forms “archetypes” and claimed that along with our immediate conscious and our personal unconscious there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature, identical in all individuals: “This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.” Archetypes are transcultural and transhistorical because they emerge from the collective unconscious and are common to all people in all times. They direct all fantasy activities,

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constantly resurfacing in fairy tales, myths, and fiction. Thus, there are many transhistorical, universal imaginative impulses which prompt us to create idealized worlds, in which similar desirable human qualities are embodied and valued. Jacques Lacan bases his fundamental thesis of fantasy on Freud’s theory of dreams and proclaims that in the opposition between dream and reality, fantasy is on the side of reality. Fantasy is the support that gives consistency to what we call “reality”: “fantasy is never anything more than the screen that conceals something quite primary, something determinate in the function of repetition,” (Lacan, 1994, 60) repetition being “the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle.” (53-54) But fantasy, whether in dreams or in day-dreaming, is “the support of desire” (185); in “going through the fantasy” (65) we experience how fantasy-scenarios materialize our desires. Impossibilities are replaced by imagined possibilities, and blank screens are filled with suggestive images. There is nothing “behind” fantasy, which supplies what is lacking in the various unfulfilled situations or relationships in our existence (126). Agreeing with Lacan in saying that fantasy supports reality, Slavoj äLåHN  -317) adds that the credibility of any object of identification relies on the ability of the fantasmatic narrative to provide a convincing explanation for the lack of total enjoyment: fantasy belongs rather to the “bizarre category of the objectively subjective–the way things actually, objectively seem to you even if they don’t seem that way to you.” Lacan and his followers also claim that fantasies survive only insofar as desires remain unsatisfied and that the fantasmatic narratives produced in the process of potentially possible realizations offer infinite variations at the level of content. Of utmost importance in the process is the way in which the human mind is capable of forming mental images of things not actually present. Imagination is thus related to the faculty of conceiving images, in general called “fancy” when it is reduced to mere imagemaking and to the power of giving the inner consistency of reality to ideal creations of the mind. That fancy is a mechanical process different from creative imagination was explained by S. T. Coleridge as early as 1817. His famous theory of the opposition between fancy and imagination is developed in Chapter XIII of Biographia Literaria: The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an

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echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. (Coleridge, Ch. 13)

Thus, in Coleridge’s opinion, fancy is “passive” and “mechanical”; like memory, it is based on a process of association. Imagination, on the other hand, is transformative and creative, offering the power needed for the higher arts. Its mysterious character, related to “hidden ideas and meaning” and “co-existing with the conscious will”, suggests its unconscious nature, which opposes deliberate acts. Being the result of sensory perceptions, the primary imagination is common to all people, while the secondary imagination is the superior faculty associated with artistic genius.2 2.2. What is the fantastic? The Oxford English Dictionary defines the fantastic as something that is imaginative, fanciful, remote from reality, strange, or exotic. The Random House Dictionary (1968, 478), on the other hand, defines the fantastic as something grotesque, eccentric, odd, fanciful, imaginary, irrational, conceived by unrestrained imagination. In fiction, the fantastic is seen as the dialogue between the possible and the impossible, the normal and the paranormal. Rosemary Jackson (1981, 15) comments: The fantastic exists as the inside, or underside, of realism, opposing the novel’s closed, monological forms with open dialogical structures, as if the novel had given rise to its own opposite, its unrecognizable reflection. Hence their symbiotic relationship, the axis of one being shaded by the paraxis of the other. The fantastic gives utterance to precisely those elements which are known only through their absence within a dominant “realistic” order.

Frequent confusions appear between the fantastic and its two related modes, the uncanny and the marvellous. If we compare the above-

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Chapter One

mentioned definition of the fantastic in The Random House Dictionary with the one given for the uncanny, considered “to have a supernatural or inexplicable basis,” to be “mysterious,” and/or “uncomfortably strange,” “beyond what is ordinary or normal,” (1968, 1428) we realize that no real distinction is being made between the two concepts. For Freud, (1919) however, the uncanny is undoubtedly related to what is frightening–to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general. ... We are tempted to conclude that what is “uncanny” is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.

Tzvetan Todorov (1975, 25) distinguishes between the marvellous, in which events are seen as supernatural, the uncanny, in which events are seen as real, and the fantastic, which is hesitation between the two states, where events cannot be defined as either marvellous or uncanny. Accordingly, in Todorov’s opinion, the fantastic is the hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature and is forced to confront an apparently supernatural event. Its forms evolve from gothic fiction onwards, moving from the marvellous, which predominates in a climate of belief in supernaturalism and magic, through the purely fantastic, in which no explanation can be found, to the uncanny, which explains all strangeness as generated by unconscious forces. Todorov’s theory has found a major opponent in Brian McHale (1996, 75-76), who claims that Todorov does not get to “the bottom of the fantastic” because the epistemological frontier of hesitation between the uncanny and the marvellous is continued by the ontological frontier created by postmodern writers between this world and the fantasy world “next door.”3 2.3. What is fantasy fiction? This is another question whose answer is problematic. Isaac Asimov (1953, 158) commented on the difficulty of giving a correct definition of science fiction, which is “an undefined term in the sense that there is no general agreed upon definition of it. To be sure, there are probably hundreds of individual definitions, but that is as bad as none at all.” Tolkien (1939) made a similar comment with regard to fairy stories: “I will not attempt to define that, nor to describe it directly. It cannot be done. Faerie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible. It has many ingredients, but analysis will not necessarily discover the secret of the whole.”

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What Asimov says about science fiction and Tolkien about fairy tales is true of fantasy fiction as well, since all these genres use fantasy activities to create imaginary worlds and characters. Definitions of fantasy fiction vary from simple explanations, such as “a story that shows a lot of imagination and is very different from real life” (Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners 2002, 503), to more detailed ones: A general term for any kind of fictional work that is not primarily devoted to realistic representation of the known world. The category includes several literary genres (e.g. dream vision, fable, fairy tale, romance, science fiction) describing imagined worlds in which magical powers and other impossibilities are accepted. Recent theorists of fantasy have attempted to distinguish more precisely between the self-contained magical realms of the marvelous, the psychological explicable delusions of the uncanny, and the inexplicable meeting of both in the fantastic. (Baldick, 2008, 125-126).

“Fantasy fiction” is also an ambiguous term because it is used in an undifferentiated way to designate a supergenre, a genre, and a subgenre. The Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus (2007, 327) defines fantasy fiction simply as “a type of imaginative fiction involving magic and adventure, especially in a setting other than the real world.” This is too wide a definition, since it would include almost all kinds of literary productions. When Kathryn Hume bases her study Fantasy and Mimesis. Responses to Reality in Western Literature (1984) on the idea that fantasy and mimesis are the two overarching modes in Western literature, she sets fantasy fiction over against realistic works. In this case fantasy is seen as a supergenre, synonymous with “speculative fiction” and “suppositional fiction,” and including such varied genres as fantasy, science fiction, romances, mythic stories, fairy tales, etc. The Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture (2006, 492) defines fantasy stories as being “about imaginary worlds which often involve magic. The characters are often searching for an object which will cause good to win over evil, and they usually fight with swords rather than modern weapons.” This definition reduces fantasy to sword-and-sorcery stories, a clearly subcategorized genre. It is not difficult to understand why one cannot give a single valid definition of fantasy fiction: on the one hand, there are too many texts which use fantastic elements to various degrees, most often intertwined with non-fantastic elements; on the other hand, since the 1970s, popular interest in fantasy literature has been increasing so rapidly and the pressure of a consumerist public has caused so many subgenres to come into

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Chapter One

existence every year that the variety of fantasy fiction can no longer be covered by a single definition. Moreover, the many types of practice observable in fantasy works tend to place them in more than one of such neighbouring genres as magic realism, science fiction, utopian/dystopian writing, horror, and supernatural fiction. Library, bookstore and dust jacket/blurb categories often use different genre classifications for the same book. 4 Dunja M. Mohr (2005, 38) adds still further reasons why scholars cannot agree on a single definition: there are too many contradictory terminologies; some arguments rage over what productions are, others over what they are not; genre boundaries are not agreed upon and are becoming increasingly confused as different forms converge, intersect, and ultimately implode generic distinctions; the same literary work is given a variety of labels by different critics, depending on their personal stances. Similar difficulties are encountered by scholars attempting to define fantasy in film productions. James Walters (2011, 1) complains that definitions are, on the one hand, so broad that they could include all fantasy films, and, on the other, so narrow that they exclude films which would deserve to be placed in this category. “Fantasy is a fragile, ephemeral, and volatile element in cinema,” Walters says, “prone to emerge in unexpected places as well as shaping [itself] into the dominant facet of certain fictional worlds.” Its propensity for crossing the boundaries of genre makes fantasy surface unexpectedly in works of horror, science fiction, melodrama, animation, and so on. Accordingly, the best thing to do is, in Walters’ opinion, to avoid both fantasy as a term of definition and all its possible sub-classifications. Authors of literary-critical theories have approached fantasy in two ways: by means of a maximalist, mode-based position, or via a minimalist, genre-historical understanding of the fantastic. Laura Feldt (2011, 255) explains: Fantasy theory does indeed seem suspended between claims for the ancient timelessness of fantasy and an extreme cultural specificity. The modebased theories do not consider the fantastic as tied to any one genre or historical period. It is, rather, an element which may form part of any kind of literature and be articulated in historically variable ways, and these theories may therefore be called maximalist, because they are potentially very inclusive. The historical, genre-based theories define the fantastic minimally, and see it as bound to a specific genre and to specific literaryhistorical periods, often the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.

Fantasy: Beyond Failing Definitions

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It seems that the sharp distinction between these two types of theories leaves no room for a common denominator for all fantasy productions, and that therefore no single definition can be valid. In spite of this impossibility, theoretical studies abound in definitions. Gary Wolfe (2004,   ZRQGHUV ZK\ WKH PRVW IUHTXHQWO\ XVHG GHILQLWLRQ RI IDQWDV\í³D fictional narrative describing events that the reader believes to be LPSRVVLEOH´íPDQDJHV WR EH VR SRSXODU VLQFH LW SODFHV WRR JUHDW DQ emphasis on reader response and not enough on thematic or structural characteristics. Another frequently cited definition is Colin Manlove’s (1982, 17) description of fantasy as “a fiction evoking wonder and containing a substantial and irreducible element of supernatural or impossible worlds, beings or objects with which the mortal characters in the story or the readers become on, at least partly, familiar terms.” This definition combines the readers’ response of wonder with the readers’ and characters’ effort to become familiar with supernatural or impossible worlds, which, we may guess, contain witches, ghosts, demon lovers, monsters, clones, cyborgs, or various other kinds of alien creatures. There are other similar definitions of fantasy fiction: W. R. Irwin (1976, 4) considers fantasy “the literature of the impossible”; for Eric Rabkin (1976, 14) it is the fiction whose “polar opposite is reality,” and which violates “what the author clearly believes to be natural law.” In the opinion of Rosemary Jackson (1981, 46-47), we are talking about the fantastic when the dialogue between the possible and impossible becomes evident and when there is a dramatic encounter fraught with threat between the normal and the paranormal. Lucie Armitt (2005, 8) underlines the two primary characteristics of fantasy novels: that they deal in the unknowableness of life, and that they convey a world not necessarily known through the senses or lived experience. Even language is seen as a distinctive feature of fantasy fiction. For Renate Lachmann (2002, 10–15) the fantastic is a broad literary mode of discourse or narration that presents the impossible, the contra-factual, and the unreal in language; as a discourse on alterity, it emphasises uncertainty and uses linguistic ambiguity programmatically. All the above definitions postulate the existence of the real, the natural, the normal as a pre-established system, attacked and subverted by fantastic elements. Referred to as “reality,” “mundane life,” or the “possible,” “normal,” or “true” world, the pre-established system allows the existence of imaginary components, which always contravene reality and provoke a break in the readers’ universe. On the other hand, all fictional worlds, including mimetic ones, are imagined. They constitute a break with

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Chapter One

normality, even if all the incidents and characters within them are accepted as naturally incorporated into an everyday reality. But then what is fictional “reality”? We all have our own reality, subjectively determined by our senses, education, religion, and sociocultural background. Therefore, whenever artists transcribe reality, they can offer nothing but an illusion, no matter how objective they may claim to be. George Eliot’s statement in Adam Bede (1859/1980, 221) is relevant from this point of view. Whenever she wants to give “a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind,” the mirror “is doubtless defective; the outline will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint and confused.” What George Eliot is saying indirectly is that the fictional world cannot simply mirror: it imitates and recreates the real world, transforming it into an imaginary universe of its own. But here again we have to become aware of the fact that what is considered real and imaginary, possible and impossible may also vary from one time to another. The audience who first listened to Beowulf, Kathryn Hume (1984, 87) tells us, may well have believed in Grendel’s real existence. In the opinion of Hunt and Lenz (2001, 14-18), even the readers of Sidney’s Faery Queen, of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, or The Tempest, and of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels saw the fantastic as unexceptional and quite possible, while for us today the distinction between what is possible and what is impossible seems to be clearly delineated in these works. As a consequence, it becomes obvious that the difference between fantastic and mimetic novels does not lie in the existence of the break between the imagined universe and the reader’s world, since this split appears in all cases: it lies in how far narratives depart from normal assumptions and how strongly they defy social, political, and ontological conventions. This may happen in two ways: as a test of reality or as a presentation of what is impossible in real life. Mikhail Bakhtin (1984, 114) favours the former variant. Seeing the origin of the fantastic in classical Menippean satire, he claims that the fantastic has served through the centuries “not for the positive embodiment of truth, but as a mode for searching after truth, provoking it, and, most important, testing it.” Joanna Russ (1973, 52) takes the opposite position, believing that fantasy contradicts reality by making us think of what can never happen, of the forms of “negative subjunctivity:” Fantasy embodies a “negative subjunctivity”–that is, fantasy is fantasy because it contravenes the real and violates it. The actual world is constantly present in fantasy, by negation … fantasy is what could not have happened; i.e., what cannot happen, what cannot exist, the negative

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subjunctivity, the cannot or could not, constitutes in fact the chief pleasure of fantasy.

Although scholars may never agree on a single definition of fantasy fiction or a common terminology for it, there are, however, a few elements which are accepted by all of them. First, that fantasy productions are mainly written in prose. Second, that they locate the place, the action, or some features of their characters in an unreal, illusory world, impossible to attain. And third, that they defamiliarize the context in which implausible societies, institutions, norms, technologies, and/or interhuman relations function, arousing through their imaginary nature estrangement, alienation, admiration, dreams, or desires, all designed to give readers a fresh view of the reality in which they live. According to Jason Glynos (2008, 287), there is even a “logic” of fantasy, which has three key aspects: First, it has a narrative structure which features, among other things, an ideal and an obstacle to its realization, and which may take a beatific or horrific form; second, it has an inherently transgressive aspect vis-à-vis officially affirmed ideals; and third, it purports to offer a foundational guarantee of sorts, in the sense that it offers the subject a degree of protection from the anxiety associated with a direct confrontation with the radical contingency of social relations.

This logic implies the capacity of fantasy to offer protection from ambiguities, uncertainties, and other features which evoke intimations of anxiety. But it is precisely these ambiguities that allow a critical distance and alternative developments.

Which? 3.1. “Fantasy” or “fantastic fiction”? Which is the genre and which the subgenre? When we try to start from a mode of all-embracing understanding, the discussion about genre categorizations also moves to a very unsteady field. Genres remain valid for only a limited period of time, since each new production can change the codification. It is not only that genres shape texts, but genres themselves are shaped by texts into quickly changing systems, impossible to compartmentalize neatly.5 Again dictionaries are of no great help. Patricia O’Brien Mathews (2011, 1) complains that she cannot use dictionaries to define such a subgenre as paranormal literature:

14

Chapter One The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines paranormal as beyond the range of normal experience or scientific explanation. If we used this broad definition to define paranormal fiction, the results would be a mix of fantasy, science fiction, and horror that could include futuristic, extra-terrestrial, time-travel, and all manner of supernatural adventures involving all manner of supernatural creatures.

As a consequence, she offers a more limited definition of paranormal works, including only romance, fantasy, mystery, and suspense, inhabited by both humans and paranormal beings in a relatively realistic modern world. An inspiring solution is suggested by Lucie Armitt (1996, 6), who favours the “fantastic” as a term referring to the general mode and “fantasy” to the genre. Tzvetan Todorov (1975, 7) explains the difference: genre fantasy deals with enclosed worlds, literary fantasy with disruptive impulses; genre fantasy implies complicity on the part of the readers, the literary fantastic seeks out reader hesitancy as a means of building competing readings of the text, typically revolving around two options, the psychological and the supernatural. In a similar way, I consider that “fantastic,” “speculative,” or “suppositional” fiction works well as supergenre terms, referring to the entire literary corpus that can be contrasted with mimetic fiction. This supergenre can be further divided into two main genres, “fantasy fiction” and “science fiction,” differentiated by the fact that the former places the story in a world of magic, impossible from the perspective of the readers, while science fiction places the story in a universe that has been affected by significant scientific and technical discoveries. While the fantastic world deals with the inexplicable and impossible, with things that do not require scientific explanation, the science fiction world might become possible with the help of technological improvements, and thus it frequently sounds a warning as to how contemporary society may evolve. 6 That this distinction between fantasy and science fiction is valid only in theory has been constantly demonstrated by numerous novels and stories where the boundaries between the two genres are intentionally blurred, as is the case with the stories published in Isaac Asimov’s Science )LFWLRQ 0DJD]LQH. In an anthology edited by Sheere R. Thomas in 2001, women writers intentionally reject a narrow hard science fiction emphasis in order to occupy a middle ground between science fiction, fantasy, folklore, and magic realism. In criticism, Dunja Mohr (2005, 53) goes beyond the traditional binary division into utopia/dystopia, invalidating this subgenre categorization by introducing a newly created subgenre, the transgressive utopian dystopia.

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15

3.2. What are the genres of fantasy fiction? Most fantasy literature criticism is about establishing genres within which texts can be neatly confined. There are numerous genre classifications, all different but acceptable from the perspective of their authors. Hunt and Lenz mention some of them in their study Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction (2001, 11), quoting among others Ann Swinfen’s classification into animal, time, dual world, visionary, and secondary worlds fantasy, and Colin Manlove’s categorization of fantasy fiction into secondary worlds, metaphysical, emotive, comic, subversive, and children’s fantasy. In Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (1975, 11), Manlove describes two classes of fantasy fiction: “imaginative” and “comic” or “escapist.” The line of division between the two “is simple enough,” he says; “it is between fancy and imagination, ZKHUHǥIDQFLIXO¶ZRUNVDUHWKRVHFDUU\LQJHLWKHUQRGHHSHUPHDQLQJRURQH lacking in vitality.” John Clute (1997, 975-76) argues that it is saner to speak about modes than subgenres of fantasy: as a mode, a subgenre can operate across a range of diverse themes, from the mythic and spiritual to the political and the economic. The easiest solution, suggested by Lucie Armitt (1996, 3), is to do away entirely with the genre and subgenre issue and to look “at the fantastic as a form of writing which is about opening up subversive spaces within the mainstream rather than ghettoizing fantasy by encasing it within genres.” In spite of all the possible dangers, I will here venture to classify fantasy fiction into two large subgenres, fantasy and horror, which can both be further subdivided into the following overlapping categories: high, epic or supernatural fiction (based on various forms of magic, with supernatural creatures, wizards, witches, ghosts, and monsters, such as in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, 1954-1955, George R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, 1996-2011, Daniel Abraham’s The Dagger and the Coin series, 2011-2013, and Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law series, 20062008), sword-and-sorcery fiction (tales about adventures in medieval settings such as Karl E. Wagner’s Kane novels–Bloodstone, 1975, Dark Crusade, 1976, The Book of Kane, 1985, and Charles Saunders’ Imaro novels–Imaro, 1981, The Quest for Cush, 1984, The Trail of Bohn, 1985), mythic fiction (based on mythological and folk-tale themes as in Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood 1984, Charles de Lint’s Someplace to Be Flying, 1998, John Crowley’s Little, Big, 1981, or Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys, 2005, and The Sandman series, 1989), quest fantasy (based on the search for an external object/person or internal experience/ wisdom/ knowledge as in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire Saga, 2006-2011), dark or noire fantasy (dealing with vampirism as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1897, and Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, 1976-2003,

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Chapter One

sado-masochism as in Alasdair Gray’s Something Leather, 1990, and Satanism in Sean Vincent’s Lehosit’s Lucifer and Lacious, 2007, or Jeff Rovin’s Conversations with the Devil, 2007), Asian fantasy (describing Asian cultural values, landscapes, martial arts, and ninjas as in Alison Goodman’s Eona, 2011, Lian Hearn’s Tales of the Otori, 2002-2007, and Zoë Marriott’s Shadows on the Moon, 2009), utopian/dystopian fantasy (Thomas More’s Utopia, 1516, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, 1726, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, 1872, Orwell’s 1984, 1948, Ursula Le Guin, Always Coming Home, 1985), paranormal fantasy (featuring characters with paranormal or psychic abilities such as telekinesis or telepathy as in Herman Maurer, The Telekinetic, 2011, and F.D. Heisser, The Forest Telekinetic, 2013), humorous or comic fantasy (amusing stories and/or characters with a satirical value as in Terry Pratchett Discworld series, 1983-2011), realistic fantasy (the magic realism cultivated by Angela Carter in Nights at the Circus, 1984, The Passion of New Eve, 1977), military fantasy (dealing with wars, armies, or military strategies, as in Steven Erikson’s series 0DOD]DQ %RRN RI WKH )DOOHQ, 1999-2011, Paul Kearney’s The Ten Thousand, 2008, and Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings, 2010), alternate/counterfactual history (Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee, 1953, in which the Civil War is won by the American South, and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, 1962, in which World War II is won by Germany and Japan), political fantasy (describing how politics might affect society as in K. A. Krisko’s Crypt of Souls, 2012, and N.K. Jemisin’s The Kingdom of Gods, 2011, or The Shadowed Sun, 2012), and urban fantasy (about large frightening cities, with sinister suburbs, dreary subway stations, dark alleys, and dank basements as in Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files, 2000-2012, and China Mieville’s King Rat, 1998). Each of the subsubgenres mentioned above has a series of subcategories. A romance novel may belong to history, paranormal, gothic, time-travel, urban, or queer romance, while a utopian novel may be classified as dark, paranormal, urban, or queer. On closer inspection, we discover that this game of counterpointed, criss-crossed ovelaps is very simple: genres can be divided into subgenres, which in their turn include as subsubgenres all the higher genre variations. We should not be surprised, then, that Charles de Lint (2011) finds that the term “mythic fiction” is best suited to designate what are in fact his urban fantasy productions (The Jack of Kinrowan: A Novel of Urban Faerie, 1997, Someplace to Be Flying, 1998), in which mythological and fairy-tale stories are placed in contemporary urban settings. Nor should we feel troubled that Peter S. Beagle (2011) reduces the three genres of urban

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fantasy to mythic fiction, paranormal romance, and noire fantasy, ignoring other sub-subgenres as the low epic, feminist, and queer urban fantasy. 3.3. What are the subgenres of science fiction? Science fiction may be classified into two broad subcategories: hard or technological sciencefiction (when science and technology are central to the work, which includes discussions on scientific truth or plausibility as happens in Arthur C. Clark’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968, Paul Anderson’s The Imperial Stars, 2000, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Galileo’s Dream, 2009), and soft or social/sociological science-fiction (when the environment is scientific, but the emphasis is on the protagonists, their adventures, and their interrelationships as in Frank Herbert’s Dune, 1965, Marge Piercy’s A Woman on the Edge of Time, 1976, and Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, 1985). These two subgenres may be further divided into sub-subgenres, of which some are similar to fantasy sub-subgenres and some are specific to science fiction only. To the former group belong the following categories of science fiction: comic (Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad, 1965, Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan, 1959), utopian/dystopian (dealing with a society (un)favourable to scientific development as in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge, 1990, and Max Barry’s Jennifer Government, 2003), romance (presenting love between artificial beings as in Marge Piercy’s He, She, It, 1991), feminist and queer (dealing with gender issues as in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, 1976, and Melissa Scott’s Trouble and Her Friends, 1994), military (dealing with wars, military forces and strategies as in Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, 1959, Gordon Dickson’s Dorsai!, 1959, and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, 1974), New Weird or horror (a genre which subverts the stereotypes of fantasy fiction in order to create a feeling of discomfort in the reader as in Herbert Lovecraft’s The Horror at Red Hook, 1925, Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City, 1969, and Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren, 2010), and alternate history (The Mongoliad by Neal Stephenson et al., 2012). Sub-subgenres specific to science fiction only are (post)apocalyptic science fiction (describing apocalyptic events in a society faced with atomic or ecological disasters as in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore, 1984, and The Gold Coast, 1988), intergalactic or space opera science fiction (interstellar universes of the future as in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, 1951-53, and Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, 1993), time-travel science fiction (describing travels forward into the future or back into past periods of human history as in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889, H. G. Wells’s The Time

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Machine, 1895, and Robert A. Heinlein’s The Door into Summer, 1957), libertarian science fiction (dealing with a right-wing type of anarchism as in Robert A. Heinlein’s Methuselah's Children, 1958, and Matthew Stover’s Heroes Die, 1997), steampunk (science fiction events taking place against a 19th century background and involving Victorian-age technology as in Keith Laumer’s Worlds of the Imperium, 1962, Ronald W. Clark’s Queen Victoria's Bomb, 1967, and Michael Moorcock's Warlord of the Air, 1971), and cyberpunk (dealing with cybernetic and informational technology and with the themes of cloning, virtual reality, the internet and the computer world as in William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, 1959, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, 1984, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, 2005, etc.). Here again sub-subgenres are the result of genre combination: cyberpunk may be feminist, gay, romance, or time-travel fiction; the New Weird may belong to the categories of fantasy, supernatural, horror, urban; steampunk may be historical, postapocalyptic, fantasy, horror, urban, gay, and so on. The interpenetration of genres and subgenres means that fantasy and science fiction lie open to all possible combinations and merge into hybrid, interactive texts that are impossible to categorize neatly. Therefore, one should accept blurred borders and liberate novels from the conceptual cages within which they have been imprisoned by traditional criticism.

Who? 4.1. Who are the heroes of fantasy fiction? What are their deeds and what do they embody? First of all, there are the “good guys,” who reflect the archetypal battle between good and evil. Fantasy is descended from myth, and, as Northrop Frye (1990, 35-42) has observed, its heroes are superhuman protagonists, demigods in conflict with enormously powerful beings. The strong males, who journey, wage war, sword-wield, and fall in love, defeating the hostile “bad guys” in the end, are the equivalent of Prince Charming in the fairy tales: they know more and do better than ordinary characters, although they fall back on similar human resources such as bravery, patience, self-control, perseverance, loyalty, and intelligence. The protagonists may be supercreatures like Spider-Man, 6XSHUPDQ%DWPDQRU,URQ0DQíWKHIDPRXVKHURHVRIFRPLFVDQGXUEDQ IDQWDVLHVíRU WKH\ PD\ EH RUGLQDU\ SLORWV XQLYHUVLW\ WHDFKHUV VFLHQWLVWV detectives, etc. The former group have oversized muscular bodies, are unusually athletic and skilled in martial arts, deploy a great amount of energy, and can fly or move at superhuman speed. The representatives of the latter group are not endowed with extraordinary physical powers, but

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can in some way control time or nature (weather, vegetation, fire, or ice), are extremely intelligent, have mystical abilities, extra-sensory powers (telekinesis, telepathy), or special weapons to defeat their enemies (swords, hammers, armour, rings, bracelets.) In general, superheroes fight against supervillains (Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter, the Joker and Dr. Impossible in comic books) who are in fact foil characters, endowed with powers similar to those of the heroes but dedicated to evil aims. The conflict in the story is based on the main heroes’ desire to seek justice in some way. They may want to avenge a crime, oppose the reign of terror imposed by a dictator, frustrate a conspiracy, punish a criminal, save a beloved person, obtain a desired object or position, etc. In general, the conflicts on which fantasy narratives are based are quite limited in number. In fairy tales, as Vladimir Propp (1928/2003, 25-65) has convincingly demonstrated, the number of motifs does not exceed thirtyone, selected and combined in different ways. Analyzed on a syntagmatic level, they start with a villainy, a prohibition, or a desire of some kind, which makes the protagonists leave home on a journey that is intended to lead them, often with the help of a magical agent, to the person or object they are looking for. They meet their enemies, defeat them, rescue the victims and/or find the desired objects, and return home. What is important is that forming the basis of the heroes’ adventurous decisions we can always find a strong moral code, based on a willingness to risk their own safety in the service of good and on a refusal to lie, steal, kill, or do anything that might prejudice the community or the family to which they belong. Their decisions are supposed to embody intellectual, moral, and spiritual “lessons” derived from collective human experiences which transcend times, places and cultures as archetypal acts, surfacing from the collective unconscious or universal memory pool shared by all humankind. In science fiction narratives, the protagonists belong to one of the following three categories: humans, humans who undergo a physical or mental/psychological change, and aliens. As space explorers or conquerors, they usually confront other humans or aliens on earth or on various other planets. The female partners of fantasy heroes are the traditional stereotypes of beautiful princesses, girlfriends, daughters, sisters and wives, mere objects to be rescued or to be won by the good guys. If they are evil, women are active as alien queens, witches, amazons, or fairies. Since 1970, the feminist movement has instigated a remarkable change in fantasy fiction with the development of a new category of female protagonists, the superheroines (Catwoman, Supergirl, Cybergirl, Wonder Woman in

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various comic books, the commander Cordelia Naismith in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Shards of Honor, 1986, Damsel in Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible, 2007). Strong and intellectually gifted, these women defeat various incarnations of evil, prevent wars and ecological disasters, defend vulnerable people, or punish crimes. Genderized variations of the male/female binary logic have also been quite numerous in recent years. Writers present us with all-female societies (Joanna Russ’s When It Changed, 1972, Nicola Griffith, Ammonite, 1992), populations with no defined gender identity (the singlesex world in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, 1915, the neutered Spacers in Samuel R. Delany’s Aye, and Gomorrah..., 1967, the androgynous people of Gethen in Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, 1969), or communities with five distinct genders (in Melissa Scott’s Shadow Man, 1995). Since the 1970s, homosexual protagonists have also been incorporated into fantasy fiction in order to allow such narratives as Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, 1975, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Heritage of Hastur, 1975, Kate Sweeney’s She Waits, 2006, or Marianne K. Martin’s Under the Witness Tree, 2004, in order to engage with issues of tolerance, reconceptualizations of gender and gender behavior, and the creation of societies free from the limitations of a heterosexual determinism for relationships (Betz 2011, 144). 4.2. Who are the “bad guys”? The list of bad guys is quite long. Besides humans, Patricia O’Brien Mathews (2011, 5-6) enumerates humans with nonhuman traits (psychics, necromancers, witches, sorcerers, warlocks, wizards, Knights Templar, ghostbusters, demon hunters, voodoo priests, empaths, animal communicators, doppelgängers, mirror-walkers), the walking dead (vampires, dhampirs, chupacabras, zombies, revenants, reavers), shapeshifters (werewolves, skin walkers, dragons, gargoyles), representatives of heaven and hell (guardian angels, cherubim, archangels, seraphim, fallen angels, demons, incubi, succubi, fiends, hellhounds), mythological characters (gods, goddesses, valkyries, furies, lamias), and fairy creatures (imps, fairies, elves, sprites, gnomes, mermaids, mermen, trolls). Sometimes a rich combination of evil characters appears in the same novel or series of novels, as is the case in Pratchett’s Discworld novels, where there are wizards (the Wizards of the Unseen University, Ponder Stibbons), dwarfs (Cuddy, Cheery Littlebottom), Lovecraftian monsters (the creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions), trolls (Detritus), zombies (Reg shoe), cyborgs (Hex), shapeshifters (the Librarian who turns into an orangutan), werewolves (Angua), etc.

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The ambiguity of these characters makes their classification difficult, since they transgress their own categories in various ways. I am not referring to the ambiguity in spelling noticed by O’Brien Mathews (2011:6), although this might be an interesting issue for linguists and etymologists. My comment relates to the way in which evil characters change from monstrous beasts to powerful, attractive male or female protagonists. Witches stop using their occult powers and serve their communities as herbal healers, wisewomen, and friends (the Lancre witches in Pratchett’s Discworld novels 1983-2011, Sycorax in Marina Warner’s Indigo, 1992, the mysterious witch woman in Madeleine L’Engle’s Poor Little Saturday, 1956); aliens become peaceful neighbours (Mildred Clingerman, Minister without Portfolio, 1952); cruel, insatiable vampires turn into sympathetic vampires, characterised by “the four B’s of the new twenty-first century vampire: beautiful, bright, bold and benefic.” *RúD ùHUEDQ    5HSUHVHQWDWLYH RI WKLV ODVW FDWHJRU\ LV *LOGD LQ Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories: A Novel, 1991), an African American runaway slave and lesbian vampire, who lives for two centuries (from 1850 to 2050) as a superheroine dedicated to her community. Her impressive awareness of the importance of responsibility, reciprocity, and choice has definitely established a new tendency in third millennium vampire stories. In science fiction, clones (the clone of Miles in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Shards of Honor, 1986, the characters in Le Guin’s Nine Lives, 1992, and in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, 2005) and cyborgs (Cardigan in James Tiptree’s The Girl who was Plugged In, 1972, Jael in Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, 1975, and Fatale in Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible, 2007) may also be both good and bad protagonists. Their ambiguity is explained by Donna Haraway (1991), who sees cyborg as “a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (1991, 149), offering a certain “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries” (1991, 150) and in the three major boundary breakdowns in its formation: first, between human and animal, due to the development of transgenic organisms; second, between organism and machine, noticeable in the humans’ coupling with machines for medical purposes (pacemakers, dialysis, artificial limbs and joints, hearing aids); and third, between the organic and the inorganic (“best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum…People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque” 153). The ambiguity of the new aliens means that vampires,

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clones, and cyborgs can pass as perfectly normal human beings and leads to a considerable decrease in terms of the fear factor.

Where and when? 5.1. Where does the action in fantastic fiction take place? Obviously in a supernatural or impossible world, with which the reader has to become acquainted. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (Clute, Grant, 1997, 847) provides the following definition for the places where fantasy actions unfold: it is “an autonomous world or venue which is not bound to mundane reality, which is impossible according to common sense and which is self-coherent as a venue for story.” This definition underlines the autonomy and self-coherence of these fantastic worlds, which need to contradict the commonsensical laws of the reader’s universe. J. R. R. Tolkien (1939) calls such worlds “secondary worlds.” They seem tolerable and keep you inside them as long as you suspend your judgment concerning the implausibility of events: What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful “subcreator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed.

Ann Swinfen (1984, 5-6) adds the distinction between those novels which use parallel worlds and those which create wholly new secondary worlds. The former “tend to clash, to contrast too strongly, to work against each other–making one or the other less credible, or undermining the relationship between the two,” while the latter require “imaginative freedom and logical discipline.” Both secondary and parallel worlds contradict tradition as marginal, centrifugal wonderlands, placed in various locations, such as castles, labyrinths, woods, mountains, caves, islands, Transylvania, imaginary planets, or some unseen level of reality experienced in dreams or posthumous fantasies. To reach these places, protagonists have to journey

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into them or cross a threshold from one life to another, a crucial process since the journey introduces an epistemological quest, based on an escape from home, which leads to a freedom with unlimited opportunities and continuous movement. The threshold between the two worlds can be a psychological portal (the mind or emotions as in Ursula Le Guin’s The Beginning Place, 1980), or a physical gate (a stargate in Andre Norton’s Star Gate, 1958, farcaster in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos, 1996, Jenson Gate in Stephen Robinett’s Stargate, 1976, a mirror in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass 1871, or a rabbit-hole in Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, 1865). When discovered, the imaginary locations appear as autonomous, self-coherent worlds, which may interact, consecutively or simultaneously, with the protagonists’ immediate reality. The former variant is illustrated by Russ Crossley’s novel Blossom Queen, Barbaria (2012), which starts in a real urban setting but ends up in an alternative barbarian universe. The latter variant appears in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Beginning Place (1980). The two protagonists of the novel, Irene Pannis and Hugh Rogers, journey from adolescence to adulthood in two alternate worlds, the suburbs of a real, unnamed American city and the mysterious world of Tembreabrezi. When there are multiple parallel worlds, a “polycosmos” or “multiverse” is created, whose coexistent societies can be travelled between by aliens or by mortals with special powers. In Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), there are four such distinct worlds, from which the interacting female protagonists come: Whileaway, Janet Evason’s futuristic world of women on a planet colonized from the Earth; Joanna’s world, similar to the Earth of the 1970s; Jeannine Dadier’s world of the Great Depression, which has a different historical development from that seen on Earth and does not experience World War II; and Jael’s dystopian world, affected by a long war between its male and female inhabitants. Sometimes new geographical worlds are associated with distinct linguistic spaces. In Suzette Haden Elgin’s satiric dystopia Native Tongue (1984), women linguists create their own language, Laádan, which is used in parallel with Langlish, the official language. The women in Ruth Nestvold’s Looking through Lace (2003) speak a secret language not available to males. Frequently, outer space is replaced as a setting by psychological landscapes, explored mainly in sociological science fiction. Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), a novel defined by its author as inner space fiction, is the story of a dramatic voyage into the astonishing inner world of Cambridge professor Charles Watkins, an amnesiac patient in a mental hospital. During a breakdown, Watkins has marvellous imaginary adventures on an Atlantic island, followed by an

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exciting cosmic journey, all designed to make readers move beyond rational processes in their pursuit of happiness and become more tolerant about irrational or mystical ideas. Through his dreams and fictions, George 2UUí8UVXOD./H*XLQ¶VKero in The Lathe of Heaven: A Novel, íLV able to create alternative structures and thus change reality. Fantasy territories may be called simply The World (John Grant, The World, 1992), Middle-earth (J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, 19541955), or Earthsea (Le Guin, The Earthsea Books, 1968-2001). Sometimes they have specific names such as Older Ruritania (Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda, 1894), Graustark (George Barr McCutcheon’s Balkan realm in the Graustark sequel, 1901-1914), Narnia (C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 1949-54), Discworld (Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, 1983-2011), Gormenghast (Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast series, 1946-1959), Prydain (Lloyd Alexander, The Chronicles of Prydain, 1964-1968), or Beta Colony (Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honour, 1986). Sometimes maps are given, mainly in the case of longer series, where readers are guided along labyrinthine universes (Le Guin’s Earthsea Books, 1968-2001, Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman’s Deathgate Cycle, 1990-1994, Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, 2006-2008 and The Kingkiller Chronicle, 2007-2011). Terry Pratchett has appended four atlases to his almost-forty-volume Discworld series, to describe the major regions of Discworld, Ankh-Morpork, Lancre, and Death’s Domain. These atlases are not called “maps,” but “mapps,” because Pratchett has satirical intentions in this series and believes that [y]ou can’t map a sense of humor. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know that There Be Dragons Everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they Be Here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs. (Terry Pratchett, see online text)

Several Discworld locations have been twinned with real world towns and cities. Wincanton, in Somerset, UK, for example, is twinned with Ankh-Morpork, and the town is the first to have even named streets after their fictional equivalents. (Wikipedia, see online text) Quite frequently, real places are transformed into crossroads of myths. Ackroyd’s fantasy London in Hawksmoor (1985), Chatterton (1987), English Music (1992), and The House of Doctor Dee (1993) has a secret self, playful and chaotic at times, but full of mysterious energies. It takes on the symbolic and sacred powers which shape English national characteristics as a unique combination of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic

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spirituality. Another famous place is Ryhope wood in Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood (1984), an ancient forest where myth-creatures, called mythagos, are generated by the memories and myths existing in the subconscious mind of the protagonists. Located in Herefordshire, the forest revives old mythic traditions in its archetypal wilderness, which made John Clute (1995a, 111) consider Ryhope wood an “abyssal chthonic resonator.” American authors prefer various urban contexts: real or hidden cities; technological supercivilizations that contrast with natural wilderness or rural life; cities fallen into ruins; hostile impersonal cities of the future; and postapocalyptic cities, from which no escape is possible, but only mutant life stirs in miserable basements. 5.2. As far as the time of action is concerned, it can range from any period in the prehistoric or ancient eras to the Victorian period (particularly favoured in steampunk), the present day, or and the immediate or distant future, all periods being equally interesting if imaginatively explored. The more remote the time and the more profound the shift in perspective, the greater the awe created in the reader. The chronology may unfold straightforwardly, or backwards as in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991), where the reversed timeline obliges the reader to follow the way in which Odilo Unverdorben, a Holocaust doctor, changes from old age to infancy. Sometimes periods are mixed as in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, where the author combines prehistoric, ancient, and Renaissance objects and characters with contemporary ones in order to create satirical effects. In fact the timeline of Discworld spans the whole period between 5000 B.C. and 2015 A.D., in accordance with what Pratchett calls a “morphic resonance” between Earth and Discworld, a flat planet supported by four elephants standing on the back of a gigantic space-turtle. In Holdstock’s Mythago (1984), Gwyneth is a character who starts life in the Bronze Age and appears in various later incarnations as a Roman girl in Britain, a young Celtic warrior princess, and Guinevere. Researchers have noted that when set in the medieval or Renaissance periods, fantasy literature has an enormous impact on the development of national identity. As Maria Sachiko Cecire (2009) claims, nostalgia for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance glorifies particular codes of values, modelled on old systems of loyalty and class hierarchy, which broaden the understanding of traditional Britishness and contribute to the backbone of Anglophone identity. The explosive popularity of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels and the subsequent rise of other new fantasy for children

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have extended these forms of medievalism to America and the world of the Commonwealth, thus placing them on a global stage.

How? How do fantasy characters speak? Tolkien insists that authors should respect their creations, grant them internal consistency, and allow them to obtain a life of their own with four clearly delineated dimensions: geographical, temporal, psychological, and linguistic. A great linguist himself, Tolkien created in The Lord of the Rings 14 artificial languages (among them Quenya, Welsh, Sindarin, Westron, Khuzdul, Valarin, and the Black Speech). Although these contribute much to the development of a marvellous imaginative world, they create huge problems for translators. Commenting on the two influential Chinese versions of The Lord of the Rings, one by Ding Di, Yao Jing-rong, and Tang Ding-jiu (Yilin Publishing House, Nanjing, 2001) and the other by Zhu Xue-heng (Linking Books, Taiwan, 2001), LI Hong-man (2010, 24) points out that the Swedish and Dutch translators of Tolkien can make extensive use of his own “Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Ring,” and produce semantic translations for Westron names wherever possible, while retaining the Elvish or Dwarfish names and passages. However, such a method is not feasible for Chinese translators, because they have to use transliteration for many expressions in Elvish and in the other invented languages. Moreover, not being familiar with Western mythology, Yilin makes The Lord of the Rings sound like a traditional Chinese wuxia story, while Zhu’s translation is much more popular with readers because Zhu is well versed in the mythological tradition of Western fantasy literature.

Why? 7.1. Why do authors write fantastic fiction? They enjoy the freedom of dealing with their own fantasies, of finding fulfilment in a world of their own mind, and of purging in a literary universe the tensions built up by taboos, restrictions, and rules regarding conduct. Writers may also want to evoke in their readers a powerful sense of wonder at the universe’s aesthetic perfection or a sense of the mystery involved in human efforts to bridge the gap between ourselves and what lies outside our imagination. In an appendix attached to her novel The Devilin Fey: An Incubus Story, Jess C. Scott (2010, 121-122) states that she loves “the world of paranormal, as the paranormal dimension allows for one to delve into another realm altogether. One has all new worlds, concepts, values, and perspectives to

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explore. I like to challenge myself to come up with something new/fresh/original too.” When asked what her readers can learn from her fantasy stories, she answers: “To be true/honest with oneself (before one can be that way, with others). To explore/accept/delve into ‘the darker aspects’ of one’s self/psyche. To attain some form of transformation/ transcendence via love/sex (where it’s one combined element, not two separate entities).” Fantasy writers also have the power to educate their audience to be more sophisticated in understanding speculative fiction and its different codes of reading. Besides, as Jackson (1981, 14) puts it, authors know how to exploit the subversiveness of fantasy fiction, its power to disturb the rules of artistic representation, and the reaction it creates towards utilitarian attitudes of mind. 7.2. Why do readers enjoy fantastic fiction? Because its authors’ boldness of invention encourages them to release their own imaginations from the chains of reason by inviting them to conduct thought experiments, explore the human mind under new conditions, and look at the world that lies beyond the limits of ordinary experience. Nanette Wargo Donohue, the author of The City Fantastic (2008), reminds us that readers are looking for fiction with tough female protagonists…, stronger distinction between good and evil, grittier urban landscapes, first-person narration, and sexual tension, often between female protagonist and a male character who toes the line between good and evil.” (quoted in O’Brien Mathews, 2011, 12)

What Donohue means is the pleasure of venturing from a world of commonplace life into a territory of supernatural wonder, where victories are won against fabulous forces, where one can feel strong, handsome, reliable, and wise, and where role models can be found, patterns followed, and examples taken up. By identifying with the supermen and superwomen of speculative fiction, one gains–at least for a while–the superior position of a demigod. But it is not only the mind that fantasy literature liberates, it is also the unconscious, the past, the feminine, the sexual, the repressed, for it subverts all the insufficiencies of a restricted universe. On the other hand, fantastic fiction deals with unusual moral and psychic states, thus giving readers the chance to experience insanity of all sorts, split personalities, eccentric behaviours, unrestrained day-dreaming, unusual nightmares, strange speeches, and scandalous scenes. For Beagle

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(2011), urban fantasy feeds “an unquenchable hunger for walks on the wild side,” while Meredith Schwartz (2009, 8) feels that fantasy is popular because it is so often about negotiating the fluid boundaries of two worlds. The stories in the queer urban anthology she edited in 2009 are about “love and sex and magic and real estate, fighting and fucking and making the trains run on time. We hope something in this book makes you snigger, tear up, jerk off, or look over your shoulder for a rustle of wings.” These are all very good reasons for reading fantasy fiction. The effects of fantasy are associated with a textual attention to mutability, as Lachmann (2002, 12) exemplifies by listing forms of foreign otherness: anthropological/physical (fantastic beings, monsters), mental (human dreamers, people who are insane, people hallucinating, or the like), and related to the forgotten, repressed, or desired other of culture (necrophilia). They are concerned with ontological changes between different spheres of being, between the natural and the supernatural, the human and the animal, mineral, or machine, which brings us to Donna Haraway’s (1991) famous cyborg theory, which explains the attraction felt by readers for all sorts of human/machine combinations. There may be numerous other reasons why people read fantastic fiction: to transcend time, create an idyllic pseudo-realist world of democracy, fight a modern battle between good and evil, or avoid boredom. The curiosity and voyeurism of readers can be added as two lower mental faculties attracted by horror, as Edmund Burke (1756/1990) and Ann Radcliffe (1826) explained long ago: terror and horror are strong ingredients in the sublime, expanding the soul and awakening its faculties to a high degree of life. The appeal of fantastic fiction may also rest on its being “a philosophical-mathematical jeu d’esprit,” “a social parable,” “a therapy,” “a retreat,” (Hunt, Lenz 2001, 17) or simply a form of entertainment. Beagle (2011, 15) assures his readers that the urban fantasy anthology he is publishing together with Joe K. Landsdale has a number of wonderful stories, some deeply provocative, others played for camp. You will be purely delighted by some of them and profoundly disturbed by others–I should be rather disappointed if it were otherwise. But you will not be bored.

This is a great statement, because the existence of much bad writing has led to speculative fiction being considered inferior literature and, consequently, boring. Its predictable discourse and lack of originality have given speculative fiction a mixed reputation. That reactions to it differ was already pointed out by E. M. Forster in his Aspects of the Novel, (1927/1974, 75-76) where he commented:

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When the fantastic is introduced it produces a special effect; some readers are thrilled, others choked off; it demands an additional adjustment because of the oddness of its method or subject-matter – like a side-show in an exhibition where you pay sixpence as well as the original entrance fee. Some readers pay with delight, it is only for the side-shows that they entered the exhibition, and it is only to them I can address myself now. Others refuse with indignation, and these have our sincere regard, for to dislike the fantastic in literature is not to dislike literature. It does not even imply poverty of imagination, only a disinclination to meet certain demands that are made on it.

Forster’s opinion exonerates readers from guilt if they do not enjoy speculative fiction. Many readers dislike the process of defamiliarization entailed by fantasy worlds and think that such novels are quite simply terrible. Even publishers regard them in one of two ways: commercial, or unpublishable. 7.3. But what is publishable and what not? Sometimes it is amazing how differently readers, critics, and publishers react. The Oxford Good Fiction Guide (2002, 46) considers that the top five fantasy authors are C. S. Lewis (That Hideous Strength, 1945), J. R. R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings, 1954-1955), T. H. White (The Once and Future King, 1958), Avram Davidson (The Phoenix and the Mirror, 1969), and S. R. Donaldson (Lord Foul’s Bane, 1977). should read: “There is no mention of J. K. Rowling (the Harry Potter series, 1997-), Edgar Rice Burroughs (the Mars, 1912-1942, Venus, 1934-1970, and 7DU]DQ1912-1995 series), or Anne Rice (Vampire Chronicles, 1997-2003), although these writers sell millions of books. The success of their novels as well as that of many others has encouraged people to write sequels, to produce films, video games, stage plays, and operas, and to establish trends in architecture, fashion, and cooking.7 Frequently, however, convincing psychological portraits, meticulous presentations of scientific principles, carefully handled plots, subtle and perceptive explorations of sexuality have allowed F&SF novels to compete with great traditional fiction. Not even here can boundaries be clearly traced. Authors such as Ackroyd, Lessing, Carter, Atwood, and Ishiguro have produced fantasy fiction for which they have been awarded prizes. On the other hand, fantasy writers have striven to raise the genre's standards of literary quality by rewriting well-known novels, often skilfully: Gregory Benford’s Against Infinity, (1998) a rediscussion of Faulkner’s The Bear, has been praised, together with Benford’s other novels (In the Ocean of the Night, 1977, Timescape, 1980, Across the Sea

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of Suns, 1984), for the modernist stream-of-consciousness techniques, the multiple, contradictory, and otherwise prismatic storytelling methods, the broken narratives, and the startling juxtapositions and discontinuities in space and time (Larry McCaffery 1990, 9-10). Handbooks of creative writing have been devoted to, or include chapters on, fantastic novels, teaching students how to write successfully (Stableford 1998; Crawford 2007; Tuttle 2005). The secret lies not only in how the world of magic is described as plausibly different from our own world, but also in how it reflects our fears and desires, and in how it personifies them. It is only then, in Charles de Lint’s (2011) opinion, that fantasy stories can become “a little candle held up for the dark of the night, trying to illuminate the hope for a better world where we all respect and care for each other.” Charles de Lint’s claim makes us accept the evidence that these little candles cannot be defined. Accepting diversity within the field of the imaginary, we may conclude that there is no such thing as fantasy or science fiction, there are only fantasies or science fictions, which all require different definitions. That their number is growing, and that there is no end of this growth in sight is comforting: it highlights the variety and versatility of the genre and strengthens our hope in a world where the speculations of an imaginative mind will have the power to save humanity.

Endnotes 1 See Malak’s (1987), Ketterer’s (1992), and Mohr (2005) for the dystopian and utopian/dystopian perspectives on The Handmaid’s Tale as well as Miner’s (1991) feminist, Foley’s (1989) historical, Kaler’s (1989) and Larson’s (1989) religious approaches. 2 Then how much imagination do writers of fantasy fiction need? How inventive are they supposed to be? Not very, according to David Lodge (1992, 37), who refers to science fiction as “a curious mixture of invented gadgetry and archetypal narrative motifs very obviously derived from folk tales, fairy tale and Scripture, recycling the myths of Creation, Fall, Flood, and a Divine Saviour, for a secular but still superstitious age.” The future is simply imagined by involving, modifying, and combining images of what the readers, consciously or unconsciously, have always known. However, the extraordinary success of such fantasy series as Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Rowling’s Harry Potter, all sold in millions of copies, seems to contradict Lodge’s severe statement. Jackson’s (1981, 8) opinion sounds more realistic: “Fantasy has not to do with inventing another non-human world: it is not transcendental. It has to do with inverting the elements of this world, recombining its constitutive features in new relations to produce something strange, unfamiliar and apparently ‘new’, absolutely ‘other’ and different.”

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McHale (1996, 75-76) explains: “Todorov is right, of course, that for a certain historical period, running roughly from the rise of the gothic novel in the eighteenth century to Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis,’ a structure of epistemological hesitation was superimposed upon the underlying dual ontological structure of the fantastic, naturalizing and ‘psychologizing’ it. But in the years since ‘Metamorphosis,’ this epistemological structure has tended to evaporate, leaving behind it the ontological deep structure of the fantastic still intact. Hence the practice of an ontological poetics of the fantastic by postmodernist writers.” 4 O’Brien Mathews (2011, 3) comments on the huge discrepancies in the classification of books in libraries, on Amazon.com, and at Borders bookstores. She gives a list of books and series variously categorized, including Kelly Armstrong’s Women of the Other World series (2001-2012), which is described as fiction, horror, science fiction, mystery, thriller, and fantasy, or Wilson F. Paul’s Repairman Jack series (1984-2008), seen as fiction, horror, mystery, science fiction, action, and adventure. On its inner cover, Jess C. Scott’s novel about a young woman who has an intimate relationship with an incubus, The Devilin Fey: An Incubus Story (2010), is classified as paranormal, erotic, romance, and urban fantasy. 5 +RZ TXLFNO\ JHQUHV FKDQJH LV H[SODLQHG E\ $QGUHHD ùHUEDQ   LQ KHU analysis of the new canon established by J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series (2005–): in the 1990s steampunk was only a small subgenre, but by 2011 it had already become a way of life, with its characteristic art objects, clothing style, paintings, books, and films (Hugo, 2011). 6 Darko Suvin (1979, 4) claims that fantasy is “the literature of cognitive estrangement,” opposing real-world norms to other-worldly, supernatural, or imagined norms. This estrangement is caused by “a strange newness, a novum”, something fundamentally different from life as we know it, provoking a discontinuity between the world of the reader and that of the story. In John Clute’s (1995b: 84) opinion, science fiction is about adventure, exploration, and penetration of the unknown, warfare, combat, hard science, and the end of the world in tracts of ice or fire. Neither of the two definitions establishes a real difference between science fiction and fantasy. What both Suvin and Clute say about science fiction is true of fantasy as well. 7 Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar novels have reached 20 volumes, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover has 19 volumes, Stephan Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas the Unbeliever has 9 volumes, etc. The play Bellona, Destroyer of Cities was staged in 2010 based on Samuel R. Delany’s novel Dhalgren, and Neuromancer the Opera was composed in 1995 by Jayne Wenger and Marc Lowenstein drawing on the novel by William Gibson.

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Works cited Selective Primary Bibliography Amis, Martin. 1991. Time’s Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence. London: Jonathan Cape. Atwood, Margaret. 1985. The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Benford, Gregory. 1998. Against Infinity. New York: Harper Voyager. Bujold, Lois Mc Master. 1986. Shards of Honor. Riverdale, New York: Baen Books. Crossley, Russ. 2012. Blossom Queen, Barbaria. Bloomington IN: Booktango Books. Elgin, Suzette Haden. 1984. Native Tongue. New York: Draw. Eliot, George. 1859/1980. Adam Bede. Ed. Stephen Gill. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Grossman, Austin. 2007. Soon I Will Be Invincible. New York: Pantheon Books. Holdstock, Robert. 1984. Mythago Wood. New York: Berkley Books. Gomez, Jewelle. 1991. The Gilda Stories: A Novel. Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand Books. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1971. The Lathe of Heaven: A Novel. New York: Scribner. —. 1980. The Beginning Place. New York: Harper & Row (subsequently published under the title Threshold, 1986). Lessing, Doris. 1971. Briefing for a Descent into Hell. London: Jonathan Cape. Nestvold, Ruth. 2003. Looking through Lace. Asimov's, September, Available at Smashwords Edition, http://www.smashwords.com/ext reader/read/43481/3/looking-through-lace. Accessed 04/15/2013. Pratchett, Terry. 1983. The Colour of Magic. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe. Rice, Anne. 1976. Interview with the Vampire. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Rowlinson, J. K. 1997. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Russ, Joanna. 1975. The Female Man. Boston: Beacon Press. Schwartz, Meredith (ed.). 2009. Alleys and Doorways: Queer Urban Fantasy. Maple Shade, N.J.: Lethe Press. Scott, Jess C. 2010. “Author Q&A” in The Devilin Fey: An Incubus Story. Smashwords Edition.

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Thomas, Sheere R. 2001. Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, London: Grand Central Publishing. Tolkien, J. R. R. 1954-1955. The Lord of the Rings. Allen & Unwin.

Secondary Bibliography Arlow, Jacob, Brenner, Charles. 1964. Psychoanalytic Concepts and the Structural Theory. New York: International Universities Press. Armitt, Lucie. 1996. Theorising the Fantastic. Interrogating Texts. London: Arnold. —. 2005. Fantasy Fiction: An Introduction. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group. Asimov Isaac. 1953. “Social Science Fiction” in Bretnor, Reginald (ed.). Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future. New York: Coward-McCann, pp. 151-168. Baldick, Chris. 2008. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Emerson, Caryl (ed. & trans.). Theory and History of Literature, vol. 8. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Beagle, Peter S. 2011. “Introduction” in Beagle, Peter S. and Landsdale, Joe K. (eds.). The Urban Fantasy Anthology. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications. Available at http://books.google.ro/books?id=6r4kYs8o D48C&printsec=frontcover&d. Accessed 04/15/2013. Betz, Phyllis Marie. 2011. The Lesbian Fantastic: A Critical Study of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Paranormal, and Gothic Writing. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland &Co. Available at q=urban+fantasy&hl=ro&sa=X &ei=XCASUe_sBIX2sgb7h4CIBg&sqi=2&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAg. Accessed 04/15/2013. Burke, Edmund. 1756/1990. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cecire, Maria Sachiko. 2009. “Medievalism, Popular Culture and National Identity in Children’s Fantasy Literature.” Studies in Ethnicity & Nationalism, vol. 9, nr. 3, pp. 395-409. Clute, John. 1995a. Look at the Evidence: Essays & Reviews. Ann Arbor: Liverpool University Press. Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Mythago_Wood. Accessed 04/15/2013. —. 1995b. Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia. Dorling Kindersley. —. 1997. “Urban Fantasy” in Clute, John and Grant, John

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(eds.). The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 975-976. Clute, John, John Grant (eds.). 1997. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Coleridge, Samuel T. 1817. Biographia Literaria. Available at http:// www.online-literature.com/coleridge/biographia-literaria/13/. Accessed 04/15/2013. Crawford, Killian. 2007. “Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy” in Earnshaw, Steven (ed.). The Handbook of Creative Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 134-145. Feldt, Laura. 2011. “Religious Narrative and the Literary Fantastic: Ambiguity and Uncertainty.” Religion, vol. 41, nr. 2, pp. 251-283. Foley, Michael. ³6DWLULF,QWHQWLQWKHǥ+LVWRULFDO1RWHV¶(SLORJXHRI Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies, vol. 11, nr. 2, pp. 44-52. Forster, Edward M.1974 [1927]. Aspects of the Novel. London, Sidney and Auckland: Holder and Stoughton. Freud, Sigmund. 1908. “On the Sexual Theories of Children” in Strachey James (ed. & trans.). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, vol. 9, pp. 205-226. —. 1915. “The Unconscious” in Strachey James (ed. & trans.). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, vol. 14, pp. 166 – 204. —. 1919. “The Uncanny” in Strachey James (ed. & trans.). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, vol. 17, pp. 219-251. Available at http://wwwrohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html. Accessed 04/15/2013. —. 1964 [1916]. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin Freud Library 1. —. 1988 [1909-1911]. Case Histories II. Harmondsworth: Penguin Freud Library 9. Frye, Northrop. 1990. Anatomy of Criticism. London: Penguin Books. Glynos, Jason. 2008. “Ideological fantasy at work.” Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 13, pp. 275-296. *RúD &RGUXĠD $QGUHHD ùHUEDQ  ³7KH 9DPSLUH RI WKH UG Millennium: From Demon to Angel” in Jarazo Álvarez, Rubén (ed.). Océanide, no. 4/ 2012, Online Journal of SELICUP. Available at http://oceanide.netne.net/articulos/art4-10.php. Accessed 04/15/2013. Haraway, Donna. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” in Simians,

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Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, pp.149-181. Hong-man, LI. 2010. “Fantasy in Translation: A Study of Two Chinese Versions of The Lord of the Rings.” Cross-Cultural Communication, vol. 6, nr. 4, pp. 20-27. Hume, Kathryn. 1984. Fantasy and Mimesis. Responses to Reality in Western Literature. New York and London: Methuen. Hunt, Peter, Millicent Lenz. 2001. Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction. London and New York: Continuum. Irwin, W. R. 1976. The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy. Urbana: The University of Illinois Press. Jackson, Rosemary. 1981. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London and New York: Methuen. Jung, Carl G. 1953/1996. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. KDOHU $QQH .  ³ǥ$ 6LVWHU 'LSSHG LQ %ORRG¶ 6DWLULF ,QYHUVLRQ RI the Formation Techniques of Women Religious in Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale.” Christianity and Literature, vol. 38, nr. 2, pp. 43-62. Ketterer, David. 1992. “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: A Contextual Dystopia.” Science-Fiction Studies, vol. 16, nr. 2, pp. 209217. Klein, Melanie. 1975. Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 19211945. London: Karnac Books. Lacan, Jacques. 1994. The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis. Miller, Jacques-Alain (ed.), Sheridan, Alan (trans). London: Penguin. Lachmann, Renate. 2002. (U]lKOWH3KDQWDVWLN=X3KDQWDVLHJHVFKLFKWHXQG Semantikphantastischer Texte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Larson, Janet L. 1989. “Margaret Atwood and the Future of Prophecy.” Religion and Literature, vol. 21, nr. 1, pp. 27-61. Lint, Charles de. 2011. “A Personal Journey into Mythic Fiction” in Beagle, Peter S., Landsdale, Joe K. (eds.). The Urban Fantasy Anthology. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications. Available at http://books.google.ro/books?id=6r4kYs8oD48C&printsec=frontcover &dq=urban+fantasy&hl=ro&sa=X&ei=XCASUe_sBIX2sgb7h4CIBg &sqi=2&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAg. Accessed 04/15/2013. Lodge, David. 1992. The Art of Fiction. London: Penguin Books. —. 2006. The Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture. Duckett, Bob (ed.). Edinburgh: Pearson Education Ltd.

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—. 2002. Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners. Rundell, Michael (ed.). London: Macmillan. Malak, Amin. 1987. “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and the Dystopian Tradition.”Canadian Literature, 112, pp. 9-17. Manlove, Colin N. 1975. Modern Fantasy: Five Studies. Cambridge, London, New York: Cambridge University Press. Manlove, Colin N. 1982. “On the Nature of Fantasy” in Schlobin, Roger (ed.). Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art. Brighton: John Spiers, pp. 16-35. McHale, Brian. 1996. Postmodernist Fiction. London and New York: Routledge. McCaffery, Larry. 1990. Across the Wounded Galaxy: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Authors. Chicago: Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Miner, Madonne. 1991. “ǥ7UXVW 0H¶ 5HDGLQJ WKH 5RPDQFH 3ORW LQ Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 37, nr. 2, pp. 148-168. Mohr, Dunja M. 2005. Worlds Apart? Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias. Jefferson, N. C. and London: McFarland & Co. O’Brien Mathews, Patricia. 2011. Fang-tastic Fiction: Twenty-firstcentury Fantastic Paranormal Reads. Philadelphia and Washington: American Library Association. —. 1996. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. Crowther, Jonathan (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2007. The Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus. Waite, Maurice (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. Oxford English Dictionary. Available at http://oxforddictionaries.com/ definition /english/fantastic? q=fantasticality#fantastic__11. Accessed 04/15/2013. —. 2002. The Oxford Good Fiction Guide. Rogers, Jane (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Propp, Vladimir I. 1928/2003. Morphology of the Folktale. Scott, Laurence (trans.). Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, Rabkin, Eric. 1976. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Radcliffe, Ann. 1826. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” New Monthly 0DJD]LQH, vol. 16, nr. 1, pp. 145-152. Available at http://www. litgothic.com/Texts/radcliffe_sup.pdf. Accessed 04/15/2013. —. 1968. Random House Dictionary of the English Language. Urdang, Laurence (ed.). New York: Random House.

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Russ, Joanna. 1973. “Speculations: The Subjunctivity of Science Fiction” Extrapolation 15, pp. 51-59. Schwartz, Meredith. 2009. “Foreword” in Schwartz, Meredith (ed.). Alleys and Doorways: Queer Urban Fantasy. Maple Shade, N.J.: Lethe Press, pp. 7-9. Scott, Jess C. 2010. “Author Q&A.” The Devilin Fey: An Incubus Story. Smashwords Ebook Edition. Accessed 04/15/2013. Sobczack, Vivian. 1987. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. New York: Ungar. Stableford, Brian M. 1998. Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction: And Getting Published. Lincolnwood, Chicago: NCT Publishing Group. Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Swinfen, Ann. 1984. In Defense of Fantasy: A Study of the Genre in English and American Literature. London: Routledge. ùHUEDQ $QGUHHD  ³5RPDQFLQJ WKH SDUDQRUPDO $ &DVH 6WXG\ RQ J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood” in Percec, Dana (ed.). Romance: The History of a Genre. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 89-110. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Howard, Richard (trans.). Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Tolkien, J. R. R. 1939. On Fairy Stories. Available at http://bjorn.kiev.ua/ librae/Tolkien/Tolkien_On_Fairy_Stories.htm. Accessed 04/15/2013. Tuttle, Lisa. 2005. Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction. London: A.& C. Black. Walkerdine, Valerie. 2005. “Freedom, Psychology and the Neoliberal Worker.” Soundings, nr. 29, pp. 47–61. Walters, James. 2011. Fantasy Fiction: A Critical Introduction. New York: Berg. :ROIH *DU\  ³ǥ)DQWDV\¶ IURP Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy” in Sandner, David (ed.). Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader. Westport, CT: Praeger, pp. 271- 272. äLåHN6ODYRM2. “Lacan Between Cultural Studies and Cognitivism” in Glynos, Janos and Stavrakakis, Yannis (eds). Lacan & Science. London: Karnac.

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Webography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_fiction_authors. Accessed 04/15/2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wincanton. Accessed 04/15/2013.

CHAPTER TWO GOTHIC LITERATURE: A BRIEF OUTLINE FRANCISCO JAVIER SÁNCHEZ-VERDEJO PÉREZ The context In the field of literary studies, what seems clear at first ends up being surprisingly difficult to define later. This is what happens with the socalled Gothic literature, and, in particular, with its specific development in England, a country where its nature can be quite precisely delimited and its evolution traced, even though this is not the only country that witnessed enthusiasm for this type of writing. Nowadays, the Gothic genre has an immediate reference: a type of literature that revolves around the macabre, the mysterious, the fantastic, everything that goes beyond logic and reason. And this type of literature developed in abundance in the 18th and 19th centuries. Apart from the difficulty of enumerating the characteristics which turn a piece of literature into a Gothic story, we have to bear in mind the polysemy of the adjective Gothic itself, which can refer to very different concepts in a great variety of fields: x Certain Germanic villages along the Baltic shores whose inhabitants invaded Europe in the 3rd century, reaching the Iberian Peninsula and being responsible for weakening the Roman Empire. x Any idea related to the medieval, in opposition to the previous Classical period. x An artistic movement that appeared in 12thand 13th century Europe. x A new architectural tendency that occurred in the last decades of the 17th century, termed the Gothic revival. x Related to the meaning that is being analysed here, a type of literature that soon came to be known as Gothic romance.

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But we cannot ignore the connotations that this term implied: the “Gothic” became a synonym for the barbarous; it was the manifestation of a wild, dark period that brought an end to the Greco-Roman civilisation. In aesthetic terms, the Gothic represented bad taste, as contrasted with typical neoclassical harmony, good taste and balance. During the 18th century, these pejorative nuances became combined with emotional ones, with the result that the same word had two different meanings when it was used by opposing parties in the political, social and intellectual fields. Gothic is a synonym for the love for freedom and was linked to the most liberal movements of the day. A highly revealing example of how Gothic could infuse itself into politics and society and/or vice versa can be observed in M. G. Lewis’ The Monk and the stir that arose following its publication. The fact of Lewis’ being a Liberal Member of Parliament gave the issue a political nuance: his Tory opponents used it as a stick to beat him with, and the association of Gothic narrative with progressive and dangerous ideologies soon became unavoidable. In addition, Lewis’ homosexuality and the defence of his work mounted by magazines such as the Analytical Review–regarded as a hotbed of feminists and radicals–reinforced the idea that such works corrupted the sacred values of society. It is in the field of aesthetics that Gothic not only acquires a positive value but also stands out as a genuine statement of principles. Starting out from philosophical treatises such as A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) by Edmund Burke, or Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres (1783) by Hugh Blair, Gothic insists on the principle of the sublime as opposed to the simply beautiful: darkness, commonness and greatness become pillars of a new aesthetic mode that not only contrasts with the lightness and variety of Neoclassical art but also implies a more refined sensitivity and a greater intellectual sharpness. When the strange and ambiguous pleasure caused by negative feelings such as melancholy, nostalgia, and some depressive states is discovered, they are considered forms of artistic inspiration, opposed to the rationality and coolness of the Neoclassical trend. Gothic buildings, landscapes in which violent chiaroscuros and dramas are encounter each other, these represent the new canons that struggle against the typical 18th century coolness and asepsis. Richard Hurd, in Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), demanded the recovery of the tradition of the romance, the medieval narrative and the labyrinth structure inspired by the great poets: Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton. (Hurd 1963, 4) From this point of view, the adjective Gothic was to be used with real pride by practitioners, and the expression Gothic

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romance was also to be brandished like a weapon against critics who used the term as a synonym for poor quality and even ridiculous literature, in other words, cheap literature for people with bad taste. This two-edged meaning of ‘Gothic’ was to be a constant from these initial moments and all through its evolution. Although new tendencies have opened up new ways to define the Gothic, we must not forget how it began. Sage (1990, 12–13) argues that the Gothic novel, banned by the canons of good taste and morality, produced and consumed in large numbers by women, managed to expand during the last decades of the 18th century. Seen from the distance of our current investigation, the genre appears completely unified, but, in its own time, the market for this type of fiction was polarised by a range of social and political factors: the desire for female emancipation, political radicalism, and anti-Catholicism, to name only a few. But a question continues to hover in the air, why did Gothic style arise in the first place? Spector (1984, 6) sees it like a force behind an obvious general dissatisfaction. It is a “reluctance to accept the traditional, the dominant, the accepted values, whether they were social, scholarly or aesthetic.” Spector backs up his idea by noting the distinctives that clearly outline Gothic writing: Without being revolutionary, in varying measures they were subversive of the very contrives of balance and regularity, whether in art or society... Gothic is an expression of uneasiness with the apparent, if superficial eighteenth–century rational climate of opinion and a desire to escape from its restrictions and limitations. (1984, 6)

The rational beauty of Neoclassicism had collapsed, and the horrifying was now the new touchstone of taste, the new source of pleasure. A wicked, evil beauty is a constant attribute of the devil; however, by the beginning of the 19th century, the traces of the medieval demon had disappeared completely. Although the Judaeo-Christian universe contains bestial monsters– Leviathan, the whale that swallows Jonah, the Beast of the Apocalypse, the dragon that Saint Michael kills–its true great creation is evil in its pure state: the Devil or Satan. Satan would come to be another key element for the understanding of the true meaning of any Gothic writing. The reader is encouraged to search for a world beyond ours. Leviathan arises from Darkness–William Blake represents him as being a snake. In Western culture, religion had not defined this being fully, but the Gothic novel did. The concept of evil had been rejected; so Satan had been relegated to aesthetics. This fantastic creature is the one whose unique mission implies

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causing spiritual disorder: confusion and evil are synonyms. John Milton defines evil as ruin, what is not truth. Evil is the anti-aesthetics, the antithesis of aesthetics which curiously is an aesthetics in itself. In this sense, we should bear in mind that, according to Hegel, aesthetics does not occur only in the beautiful but in the evil as well. Similarly, for Goethe, the demoniac is a form of wild energy. According to Hoffmann, man is attracted by evil. Tragic beauty, no matter whether it manifests itself in the guise of honoured men driven to the destruction of those around them, or in the form of women whose charm entraps men and women alike, is a recurrent motif in the 18th and 19th centuries. Evil can be as noble as Good, and death can be more glorious than life. Death can be something beautiful, just as evil can be something desirable: these two sensibilities define, to a great extent, the works of these periods. In Milton’s vision, the fallen angel assumes a new poetic splendour; his rebelliousness has been endowed with heroic qualities and becomes a new cult object. Paradise Lost awakens the archetype of the new, Satanic beauty. Maggie Kilgour expresses the connection between that mysterious being and Milton’s fallen angel thus: While Milton himself becomes an important image for the tradition of British liberty, his Satan provided an important model for (among other things) the gothic villain: the individual who fights against an oppressive tradition, the revolutionary oedipal son, who not only rebels against but also denies his father… Milton’s Satan is one of the types of the noble robber or outlaw as an archetype of the individual alienated from society because of society's inherent evil. (Kilgour 1995, 40–41)

In the 18th century, there was nothing more hidden than the devil. In a time of confidence in reason and in positive values, evil was seen as an abstraction of the remote past; neither literature nor philosophy nor religion was interested in it, and it was consigned to darkness (not yet Gothic, though), confined to a separate realm of (un)reality. A world so close to paradise as the one which seemed to be emerging from the ideas of the Enlightenment did have a deep need for a negative counterpart. De Sade was to be one of the first to walk this path, by making the darkest aspects of sex emerge in an undoubtedly cathartic way. His example would be followed, to different degrees, by Cloderlos of Laclos with Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Lewis with his The Monk, and by Madame Leprince of Beaumont, to whom we owe Beauty and the Beast. The Gothic genre maintained its success during the 18th and 19th centuries as a consequence of the rise of agnostic, rationalistic scepticism

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(this being a period in which the mind of man was seeking new boundaries in order to find answers to his transcendental questions). It was necessary to surprise and to shock a reader who could contemplate lost souls, pacts with the Devil, and coven scenes with a distant, sceptical eye. Gothic literature therefore resorted to remote traditions, to enigmatic and unknown divinities, to beings from another world, to oppressive images and surprising metamorphoses of (and into) terrible beings. We can observe, therefore, that this entire context was preparing the ground to facilitate the rise of this new genre, a clear reflection of a convulsive and uneasy subconscious. The contradiction between an ideology in which “individual desires and collective needs participated in perfect reciprocity” (Poovey 1979, 307) and the economic conditions and politics of the moment was beginning to surface. And Laura Kranzler also believes that: this juxtaposition of the ghastly and the everyday suggests one of the defining characteristics of the Gothic genre, that of the uncanny double, the shadowy world that is the complex underbelly of familiar experience. (in Gaskell 2000, xi)

In the 18th century, the economic potential of the Gothic genre was plain to see from book sales and the number of such stories published in newspapers. The rise of the middle class and the inception of the decline of the upper class are part of the background to the success of Gothic, together with the development of new means of communication, urban growth, and the transformation of rural areas. And it was in this social climate that the Gothic novel emerged: a new and frightening genre for a new and frightening age. The spectre of social revolution appears in the spectres of the Gothic; the loss of social identity metamorphoses into the Gothic hero or heroine in search of their own identity. And if we are looking for the perfect metaphor of the search for identity, H G Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897) is a valuable source: his anonymity is the consequence of his lack of identity. The Gothic–a synonym for medieval obscurantism–reveals a world that is cryptic, full of unseen knowledge and secret power. It is often criticised for its excessively melodramatic scripts, its tortured characters, its constant evocation of the fear and the threat of the powers of Avernus, the Other, its totally predictable plots, and the predictable parallels between décor and characters. The incredible popularity of the genre in the 18th century and at the beginning of the 19th century shows a resistance and strength that cannot be overlooked. What is there in these repetitive and fantastic works that made/makes them exert such a fascination upon the

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readers of then and now? Part of the answer lies in the very topics favoured by the Gothic mode: nature, the past, and the uncanny, even that frequently derided escapism. Readers of Gothic, as members of a decadent, heavily criticised group, expect and favour escapist plots, one of the most brilliant examples being Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. At the same time, the reading public is ready to devote itself to an idealised Middle Ages, rich in elements capable of transmitting strong emotions. This is why writers and readers alike are fascinated by far-away countries such as Spain or Italy, regarded as less ‘modern’ and frequently selected as settings for Gothic novels. In the typical Gothic plot, the monster is destroyed, but the Gothic world is so subversive that it rejects a closed ending. The murderer ends up being like a victim and order is re-established, with the forms and the norms being fulfilled after having been transgressed. In the Gothic tradition of the previous centuries, order was regularly disturbed and never re-established, because Gothic was a modus vivendi. The terror was always there: one only had to wait until it spread, or go and look for it. Gothic remained the language of sublimated horror. The most frequent aim of this open ending is to perpetuate horror beyond the actual closing of the story. The endings of the stories seem uncertain. In the dénouement, we do not find any rational explanation for the supernatural events that have occurred: “It was almost impossible to believe that the things which we had seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears were living truths. Every trace of all that had been was blotted out.” (Stoker 1989, 378) Nevertheless, the bad reputation of horror fiction can be traced back to its inception and continues to this day, in spite of the social importance that horror as a genre has acquired in mass culture. Rivals and critics have always disparaged it as escapist, commercial, of low literary quality and so on. But many texts and authors that have penetrated deeply into it definitely deserve a new and revised interest. The critics of Gothic literature were numerous in the last years of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, with angry and violent reproaches being levelled at its absurd or unconvincing plots, careless style, or downright immorality. In this last sense, a large number of reviews accused Gothic of corrupting readers–a great part of the readership being made up of young women–by filling their minds with fantasies that took them away from the duties of daily life and brought them into contact with dark passions and facets of human experience that deserved to remain decorously hidden, unseen. Thus, in an anonymous article published in the Lady’s 0RQWKO\ 0DJD]LQH in 1798, this type of

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literature was criticised for mocking Providence, promoting absurdities and deformations of reality, corrupting the paths of virtue, seeding vice, showing fantastic characters as real human beings, etc. Speaking of this baleful influence of Gothic writings, Botting comments that (1): it was also believed to exert a corrupting influence on the morals of readers... Indeed, the danger of moral degeneration became the main reason for the general condemnation of romances, tales and novels. (Botting 1996, 26)

The work that best sums up this series of criticisms may well be the parody of the genre that Jane Austen devised in Northanger Abbey, (1818) which describes the fascination that young people feel for the far-fetched plots of Gothic novels. It is no exaggeration to state that Northanger Abbey is comparable to Don Quixote: if the former sets out to parody and ridicule the Gothic novel, the latter does the same for knightly fiction, and this turns both into works which are epitomes of their respective genres. Besides being described as aesthetically excessive, Gothic productions were considered unnatural, since they undermined physical laws by their use of fantastic creatures and impossible events. By transgressing the limits of reality, they also challenged reason with their abundance of fantastic and imaginative ideas. By feeding superstitious beliefs, they subverted the codes of rational understanding, and by presenting devilish deeds and supernatural incidents, they plunged into the domain of arcane rites. The prevalence of intrigue, betrayal, and murder in Gothic writings seemed to sanction criminal behaviour, violence, personal ambition, unbridled passion, and dissolute representations of carnal desire. Some kinds of terror, which emanated from a castle or inhabited the wicked, sinister characters, were also a source of pleasure, and, some people feared, might encourage readers to fall into depravity and corruption. On the other hand, Gothic fiction rescued nature from being a source of social fear and introduced different and more exciting worlds in which their heroines could find not only terrifying violence but also the freedom of adventure. It seems that the romances mentioned were pursuing an ideal of utter evil. According to the definition of Gothic suggested by Baldick, “typically a Gothic tale will invoke the tyranny of the past (a family curse, the survival of archaic forms of despotism and of superstition) with such weight as to stifle the hopes of the present.” (Baldick 1992, xix) The “transgression” found in Gothic fiction is ambivalent in its aims and effects. It is not only a transgression for the pleasure of breaking the prevailing order; Gothic horrors activate an unknown sense and do so with

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an uncontrollable power that threatens to destroy honour, property, social position, or life itself as well as the true order that sustains the coherence of reality: society. Yet the horrors of transgression in the Gothic genre also confirm the values of society, virtue and property: the transgression, when it crosses the social boundaries, serves to reinforce and underline society’s values and needs, by first defining these limits and later trying to restore them. As Michel Foucault states regarding reason and its counterpoint: “Any transgression in life becomes a social crime, condemned and punished... imprisoned in an oral world [for offending] bourgeois society.” (Foucault 1967, 288) The Gothic novels can therefore be read as a strategy for putting people on the alert, warning of the dangers of social and moral transgression by introducing them under their darkest, most frightening aspect. The tales where vice, corruption and depravation are the pervading themes exemplify what happens when the rules of social behaviour are left on one side. And we must not forget that in order to exorcise a problem, we first have to be conscious of its existence. The novels had to stress virtue and inspire the rejection of vice by their readers. The reason for exposing vices can be clearly observed in Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man, (1733–4) where it is stated that vice is such a perfidious monster that if we mean to repudiate it we must first become aware of it. The game proposed by the Gothic authors means that Gothic lies neither in the dark nor in the light; it is not an expression of reason, nor of superstition, it is neither good nor bad, but both good and bad at the same time. The intrinsic and intimate relations–although apparently so far the former create the latter–between the real and the fantastic, the supernatural and the natural, the past and the present, civilisation and the realm of the barbarian, the rational and the fantastic, all of these are essential for the dynamics of transgression. It is this game of antithesis that produces the effects and the ambivalent and excessive reception of the Gothic genre: not only do these features generate repugnance, discomfort, and rejection, but they also catch the interest of readers as they are stimulated, stirred and attracted by them. People’s minds are threatened by such madness; Gothic, like parody, relies on the creature that we all carry inside of us. In his famous analysis of madness, Foucault notes that this state of consciousness turned into the Renaissance’s “lyrical halo” related to mental illness (Foucault 1996, 103). The (real or imaginary) madness of women attracted considerable attention in the 19th century. In this respect, we cannot ignore the argument advanced by Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, where madness is equated with otherness (Bertha Mason is silenced and confined in the attic of Thornfield

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by her sexual affairs), a logic also seen in the lunatic Renfield in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. When referring to these altered states of personality, we cannot but mention Poe; The Imp of the Perverse (1845) is a brilliant critique of the paranoia that influenced the Gothic genre. As Susan Wolstenholme comments, a woman who is herself dominated by madness finds in this genre the only available way to make her voice heard. (1993, 65) This idea is at odds with that suggested by John Nicholson, who states that “paranoia is the last refuge of the powerless.” (in Bloom 1998, 253) In the above-mentioned works and in most Gothic fiction, the reader sees himself standing on the edge of a cliff from where he observes the abyss that yawns in front of the main character, an abyss which we too are, by implication, forced to contemplate. Hegel defined madness as a state close to the devil, equivalent to what is hidden and comes to light in a distorted way. What all these works have in common is a wish to control women, either their behaviour or their property–if any–by means of the physical repression of their freedom. For example, Charlotte Brontë uses the presence of Bertha to show “how disobedient women are silenced and driven mad.” (Winter 1992, 188) For Botting, Gothic signifies a writing of excess. It appears in the awful obscurity that haunted eighteenth-century rationality and morality. It shadows the despairing ecstasies of Romantic idealism and individualism and the uncanny dualities of Victorian realism and decadence. (Botting 1996, 1)

The political, social, cultural, and religious concerns of the 18th century were felt all over Europe and spread throughout the continent more or less simultaneously. Thus, according to the Marquis de Sade: it was therefore necessary [for writers] to call upon hell for aid in the creation of titles that could arouse interest, and to situate in the land of fantasies what was common knowledge, from mere observation of the history of man in this iron age. (in Mulvey-Roberts 1998, 204)

De Sade argues that the Gothic genre was “the unavoidable product of the revolutionary shocks with which the whole of Europe resounded.” (in Mulvey-Roberts 1998, 204) In Gothic fiction, some elements echo the chief anxieties of each age and culture. Incomplete narrations which relate mysterious incidents and horribly threatening images dominate 18th century fiction: “Mouldering abbeys, haunted castles, banditti, illuminati, sorcerers, conspirators, murderous monks and phantom friars.” (Montague Summers, in Bloom,

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1998a, 58) This list would expand in the 19th century to include parents, insane husbands, criminals, and all the anomalous categories that implied duplicity and a diabolical nature. Gothic landscapes are distressing, dehumanising and full of threats. This transgression is not confined to the action of the story but also delimits the relationship between the text and the reader. Gothic texts establish a structure (a newspaper, a letter, or a confession) that provides for a distancing of the reader from the text. As the narration continues, it makes the reader participate, and he is placed in an ambiguous position as he considers the insecurities and fears expressed in the text. The reader’s safe position as a spectator is threatened as soon as he comes to share the narrator’s insecurity and doubts. The plot progresses in a circular way. There is a clear dismantling of order that “subverts the possibility, not simply of an objective reality, but of any common perception at all.” (Reverse 1990, 25) As one reads these works one can appreciate an increasing psychological violence with which the reader feels a high degree of identification. In fact, society has always been violent and has been fascinated by any kind of violence. In this respect, Fraser thinks that: Violence... demonstrates the ‘Real’ nature of man, his fundamental disorderliness and will to destruction, his hatred of constraints, his resentment of contrive and all other artificial constructions. Hence the artist who deals honestly with violence becomes a kind of nose-rubber or mirror-holder, someone rubbing the spectator’s nose in the disagreeable, and holding up a mirror in which he can contemplate the essential filthiness, nastiness, and beastliness of mankind. (Fraser 1974, 109)

The Gothic novel We could start by saying that the presence of supernatural entities in a story is a sine qua non for it to be labelled as truly Gothic. In addition, inside the dense Gothic plot, the reader should have to face ghosts, demons, vampires, or other creatures that fall outside the realm of the human. There should also be a romance, which needs to involve religious and mythical beliefs and certain taboos. Finally, the events of the story should make the reader wish to explore further outside the material world. The success of the Gothic novel aroused a true literary debate that centred around a clash between two types of fiction, whose names refer to two quite different ways of understanding narrative: on the one hand, the novel (from the Italian novella), which, in its classical form, is mimetic and follows the rules of credibility and of being a clear reflection of the

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period; on the other hand, the romance (from the French roman), an escapist form of literature set in the past and rich in fantastic, horrifying, or wonder-generating elements. The Gothic genre matched the second of these definitions of narrative precisely. This can be seen from the principles it promulgated, which then sustained the most furious attacks. Gothic literature had a decisive role in outlining the image of the monster. This style would start to decline at the end of the 19th century, just as Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published, making it a novel which illustrates the decadence of the Gothic genre. However, it is undeniable that Stoker designs his Dracula by making him the typical villain of a Gothic tale; and, like most wicked characters, Dracula lives in a castle redolent of past magnificence and glory, but already in ruins, like Udolpho, Otranto, and all the sublimely horrifying structures of Gothic fiction. Obviously, the monster’s aristocratic title is an ironic evocation of the Gothic tradition, since we should remember that most of the evil characters in this tradition are associated with the aristocracy (Count Morano in The Mysteries of Udolpho, Count Bruno in The Italian, Count Doni in Ernestus Berchtold, Dracula himself, the Karnsteins in Carmilla, etc.). The stories that had scared the more rudimentary cultures of the past maintained their influence for centuries, remaining a substantial component of folklore, until the 18th century, when the Gothic novel developed. Called Gothic due to its constant allusions to medieval ruins, castles, and monasteries, this literature gained prominence and popularity by employing a mysterious atmosphere, with a supernatural touch. In fact, ruins had for centuries been one of the favourite topics of other art forms, such as painting–the parallel is well documented by Macaulay, (1966) for example. Writers now discovered a new feeling as they contemplated ruins, a frisson caused by beauty, a charm that resulted from a mixture of rejection and attraction, quell’orror beautiful che attristando piace (“that beautiful horror which makes me glad at the same time as it makes me sad,” as the Italian poet Ippolito Pindemonte put it.) An essayist, in an article called “On the Pleasure Arising from the Sight of Ruins or Ancient Structures” published in the European 0DJD]LQH (1795) writes: No one of the least sentiment or imagination can look upon an old or ruined edifice without feeling sublime emotions; a thousand ideas croud upon his mind, and fill him with awful astonishment. (in Monk 1960, 141)

But this fascination with ruins was nothing new. During the Renaissance, the remains of classical antiquity were already looked upon with historical interest and were the subject of intense study. Later, in the

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17th century, Giovanni Battista Piranesi managed to draw the public’s attention to the aesthetic appeal of the dilapidated ruins of the past in his engravings of the architectural evidence of the Roman Empire: “The 18th century thought much of death and decay, from churchyard-poets to philosophers […] Decay was part of every romantic spell, the noiseless slipping of life into oblivion.” (Tompkins 1932, 267) Ruins became a motif for decadence, for ancient splendour, and were seen as the expression of the fragile and mortal nature of all earthly creations. They contained the ideas of dreaming, of a return to the past, and the sublime horror of the memory of the immortal. Gothic novels are replete with such memento mori sites. In this sense, the ruins that had attracted people by the disorder of their appearance in the 17th century were imbued with a touch of beauty in the 18th. From being simply an ornament in a garden, the Gothic castle, as Praz describes it, “became the background against which an idle and morbid mind projected its rêves d’echafauds” (quoted in Fairclough 1968, 16), which reminds us of an 1804 text by Jan Potocki about a scaffold: Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse (0DQXVFULSWIRXQGLQ=DUDJR]D). (2) English Gothic literature is one of the few genres that seems to have a clear date of birth: 1764, with the publication of The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, although it is true that we can trace previous elements of this movement in The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) by Tobias Smollett, perhaps the first novel to employ horror and cruelty as its main topics by introducing a hero in an isolated house in a forest who finds a dismembered corpse in the room where he is invited to sleep. The Castle of Otranto is the archetypal Gothic novel. It features ruins, a maiden pursued through subterranean labyrinths, crypts, mysterious disappearances, supernatural presences, a tyrannical hero, all set in a medieval décor. The plot focuses on the merciless determination of the feudal tyrant to continue his blood line, the threat of dynastic extinction, and the confinement and persecution of a vulnerable heroine, who is chased around sinister buildings. In Walpole’s story, as in most Gothic novels, the characters have sinful thoughts and therefore have to be punished by a divine power. This superior being plans to make these sinners aware of how close life is to death. This is achieved by bringing the characters face to face with supernatural forces, hidden in the very walls of the castle. Ruin itself is, therefore, one of the main characters in the novel. Apart from being an immensely popular book, Walpole’s story also came to be seen as the true manifesto of the pre-Romantic narrative, and was reprinted, after its first publication, in at least a hundred editions. The

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novel’s publication made Walpole a hugely successful writer, bringing him renown that he was not very confident of while writing. In fact, he published the first edition of the novel under a pseudonym, giving readers to believe that it was a translation of an old book printed in Naples in 1529, written by Onuphrio Muralto, a canon at the church of Saint Nicolas of Otranto, which was itself a translation of a medieval Italian manuscript by William Marshall. It is logical to think that it was fear of ridicule that determined him to hide his authorship in that first edition. A justified fear, since, in the very century of reason, still under the influence of such thinkers as Thomas Hobbes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and John Locke, and with Rousseau, Diderot, and Voltaire alive, to write a novel that advanced the claims of magic, the irrational, and the supernatural was a serious challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy. Some months later, in April 1765, encouraged by the popularity of the novel, Walpole prepared a second edition and, in the Prologue, proclaimed the truth by proudly acknowledging his authorship. Walpole’s introduction to his work is a kind of literary manifesto that pleads for the creation of a new type of narrative. His project involves a rejection of both Voltaire’s rationalism and the excesses of fantasy that had undermined the credibility of fiction: his new type of novel suggests that the characters behave always as men and women are supposed to behave in extraordinary circumstances. Walpole aims at taking literature out of the confines of Neoclassicism, of the Aristotelian precepts, in an attitude that clearly foreshadows Romantic ideology. Thus, in Walpole, the adjective Gothic moves beyond being a label for a historical period and assumes other values: a fascination with a past age, seen as a period of greater aesthetic quality, and a wish to create a new type of fiction: in sum, a revolution. However, Walpole’s ambitious statement of principle evolved into something different: a literary trend that used the most horrifying, striking elements found in this first novel as the foundations of what we call “Gothic” today. This process was however a slow one. It is only fair to say that Walpole was not blazing an entirely novel trail, since medieval settings were already in vogue in France and Germany, where a similar recovery of the romance tradition was taking place. But the seed he planted took root and grew, and in the seventies and eighties of the 18th century such novels proliferated. The best example is the work of Clara Reeve, who in 1777 published The Old English Baron–a work that she had previously entitled The Champion of Virtue, A Gothic Story–with the subsidiary title unchanged and a plot that delves into a feudal past. Reeve does not reject fear and suspense, but she adds a self-imposed condition,

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namely that any odd and mysterious element must be explained in a rational way; this contrasts with the extreme situations evoked in The Castle of Otranto and, later, by Ann Radcliffe. Although Gothic fiction has long had a bad name and been regarded as barren and artificial, full of melodramatic elements, a new critical evaluation of the subject seems to be in progress, due, to a large extent, to the recent rise of cultural and historical studies. This subject makes it its aim to go back and examine previously negatively-viewed works from within their social, cultural, and historical contexts. To this effect, Jerome McGrann states that “literary works are fundamentally social rather than personal or psychological products.” (in Cox 1992, 80) Similarly, Robert Miles (1993, 214) emphasises the importance of historical location, arguing that: “Gothic arises as a result of some historical, seismic shift in the deep structure of the self”. And Linda Bayer-Berenbaum writes that The Castle of Otranto implied something more than a new tendency (1982, 21). She affirms that, with the aid of elements such as graves, subterranean passageways, ancestral curses, tolling bells–all of which are clear benchmarks of the Gothic novel–, the reader is able to foretell the next event in the story, whether a ghostly apparition or a moral dilemma. Bayer-Berenbaum indicates that there were additional elements that stimulated the popularity of the genre in the 18th century, such as “the romantic qualities of yearning, aspiration, mystery, and wonder”. These “romantic qualities” to which she alludes are “sensualism, sensationalism, sadism, and satanisms all of which nurtured an orgy of emotions.” (Bayer-Berenbaum 1982, 20) To The Castle of Otranto we owe a revolution whose influence is strong even to this day, since it contained so many of the supernatural and occult elements we find in contemporary narratives. Walpole’s novel went against the norms of what a novel had to be. So the revolution brought about by The Castle of Otranto consisted of incorporating previously hidden elements of human nature while remaining within the parameters of the 18th century aesthetics of the sublime, the result being a new type of novel. By means of this aesthetics, Walpole managed to stir experiences in readers that they normally suppressed in the name of certain standards of morality that the novel had allegedly, until then, had a mission to defend. This is proof enough that the Gothic genre is not by any means extinguished, as one of its contemporary exponents, Devendra Varma, (1966) suggests. But it would not be fair to give the impression that the success of the genre was confined to England, since a sustained exchange with the Continent, and especially with France and Germany, took place in the 18th century, as shown in the previous subchapter. During the French

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Revolution, a series of “hellish” novels appeared in France, the origin of which should be traced back to the Marquis de Sade, with England seeing, as a consequence, according to Mario Praz, “a whole blossoming of Gothic novels, called novels of terror there and romans noirs abroad” (in Fairclough 1968, 8). The French sentimental novel–particularly AntoineFrançois Prévost’s and François-Thomas Baculard D’Arnaud’s works–was also rich in gloomy passages and landscapes, and the anticlerical novel– such as Diderot’s The Religieuse (1796)–did not hesitate to employ shocking episodes described as taking place in convents and monasteries. The Marquis de Sade and his Les Crimes de l’Amour (1800) were the primary source of the narrative type known as roman noir which developed some while later all over Europe. The impact of de Sade, and not only on the Gothic genre, would be difficult to measure, since his influence is strongly evident in fantastic, romantic and decadent fiction. To give only one example, Charlotte Dacre’s most important novel, Zofloya, or The Moor (1806), which appeared chronologically between Radcliffe’s romances and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, distilling influences from both Radcliffe and Lewis, is certainly comparable to de Sade’s prose in terms of character description and themes: the fall into vice of the treacherous, Machiavellian and highly transgressive Victoria, ambition, attraction towards crime, torture, and progressive depravation and sexual appetite, all witnessed in great detail by the reader. On the other hand, the impetus of the historical novel after Walpole and the morbid works of some 18th century English poets (James McPherson, James Hervey, Edward Young) created an interest in romance in a great number of German authors, as is evidenced by genres such as the Ritterroman (stories about knights), the 5lEerroman (the picaresque novel) and the Schauerroman (the horror novel). Not only were the stories of Friedrich Schiller widely read–and his influential 'LH 5lXEHU (1781) August von Kotzebue, Johann Wolfgang Goethe or Gottfried August Bürger, but translations of the today forgotten German novels also enjoyed a great popularity: Hermann von Unna (1788) by Christiane Benedicte Eugenie Naubert, Der deutsche Alcibiades (1790) by Karl Gottlieb Cramer, Der Genie (1792) by Karl Grosse or Der Geisterbaner (1792) by Karl Fiedrich Kahlert. A more sensationalistic type of Gothic writing that dealt with horror and violence flowered in Germany and was introduced by M. G. Lewis with The Monk (1796); its pages reveal a gloomy Capuchin monastery and a prison cell during the Inquisition, a locus often evoked in European novels set in Spain. (3) The plot includes magic, sex, cross-dressing, violence, and demonic scenes. A subversive and powerful eroticism, as an

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essential ingredient of the Gothic novel, is employed extensively by Lewis. Antonia, the innocent young heroine, is counterbalanced by Matilda, a transgressor disguised as a man, who sells her soul to the Devil and seduces Ambrosio. Classical horror stories such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) are embedded in the same Gothic tradition. They both tell a temptation and seduction story in a setting that is a perfect example of Gothic décor: castles, gloomy mausoleums, cemeteries, rats, bats and a demonic creature. As Kilgour (1995, 3) puts it: “One of the powerful images conjured up by the words ‘gothic novel' is that of a shadowy form rising from a mysterious place. Frankenstein's monster rising from the laboratory table, Dracula creeping from his coffin...”

Conclusion For Maggie Kilgour (1995, 4), Gothic fiction feeds upon and mixes a wide range of literary sources out of which it emerges and from which it never fully disentangles itself... The form is itself a Frankenstein's monster, assembled out of bits and pieces of the past.

Gothic fiction proposes a subversive text. Gothic is a conglomerate of negative elements, something we fear and desire at the same time. It is this fusion that makes the Gothic genre attractive to readers. Unlike other genres, where good and evil can be dealt with as two absolute truths, the Gothic allows for a blurring of the boundaries between good and evil. It does not provide us with a clear statement, but stirs up feelings of fear and insecurity, while offering, at the same time, the means to understand them.

Endnotes 1 In the pages following the above-mentioned quote, Botting goes through the criticism directed at this type of literature. 2 Undoubtedly mysterious due to both its origin and its contents (it was considered too scandalous to be made generally available), this work disappeared for more than a century and was republished in its original form in 1958. 3 The episode describing the descent to the dungeons, the prisons of the Inquisition, stands out in this work. Other representative pieces of fiction, such as The Italian, describe the main character’s descent to this world full of horror, obscurantism and ignorance. Nonetheless, this voyage is also an initiation, which

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clearly evokes the descents to hell described in Dante’s Divine Comedy and in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Works cited Baldick, Chris (ed.) 1992. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda. 1982. The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art. London: Associated University Press. Bloom, Clive (ed.) 1998. Gothic Horror: A Reader’s Guide from Poe to King and Beyond. London: Macmillan. Botting, Fred. 1996. Gothic. London: Routledge. Cox, Jeffrey N. (ed.) 1992. Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789-1825. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Fairclough, Peter (ed.) 1968. Three Gothic Novels. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Foucault, Michel. 1967. MadQHVVDQG&LYLOL]DWLRQ$+LVWRU\RI,QVDQLW\LQ the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Tavistock. —. 1996. “Madness, absence of an oeuvre,” in John Lechte (ed.) Writing and Psychoanalysis: A Reader. London: Arnold. Fraser, John. 1974. Violence in the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gaskell, Elizabeth. 2000. Gothic Tales. Edited and introduced by Laura Kranzler. London: Penguin Classics. Hurd, Richard. 1963. Letters on Chivalry and Romance. University of California: Augustan Reprint Society. Kilgour, Maggie. 1995. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London: Routledge. Macaulay, Rose. 1996. Pleasures of Ruins. London: Thames & Hudson. Miles, Robert. 1993. Gothic Writing 1750–1820: A Genealogy. London: Routledge. Monk, Samuel Holt. 1960. The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in 18th Century England. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press. Mulvey-Roberts, Marie (ed.) 1998. A Handbook to Gothic Literature. London: Macmillan. Poovey, Mary. 1979. “Ideology and The Mysteries of Udolpho”, in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and The Arts, vol XXI, pp. 307– 330. Sage, Victor (ed.) 1990. The Gothick Novel: A Casebook. London: Macmillan.

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Spector, Robert D. 1984. The English Gothic: A Bibliographic Guide to Writers from Horace Walpole to Mary Shelley. Westport and London: Greenwood Press. Stoker, Bram. 1989. Dracula. Oxford: Oxford University Press, The World’s Classics. Tompkins, Joyce M. S. 1932. The Popular Novel in England 1770–1800. London: Constable. Winter, Kari J. 1992. Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790–1865. Athens and London: Ohio University Press.

CHAPTER THREE FROM FANTASTIC TWILIGHT TO FIFTY SHADES FANFICTION: NOT ANOTHER CINDERELLA STORY… C2'58ğ$G2ù$ Setting the scene The Fifty Shades (self)proclaimed fanfiction trilogy can be called by many names, ranging from worthless-copycat-housewife-porn to a wittygroundbreaking-sex-liberating endeavour, it can be loathed, loved, torn to pieces, overdiscussed, criticized, but it cannot be ignored. If you ask around, I am certain there is hardly anyone who has not actually heard of it (if not attempted to read it). So, the question is: what makes it so “popular”? In this study I shall attempt to answer this question by exploring the similarities and differences between this spin off fanfiction series and its source, the Twilight series, aiming to understand what might have contributed both to their incredible popularity and to their financial success, even more outstanding in the case of Fifty Shades (both when it comes to the time-related aspect and to the money-making one). To this end, I shall explore the substance and essence of these two series and propose an analytical framework which draws on a number of approaches which are customarily employed when analysing fiction: genre, narratology and language based approaches.

Fantastic and fairytale, fan fiction and romance Motto: (…) fairy tales were never meant for children. (Cashdan, 1999, 6)

Both works of fiction under scrutiny, I argue, are heavily loaded with fantastic and fairytale characteristics, irrespective of their overt and covert

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nature. In order to substantiate my argument I will first deal with some theory-related aspects and then discuss the analytical framework and the results of my analysis. In his seminal work on the genre, Todorov (1973, 25) argues that what lies “at the very heart of fantastic” is that in “the world we know, a world without devils, sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of the same familiar world”. He continues by arguing that there is a difference between what counts as fantastic and what he calls “the uncanny or marvelous”. Thus fantastic only occurs when someone is filled with doubt as to whether what s/he is faced with is a mere illusion or a reality governed by “laws unknown to us”. Once we, the readers, plump for one of these two options “we leave the fantastic for the neighbouring genre, the uncanny or marvellous.” (Todorov 1973, 25) In other words, if we are willing to accept that there might be some kind of rational explanation for the fantastic we are presented with, we are dealing with the realm of the ‘uncanny’, while, in the case of a fantastic element acknowledged as supernatural, i.e., which cannot be explained by resorting to the rules that govern the real, we are dealing with the “marvellous”. The genre of fantastic can be approached in a similar way by resorting to the cognitively rooted schema theory, which was first proposed by Cook (1994) in the study of literature. He says that a certain schema (seen as an inventory of everything we have experienced in connection with a certain situation) is automatically activated in our brain when we are faced with a similar situation. Schema operates in two ways: on the one hand our schema can be “reinforced” through the confirmation of everything that we already know, and on the other, it can be “disrupted” if what we know is negated. Schema disruption or breakage most commonly has a result “schema refreshing,” (and this, according to Cook, is what gives a work literariness) Following the same line of thought, I would further argue that schema refreshment functions only if it operates in the realm of the credible, for otherwise the logical results of the schema breakage would be either the realm of the incredible (or the fantastic), or the absurd (most often used to produce humour). Thus, I claim, in the case of the uncanny we are dealing with schema breaking which results in schema refreshing, while in the case of the marvellous, we are dealing with schema breaking which puts forward an impossible, fantastic world. As a matter of consequence, fairytales as a subgenre of the fantastic are normally seen as marvellous fantastic. Though impressive and almost universal in span, both geographically and historically, springing from cultures and languages as varied as could be, surprisingly (or maybe not), fairytales do share quite a number of characteristics. Here are some salient

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attempts to define fairytales by having recourse to a number of their rather different and complex aspects. Fairy tales, also known as wonder tales or 0lUFKHQ (from German), are a sub-genre of folktales “involving magical, fantastic or wonderful episodes, characters, events, or symbols”. Like all folktales they are narratives that “are not believed to be true” (fictional stories), they take place “in timeless settings” (once upon a time) in “generic, unspecified places” (e.g. the woods), and they have “one-dimensional characters.” (either good or bad) Though almost every parent has read his/her child a fairy tale as a bedtime story, as the motto for this chapter suggests, there is much more in a fairy tale than a mere story for children. Thus: Fairy tales have a darker, deeper undercurrent to them, a more psychological purpose. The stories often show children in difficult if not horrifying situations which they must overcome, inner conflicts they must deal with, and sacrifices they must make. (Kelly Cipera, see online text)

This quotation highlights some categories of features which are typical for fairytales, ranging from their magical and psychological tones to their darker, sex-related ones. So, then, what makes a work of fiction fantastic and fairytale-like? Here is a possible checklist compiled both from the literature and from personal observations. Thus the two basic aspects are firstly the fantastic elements they contain and secondly their formulaic nature. The fantastic elements can range from existing beings endowed with non-existing and thus unbelievable traits (such as a talking wolf, or witches) to totally imaginary beings (such as fairies). The formulaic nature, on the other hand, appears at almost all levels of the story: from the one-sided stock characters, to the ever-present battle between good and evil. The simple linear plot involves magic (where things happen in threes and sevens) and always presents situations that result in some bodily harm (quite bloody, in fact, and sexually related), and the resolution makes good always prevail the good character is rewarded (the girl marries the prince, peace is restored in the community), while the evil character gets his/her comeuppance–and thus advances moralizing values. The setting is symbolic and unreal (everything takes place “far, far away” and “long ago,” with castles and royalty often involved). The beginnings and endings are also highly formulaic: from “once upon a time” to “they lived happily ever after”. To discover to what extent both series investigated can be related to the fairytale features discussed above, and whether there are

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differences between them in this regard (and if so what), is one of the aims of the analysis presented in this chapter. As far as the subgenre of fanfiction is concerned, this is a fairly new subgenre of fiction whose birth (and nurture) is closely connected to the growth of the internet. According to two definitions, fanfiction is: when someone takes either the story or characters (or both) of a certain piece of work, whether it be a novel, TV show, movie, etc, and creates their own story based on it. (Urban Dictionary, see online text) a fictional account written by a fan of a show, movie, book, or video game to explore themes and ideas that will not or cannot be explored via the originating medium; also written fan fiction, also called fanfic. (see online text)

It is not the aim of this paper to explore in depth the fanfiction dimension of the two series under scrutiny, either in regard to the process of writing and the relation of the author with his/her fans, or to the ethics of such an endeavour. The scope is, though, to compare and contrast the two series from a textual perspective and to see how far the fanfiction Fifty Shades moves away from her inspirational older sister Twilight. When it comes to romance as a genre, Percec (2012, ix) draws attention to “the fluid character of the genre, with its great number of mixed and hybrid subcategories, thus illustrating the polymorphous nature of contemporary popular culture”, an observation borne out by the two series under investigation. Both series undoubtedly display all the characteristics that are normally associated with the genre of romance, as they are love stories with a number of the musts, or, better said, “ingredients.” For example, Ramsdell (1999, 4) identifies the following: “Focus on the relationship between the two main characters, attempt to engage the readers’ feelings and satisfactory ending.” As for the subgenres, the following are normally accepted: contemporary, romantic mysteries, historical, regency/period, alternative/paranormal, sagas, gay and lesbian, inspirational, ethnic/multicultural. Thus both series are contemporary romances, as our analysis will show, since they correspond to the following definition: Essentially love stories with contemporary settings, these novels focus on the attempts of a woman to find success and happiness both professionally and romantically. Usually by the end of the book she has attained both. A committed permanent, monogamous, one that usually includes marriage and often a family is still the ultimate goal of this type of romance. (Ramsdell 1999, 43)

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The “hybrid” nature mentioned above is also evident, at least in the case of Twilight, which is both a saga and a paranormal romance. It is a saga because it deals with the century-long becoming of the Cullen vampire family, and it is paranormal since vampires, despite living in this world, are not of “our world” and “cannot be explained by science.” (Frantz, 2007) Fifty Shades, on the other hand, if not blatant enough to be labelled as fantastic or paranormal, is similarly fantastic in essence, as will be argued further on in this paper. Another important, as well as relevant characteristic that needs to be mentioned at this point is the escapist nature of romance, particularly so in popular culture. Romances are meant to offer refuge, an escape from the world we live in into a fantasy zone, a world which I labelled, in a previous study on the genre of romance, “an enchanted kingdom of dreams in fantasy” (a combination of the titles of the three novels investigated in that study) (GoúD . This escapist dimension is also richly present in the two series discussed in this chapter. Taking everything into consideration, the two series examined here seem (at least at the surface level) to belong to different subgenres of romance, and indeed logically they should be different, especially when it comes to the dimension of the fantastic, since the Twilight saga is a paranormal saga (or a “pop Gothic Romance” as Rogobete, 2012, 129 has it), while the Fifty Shades fanfiction is just another contemporary romance. So the questions to be explored next are: to what extent are they really that different, and what is their connection with fairytales?

The Cinder(b)ella(na) story Motto: All mine? “It’s odd. Going from nothing to–I wave my hand to indicate our opulent surroundings–to “everything”. (Fifty Shades Freed)

Right from the outset of my analysis I want to make it very clear that I consider that the two texts under scrutiny are strikingly (but, perhaps not very surprisingly, since the latter is a self-proclaimed fanfiction) similar in almost every respect, ranging from their general, macro features to the micro, textually based ones. Even the names of the two series are as taletelling as it gets and highly symbolic, with both of them suggesting threshold-crossing, in-between-worlds kinds of existence, day and night, or good and bad worlds. The very slight differences lie in details such as the source series’ being a four-volume saga (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn), the first volume of which was published in 2005, while the second (Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty

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Shades Freed) is a trilogy whose first volume was published in 2011. They were both written by female writers (Stephanie Meyer and E. L. James), and they were hugely successful record-setting bestsellers. Thus the four Twilight books have each in turn been at the top of the best-seller lists around the world. Similarly, the Fifty Shades series has sold over 70 million copies worldwide since 2011, the book having been translated into 37 languages, and, what is more and unexpectedly so, it broke the record for the fastest-selling paperback of all time (thus dethroning the Harry Potter series). The film industry rapidly grasped the potential of both series, and Twilight has already been made into five very successful films (the last having been released in 2012). The rights to the film adaptation of Fifty Shades were sold almost the moment the book hit the bestseller lists, and the internet is brimming with speculation and recommendations concerning the director and actors best suited to the making of the film. So far, though, the high-stakers have managed to keep the secret, and this is undoubtedly working to create suspense among fans and build up expectations which will ultimately trigger huge profits. So what has made for the success of both series, and what is more, how can a copycat or a recycled text turn out to be even more successful than its proclaimed source? I argue (and will then try to substantiate my position) that the first possible explanation lies in the fact that both series are ultimately, and to different degrees, fairy tales that belong to the realm of fantasy, thus appealing to readers’ ever unquenchable thirst for fairytales. To this end, in my exploratory endeavour I will appeal to the categories most generally employed in the analysis of fiction: story, conflict, narrative technique, setting, style, character, and finally, theme and message. The story in both series is as time-immemorial and (stereo)typical as it gets: a love-conquers-all-happily-ever-after-ending kind of story. In other words, we have here two Cinderella stories with a simple and identical theme of love spiced up with sexual tension, leading to (more or less) delayed gratification. The two storylines are similarly simple: boy meets girl, they fall in love and eventually they manage to reach the happilyever-after stage against all odds, due to the female protagonist’s resilience and endurance (through mental and physical pain). The plot in both series revolves around the lovers’ trials and tribulations as they attempt to make their love story work. Both couples succeed in marrying, but this does not put an end to their trials. In both cases the final, climactic trial takes the form of an unwanted pregnancy and the initial rejection of the child by the male protagonist. But all’s well that ends well, obviously, in a typical fairy

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tale kind of formula (more intertextually explicit in the Twilight series, though): …and then we continued blissfully into this small but perfect piece of our forever. (Breaking Dawn) He grins and kisses me again. “I love you, Mrs. Grey.” “I love you, too, Christian. Always.” (Fifty Shades Freed)

In both series the major conflict is triggered by the clash between two worlds: a mainstream, ordinary, visible, as-real-as-you-and-I kind of world, and an invisible, underground, marvellously fantastic one (a parallel vampire world) in Twilight or a darker, uncannily sexually fantastic (perverted in the eyes of the mainstream) world, the world of BDSM (short for bondage & discipline, dominance & submission sadism & masochism) in Fifty Shades. Thus both series are instantiations of two similar major types of conflict. The first is that of individual against society: both vampires and sadists are deemed bad by mainstream society, so they have to go underground and guard their secrets carefully. Secondly, we have that of individual against him/herself: both male protagonists are aware that what they are proposing to their female counterparts is an unnatural, deviant kind of love (whether this is human vs. vampire, or straight vs. BDSM) and they do try hard not to hurt their loved ones (obviously to no avail). The plots are quite similar as well: they are both linear, sprinkled with occasional flashbacks or re-runs of important episodes in the mind of the character-narrator. Both have as subplots a love triangle. What is more, they both exhibit many identical episodes. For example: graduation ceremonies, the heroines’ last minute rescue from traffic accidents (obviously accomplished by their heroes), the abduction of both heroines by the villain, followed by yet another spectacular, last minute rescue, but not before the female protagonists’ blood has been spilled. Both heroines, though desperately in love, reject a proposal of marriage but then reluctantly accept it, both couples spend their honeymoons in extremely enviable exotic locations. Both heroines experience unplanned pregnancies which jeopardize their relationship with their heroes, but both manage to somehow put things right. Obviously there are differences between the series, but these are more or less details. For example, in Twilight the love triangle is much stronger, and the werewolf rival of the vampire is a main character throughout the series. In Fifty Shades, on the other hand, the rival is just a secondary, pretext-and vehicle-character. Other discrepancies are even smaller, such as the villain using his fangs to hurt the heroine in

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Twilight, while in Fifty Shades he uses bullets. In Twilight the couple spend their honeymoon on a completely isolated island not far from Rio de Janeiro, while in Fifty Shades they spend it on a yacht off the South of France. There is, however, one major difference between the two series that might account for the success of the fanfiction series, and for this reason this aspect will be explored in more depth later in the paper. The most frequent activity the protagonists indulge in throughout the Twilight series is fighting in self-defence against other vampires, while in Fifty Shades the protagonists have sex, even though this much-favoured activity can also be seen as a fight between mainstream, regular, her kind of sex, and his BDSM kind of sex. The sameness of the two series extends to the narratological level. Thus the main narratological strategy is that of employing an intradiegetic, involved and subjective first person narrator, using almost exclusively the perspective and voice of the main female character. In other words, the two stories are seen and told by the two heroines. However, both stories offer a small interlude when they break this pattern via narratological shifts: in volume four of Twilight, Breaking Dawn, one part of the story is told by the male protagonist’s ex-rival-future-son-in-law werewolf. Similarly, at the end of the final Fifty Shades Freed volume, the exact beginning of the same story is re-cycled and re-told through the male protagonist’s eyes and voice. The purpose of this is difficult to understand and one can only speculate that it may be another sign of E.L. James’ admiration for and desire to emulate Stephanie Meyers, who actually started, but fairly soon aborted, a follow-up to the Twilight series, called Midnight Sun, in which she set out to rewrite the story via the male protagonist’s voice and perspective. Another similar strategy is the juxtaposition of the main genre with other genres: there are letters, notes and e-mails in Twilight, with a greater variety and volume in Fifty Shades (e-mails, messages, memos, checklists, contracts, menus). Another strategy, used only once in Twilight, is borrowed, developed and richly employed in Fifty Shades. This is actually quite schizoid as it refers to two personalities existing inside the character-narrator’s head. To illustrate, the heroine of Twilight says at one point: Two voices were fighting in my head. One of them was telling me to be good and brave; the other one was telling the good voice to keep her mouth shut. (Eclipse)

These bipolar “voices” become in Fifty Shades “my subconscious” and “my inner goddess.” These two schizoid entities surface, either together or

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separately, whenever sex is involved. See for example the following quotations, selected randomly: What have you done? My subconscious screams at me. My inner goddess is doing back flips in a routine worthy of a Russian Olympic gymnast. (Fifty Shades of Grey) My inner goddess is down on bended knee with her hands clasped in supplication, begging me. (Fifty Shades Darker) My subconscious rolls her eyes at me in despair and goes back to reading her dog-eared copy of Jane Eyre. (Fifty Shades Freed)

This frequently-resorted-to “strategy” became quite annoying while I was reading the three volumes, and as a result I decided to count the frequency of mention in the third volume. There were 31 instances of reference to either the heroine’s good, well behaved “subconscious” or her wicked, wayward “inner goddess” in the twenty-five chapters of this volume, more than one per chapter! And speaking of “strategies”, both novels are written in what could be labeled as “a witty style,” spoken and informal, laden with sarcasm, double meanings, euphemisms, intertextual references, apt metaphors, long compounds, hyphenated phrases, and lexical and/or morphological deviations (invented or skillfully coined words), along with use of (nick)names and short, elliptical, emphatic sentences. Here are some salient examples to illustrate the categories mentioned above: Sarcasm Instead of being the A/V dweeb about to ask the head cheerleader to the prom, I was the finished-second-place werewolf about to ask the vampire’s wife to shack up and procreate. Nice. (Breaking Dawn) You could have a nice brunette submissive. One who’d say ‘how high’ every time you said ‘jump’, provided of course she had the permission to speak. (Fifty Shades Freed)

Double meanings “How are your feet?” he asked (…) “Toasty warm” “Really? No second thoughts?” (Breaking Dawn)

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Evidently this example refers to the idiomatic expression “cold feet” i.e. to the heroine’s second thoughts about the wedding. Love covering all the bases with you. (Fifty Shades Freed)

This looks like a baseball metaphor but in fact it refers to the American (teenage) way of conceptualizing sexual relationships. Intertextual references (overt or covert) Like Mad King Lear? in Twilight My innocence is the albatross around my neck. (Fifty Shades of Grey)

Euphemisms Both heroines invent terms of endearment for their fetuses: “little nudger” in Twilight, “my Little Blip” in Fifty Shades. Apt metaphors The tapestry of family and friends that wove together around me was a beautiful, glowing thing, full of their bright complementary colours. (Breaking Dawn) My subconscious has finally decided to make an appearance, and she’s wearing her Edvard Munch The Scream face. (Fifty Shades Darker)

Deviations -(morpho)semantic/unusual collocations cockles of her heart (Breaking Dawn) shouty capitals (Fifty Shades of Grey)

-lexical/morphological I still think Dracula One and Dracula Two are creeptacular. (Breaking Dawn) Oh, he’s in überbossy mood... (Fifty Shades Darker)

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Hyphenated phrases thing-from-the-swamp scary (Breaking Dawn), the biggest-bluest-longest-eyelashed look (Fifty Shades Darker)

Nicknames “Blondie”, “Silly Bella”, “Mr. Show-Off” in Twilight “Mr. Evasive”, “Mr. Grumpy”, “Miss Very Short Hair and Red Lipstick” (Fifty Shades Darker) Short, emphatic, grammatically deviant sentences (what, to paraphrase E.L. James, I would call “shouty sentences”) You. Got. Food. In. My. Hair. (Breaking Dawn) You. Are. Mine (Fifty Shades Darker)

Perhaps a quantitative analysis of the frequency of occurrence of the language related subcategories listed above across the two series would prove relevant, as my first impression, after reading the two series, was that Fifty Shades abounds in them. However it will not be done here and now. The final category to be examined in this section concerns the time and space of the stories, a category generally known as setting. Both settings are real and almost identical: the Washington/Seattle region of contemporary, 21st century USA. Real geographical features are referred to, such as Seattle, the Sound, Olympic Beach, Portland, Port Angeles or the Sea-Tac airport (in both), Rio (in Twilight), and Cannes (in Fifty Shades.) The only invented geographical place is the small town of Forks, home of the vampires in Twilight. However, it needs to be stressed that the male protagonists in both series do live in “castles” of their own, and although these are endowed with state-of the-art technology, they still retain the fairy tale atmosphere that belongs to them. Even the “homes” built for their brides have the same dreamlike, fairytale feel to them and, what is more, since such places are normally forbidden to ordinary mortals, they do work in an escapist direction and contribute towards constructing the “enchanted kingdom of dreams in fantasy´*RúD 17) mentioned earlier.

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If, as the analysis has shown so far, the two series scrutinized are, at least when it comes to the storytelling strategies employed, almost identical, it will be interesting to see what the main protagonists have in store for the reader.

When Cinderbellana meets her Edward-Christian Prince Motto: Christian, you are the state lottery, the cure for cancer, and the three wishes of Aladdin’s lamp, all rolled into one. (Fifty Shades Freed)

As far as I am concerned, it is beyond a shadow of doubt that the most striking similarity in the two series concerns the protagonists. From Cinderbella (as Buttsworth, 2010, 47 calls her) to Cinderana and from Charming Edward to Charming Christian, it is fairly difficult to find any substantial differences. The differences between the characters are so few and so insignificant that they practically pass unnoticed. The most, let us call it “noticeable”, difference, is the ages of the two couples: while in Twilight they are in their teens, in Fifty Shades they are young adults in their twenties. Otherwise, from their physical and psychological traits to the way they are constructed, both the female and the male protagonists in Fifty Shades are copycats of those in Twilight. A brief overview of the female and then of the male characters will, I believe, bear out my claim. The two Cinderellas, labelled as Isabella (Bella) Swan in Twilight and Anastasia (Ana) Steele in Fifty Shades, have exotic non Anglo-Saxon names, and please do note the unconcealed symbolism of their names. The only difference in their names lies in their Spanish/Slavic origins. Otherwise Anastasia is almost a copy-paste image of Isabella, both in her physical and in her psychological profile. They are both of the same build and have pale, smooth skins and dark hair, very beautiful, of course, but unaware of their subdued, non-glamorous beauty, with a unique and very appealing smell. They are not sporty; far from it, they are clumsy, both suffering from balance problems and two left feet–they both trip and fall frequently and are prone to accidents (for example, this is how Christian first sees Anastasia, when she stumbles in his office). They have the same mannerisms (lip biting and eye-rolling), and identical habits and preferences when it comes to dressing, eating and reading. They are not interested in fashion, they are extremely modest and are therefore surprised that the dashing male heroes notice them: “I still don’t understand what he sees in me… mousy Ana Steele–it makes no sense” says the heroine in Fifty Shades. Both are good cooks but are very rarely hungry, and they both prefer granola for breakfast. Their favourite reading

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is British classics (Wuthering Heights for Bella, Tess of the D’Urbervilles for Ana). They even have similar family backgrounds: mothers who are slightly irresponsible, divorced, focused on a new partner but sensitive mother figures, and strong, reliable, supportive, taciturn in-love-withfishing father figures. They both have bosom friends who are like sisters to them. In addition, they are shy (they keep blushing all the time), innocent (both lose their virginity to the male protagonists), clever and witty, but in a self-deprecating kind of way. They are also extremely modest in their demands and ethical (they both hate receiving gifts and feel uncomfortable about the male protagonists’ wealth and are reluctant to accept it). At the same time they are generous, resilient and very brave, sacrificing their well-being for the sake of their partners. What is more, they are utterly and irrevocably besotted with the male protagonists and both see them as perfectly beautiful Greek gods or Davids (this is referred to in both series, but more frequently so in Twilight, since the vampire is as cold and as hard as a statue.) They adore everything about them, from their perfect smell and looks to their personality profiles and behaviour. In other words, Isabella and Ana are perfect figments of male imagination, or, better labelled, in the line of thought of this paper, perfect fairytale heroines,as they are perfect, in Tatar’s (1987, 118) words, “combination[s] of labor and good looks,” and this will undoubtedly help her win the heart (and fortune) of the prince. On the other hand, our heroines are at times active agents, displaying (vague traces of) feminist attitudes. After all just being what Filimon (2013, 132) argues that a “proper” female should be “under the patriarchal system:” “passive, inferior and without much initiative” and always waiting “quietly for the chances to come to her”, will simply not do these days. Or, as James Thurber puts it in the moral of his The Little Girl and the Wolf, “it is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.” In other words, a 21st century teenager or young adult female cannot simply identify with an utterly passive and submissive Cinderella figure. The Cinderbellana they would want to identify with has to manifest some kind of independence and be a trifle opinionated (even if she will ultimately succumb to the male protagonist’s charm) to suit her purpose. The story repeats itself when it comes to the shape and substance of the male protagonists of the two series under investigation. From vampire charming Edward to prince charming Christian no surprises are in store for us, and once again the differences between them are practically insignificant. Thus both are picture perfect individuals with a soon-to-berevealed-dark-secret-life, with one minor difference and a single major one. The minor difference resides in their names: in Twilight the hero has a

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good solid Anglo-Saxon royal name, Edward Cullen, while in Fifty Shades the more Latin-sounding Christian Grey was preferred. The major difference resides in the two heroes’ flaws. Edward, on the one hand, is a very trendy vampire, obeying every rule laid down for the vampire of the third millennium, as shown in the following quote. … the vampire is not a monster seeking lives to claim in sadistic acts of terror and violence night after eternal night. Rather, the image they fancy is that of a poor Byronic figure in need of understanding, compassion, and love. To the fans of paranormal romance, the vampire with his hundreds of years of sexual experience to draw from is a near perfect lover: passionate, dominant and seductive—it loves only her, wants only her, needs only her, the one person who can save him from an isolated, dismal and droning eternity of loneliness. (Bane, 2010, 7)

Thus the profile of the 21st century, new millennium vampire is becoming increasingly heroified, oversexualised and angelised. In other words, they are endowed with what we called the “four B’s of the new vampire:” beautiful, bright, bold and benefic *RúD ùHUEDQ  VHH online text). Christian, on the other hand, is not a fantastic figure per se, but he is nevertheless equally and unbelievably perfect: although still in his twenties he is a very successful entrepreneur, a beautiful and “sexpert” loverboy. His dark secret glitch is that he is a (curable) domineering sadist who likes to beat up his sexual partners. In brief, Edward the vampire is the Prince Charming of the third millennium, as is Christian, his copycat mogul, in Fifty Shades, for that matter. As in the case of Cinderbellana, the two “princes” are identical in shape, size and substance. The two “Greek gods” are copper-haired and graceful, with perfectly built bodies which emanate unique and irresistible smells. They are both mind readers: “marvellously” so Edward (his special vampire’s gift makes him capable of reading any mind but Bella’s), and “uncannily” so Christian (he can read Ana’s thoughts). Thus they are both “beautiful, sexy as fuck, richer than Croesus and crazy with capital K,” as the heroine-narrator in Fifty Shades aptly words it. Added to that, they are perfect at whatever they do, ranging from their artistic inclinations (both play the piano), to their love and ownership of expensive cars, to always giving the perfect gift, or making perfect love, for that matter. They are also mercurial, jealous, controlling and domineering, with stalking tendencies, but at the same time overprotective of their lovers and completely and utterly oblivious to other females. Like the heroines, they have similar backgrounds, but their pasts are much more troubled: Edward used to be a killer and bloodsucker (but only of bad guys) while Christian

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was a neglected and abused child (which is at the root of his BDSM tendencies). Luckily they were both adopted by perfect families who saved them from a terrible life and both have siblings with a sister as a strong vehicle character. They both become completely focused on their partners and for this reason they are both unwilling and unhappy fathers-to-be. Yet, despite their sheer alpha manliness, they are at a loss without their female partners, who ultimately have to “rescue them right back”, as the finale of another famous Cinderella story (the film Pretty Woman) puts it. In short, both series put forward essentially fairytale-like heroes and heroines, yet contemporary ones who have somehow lost the once-upon-atime and far-far-away nature characteristic of the genre.

“Sex and the genre” reloaded Motto: Mr. Orgasmic was using his fine-motor sexing skills on me. (Fifty Shades Freed)

After looking into most of the categories of my analysis, I have still not managed to find any plausible explanation for the success of the Fifty Shades (self-ascribed) fanfiction trilogy. What the analysis has so far revealed, though, is that, save for some details, it is but (as fancfiction often is) a copycat of the source text. One more aspect that remains to be explored is that of theme. Both series exploit the themes of love and sex. But while the theme of love is yet again treated in a copy-paste, fairytalelike manner, the love described being of the superlatively supreme rags-toriches kind, the-only-one-forever-and-ever love which nobody-andnothing-will-ever-break, the way the theme of sex is treated is an entirely different story. And this story will be told as follows. In a previous volume on the genre of romance, in a chapter entitled Sex and the Genre: the Role of Sex in Popular Romance, I argued that: … rather than the escapist mode it sets off, it is pure sex that makes its UHDGHUWLFN«*RúD)

In order to explore whether this argument could in any way be substantiated, I ran both a qualitative and a quantitative analysis of the sex scenes in three novels belonging to different subgenres of romance. The quantitative analysis showed that the number of sex scenes in these novels ranged from six to eight, while the number of words devoted to depicting these scenes ranged from six per cent to nine per cent. Even after a first reading of the two series I realized that a similar comparative analysis could not be carried out. The reason was that in

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Twilight I could not identify any sex scene that would fit the following definition, which had been designed for the purpose of analysis: … a stretch of text longer than one paragraph which explicitly describes sexual encounters, whether they are describing a completed sexual act or just referring to prelude (kissing and fondling), intercourse (doing the deed) or postlude (seen as post-sex talk or action with specific sexual reference). (*RúD)

This absence of find is significant when it comes to the single crucial difference between the two series analyzed in this paper, since the only sex-related action the two protagonists in Twilight explicitly perform is kissing. They kiss fairly often, but they do not do so for more than a paragraph. In addition, they do it without any specific details being given and they never make any move to “a second, third of fourth base”. Even when they finally manage to do the deed, in the first half of the last volume of the series, they do not do it before our eyes. Thus in a very romantic spot, in the moonlight in the warm waters of the ocean, Bella poetically and shyly reports that: His arms wrapped around me, holding me against him, summer and winter. It felt like every nerve ending my body was a live wire. (Breaking Dawn)

But after that there is a time lapse in her reporting and she moves directly to the morning after and gives the reader suggestive details about the big smile on her face and the havoc in the room created by their performance of the deed. In brief, sex is not described but suggested. See the following example as illustration: We laughed together, and the motion of our laughter did interesting things to the way our bodies were connected, effectively ending that conversation. (Breaking Dawn)

By contrast, sex, in all shapes and manners, is not only clearly and explicitly present but also very frequent in the Fifty Shades trilogy. For this reason, and for a comparative purpose, a similar (to the one discussed previously) quantitative analysis was run randomly on the first volume, Fifty Shades of Grey. The analysis showed that out of the 150,546 words in the volume, 33,755 are used to depict the sixteen sex scenes, and this without taking into account the so called BDSM contract, which is repeated five times. The scenes depict sex ranging from normal (“vanilla sex”, as the protagonists put it) to BDSM sex (involving restraint and

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physical punishment) and even less frequently, a “kinky” kind of sex. The analysis revealed an average of 2,110 words per scene and the overall number of words represent 23% of the entire volume. This find shows a great quantitative leap forward at all levels when it is compared to the QRYHOVLQYHVWLJDWHGLQ*RúD QXPEHURIVH[VFHQHVWKHQXPEHURI words employed in describing them, and their percentage from the total number of words. It might be argued that this leap can be seen as schema breaking when it comes to the genre of romance and that it qualifies it to be seen as erotic romance, a fairly new subgenre on the market. It is not just the quantity of sex that makes the difference between the two series investigated, but also the overt and detailed nature of its representation. See this one example as illustration: “Pull your knees up,” he orders softly, and I’m quick to obey. “I’m going to fuck you now, Miss Steele,” he murmurs as he positions the head of his erection at the entrance of my sex. “Hard,” he whispers, and he slams into me. “Aargh!” I cry as I feel a weird pinching sensation deep inside me as he rips through my virginity. He stills, gazing down at me, his eyes bright with ecstatic triumph. (Fifty Shades of Grey)

In spite of the major difference in the treatment of the theme of sex, there are two common elements. The first refers to the “electricity” the protagonists experience, which is triggered by their being in a dark space in Twilight, or in the elevator in Fifty Shades: I was stunned by the unexpected electricity that flowed through me, amazed that it was possible to be more aware of him than I already was. (Twilight) Grey takes my hand, clasping it with his long cool fingers. I feel the current run through me, and my already rapid heartbeat accelerates. (Fifty Shades of Grey)

Secondly, the idea of “rough sex” is suggested in Twilight and then richly elaborated on in Fifty Shades. Thus, after the couple have first had sex, not only are the bed and the room affected (i.e. there are feathers from torn pillows floating artistically around the room) but Bella herself is black and blue from his rather rough handling. However she does not complain and her gratification is utterly complete, her happiness only being undermined by his feelings of remorse. Everything considered, I believe I can safely argue that the principal original and defining element of the Fifty Shades trilogy is sex, both when

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it comes to the quantity of its presence and to its quality (explicit and various.) It is also worth mentioning that this treatment of the theme of sex, if not groundbreaking, is definitely schema breaking since it verges on pornography. It only verges on pornography, since it lacks the crudeness or, better said, the vulgarity of the language employed in pornography, as well as a single-minded focus on sexual acts. And pornography has not (yet) been associated with the genre of romance, so, in this respect, what E.L. James has managed to do with her Fifty Shades can after all be seen as a cutting edge kind of romance. And this might account for the success of the series.

And they lived happily ever after… Motto: It was a place where anyone could believe magic existed. A place where you just expected Snow White to walk right in with her apple in her hand, or a unicorn to stop and nibble at the rosebush. (Breaking Dawn)

To sum up, despite apparently belonging to different romance subgenres, in fact, the two series investigated in this paper are very similar in every respect (story, characters, setting, theme, style), with only very specific details making for the apparent differences between them. Thus they both give us a fairytale, or, in other words, a more or less explicit Cinderella story: the plain but good girl is swept off her feet by the glamorous Prince and from her ordinary world she is taken to his realm (and castle) to live happily ever after. This gratifying instant promotion, which is bound to be appealing to every modern working girl, involves a rather steep price to be paid in both series: the girl’s physically painful self-sacrifice on the altar of the beloved. So, even if one can understand the success of the fantastic Twilight saga, which resorts to the ever more popular figure of a vampire who, turned good and deeply in love, only in extremis accepts having to make his girl suffer, how can a woman (the usual suspect of romantic fiction) appreciate a book in which another decent twenty-first century girl is beaten up by a deranged man (even if he is Prince Charming in looks and wealth) but gets to live happily ever after? This latter case does sound as fantastic, hard to believe and out of time as a fairytale vampire story, doesn’t it? So then, to repeat myself, how can a book that practically plagiarizes another book be so incredibly successful and turn its author into yet another Cinderella, from-rags-to riches, figure? The answer to this question appears to be sex: explicit, blatant, plentiful and almost pornographic sex. It is the kind of sex, though, that does not address itself

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to men, who (an issue to be explored) might see it as belonging to the realm of female fantasy, but it definitely addresses the dark side of (sexually liberated?) women. It is, after all, sex born out of love, performed by an expert in the field, and has as a consequence the materialization of a woman’s most coveted wish: the power to rid him of his “flaws” and transform him into the partner of her dreams. And if this is not “marvelously” (or at least “uncannily”) fantastic, I don’t know what is.

Works cited Bane, Theresa. 2010. Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology. McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, Jefferson, North Carolina. Buttsworth, Sara. 2010. “CinderBella: Twilight, fairy tales, and the twenty-first-century American dream”, in Reagin, Nancy (ed.) Twilight and History New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, p. 47-69. Cook, Guy. 1994. Discourse and Literature: The Interplay of Form and Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Filimon, Eliza Claudia, 2012. “Cinderella’s Ashes–New Women, Old Fairytales” in Romanian Journal of English Studies. 7LPLúRDUD 9/2012, pp. 131-137. Frantz, 2007. Musings on Romance Fiction from an Academic Perspective, Available at http://teachmetonight.blogspot.ro/2007/01/definition-ofparanormal-romance.html. Accessed 05/15/2013. *RúD &RGUXĠD  “Sex and the genre: the role of sex in popular romance” in Romance. The History of a Genre, edited by Dana Percec. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, p. 14-28. *RúD &RGUXĠD ùHUEDQ $QGUHHD  “The Vampire of the Third Millennium: from Demon to Angel” in Oceánide, 4/2012, Available at http://oceanide.netne.net/articulos/art4-10.php. Accessed 05/15/2013. Percec, Dana. 2012, “Foreword” in Romance. The History of a Genre, edited by Dana Percec. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. viii-ix. Ramsdell, Kristin. 1999, Romance Fiction: A Guide to the Genre. Englewood: Libraries Unlimited Inc. Rogobete, Daniela, 2012. “The Twilight Saga: Teen Gothic Romance between the Dissolution of the Gothic and the Revival of Romance” in Romance. The History of a Genre, edited by Dana Percec, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 111-132. Tatar, M. 1987. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

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Todorov, Tzvetan. 1973. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Cornell University Press.

Webography http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fanfiction. Accessed 02/20/2013. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fan+fiction. Accessed 02/28/2013.

CHAPTER FOUR FANTASY AND THE UNICORN IN IRIS MURDOCH’S THE UNICORN AND TRACY CHEVALIER’S THE LADY AND THE UNICORN DANA PERCEC Introduction In an age in which the only fabulous creatures are robots and cyborgs, some contemporary writers have chosen the unicorn as the central motif of their works of fiction, in books with a fantastic or historical flavour. The unicorn, in the Western medieval imagination, was the symbol of luxury and spirituality, an aristocratic being and the incarnation of God’s breath. It was the icon of sublimated love and innermost drives. At the same time, this creature had the mysterious power of locating and removing all impurities, exerting a powerful influence even on the most corrupt of souls. Exploiting the fluid boundary between what is real and what is imaginary in the cultural construction and legacy of the unicorn, many authors have attempted to approach the beast and tame it within the pages of their books. One of the first to do so, in a work which is read both as a piece of cultural history and as a fantastic journey into an enchanted age of mystery and lore, was Michael Green’s The Unicornis manuscripts: On the History and Truth of the Unicorn (1943; 2008). An early evocation of the unicorn in a novel belonging to the fantasy genre is the already classic book by Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn (1968; 1991). Due to its imaginative potential, the subject is frequently exploited by books targeted at the younger segment of the reading public, from tales with an educational purpose for small children, such as Lorna Hussey’s 2009 Little Lost Unicorn, to teenage series, such as Bruce Coville’s 1994 The Unicorn Chronicles, in three books. Even the humour market has been conquered

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by the unicorn, in a book by Jessica S. Marquis (2011), a mock how-to about unicorn farming, which includes a questionnaire and advice that employs the rhetoric of a scientific, animal rearing handbook. But this chapter chooses two novels which use the unicorn chiefly as a mise en abyme reference, framed by their very titles: Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn (1964) and Tracy Chevalier’s The Lady and the Unicorn (2003). These novels, though featuring this fantastic creature, do not belong to the fantastic genre. The former tells a contemporary story which recycles Gothic motifs, in a decade (the 1960s) when the second Gothic revival, occasioned, a little later, by popular literature and the film industry, had not yet taken place. The latter is a historical novel dealing with the imagined genesis of a famous work of art. Both authors take as their starting-point the medieval tapestries in the Cluny Museum in Paris, works that have long been regarded as embodying the quintessence of religious and erotic expression in the western Middle Ages. Both writers regard the fabulous creature of the unicorn as a token of devotion, suffering and sacrifice, all in connection with feminine identity. For Iris Murdoch, a gloomy setting of Gothic inspiration, with trapped female victims and desperate expectations of love and redemption, becomes the ideal incarnation of these richly symbolic tapestries. For Tracy Chevalier, art and imagination, the transformation of erotic temptations into aesthetic ideals, are the best expression of the sublimated relationship between the woman and the mysterious animal. Although neither book belongs to the genre of fantasy or features the unicorn as a character, the two authors have drawn freely on personal material, on various postmodern narrative techniques, and on the conventions of several literary genres in order to incorporate the unicorn into their story. Iris Murdoch’s novels are, at the same time, intense and bizarre, filled with dark humour and unpredictable plot twists that destroy the civilized surface of the intellectual or bourgeois milieu in which her characters are set. They deal with issues of morality, and the conflicts between good and evil are often presented in everyday scenes that gain mythic and tragic force through the subtlety with which they are depicted. Though intellectually sophisticated, her novels are often melodramatic and comedic, rooted, she famously said, in the desire to tell a “jolly good yarn.” (Murdoch 2010) She was strongly influenced by thinkers from Plato to Sartre and by the 19th century English and Russian novelists. Her novels often include upper middle class men trapped in moral dilemmas, gay characters, Anglo-Catholics facing crises of faith, mature children, and evil male enchanters. Although she wrote primarily in a realistic manner, Iris Murdoch sometimes used symbolism in a misleading way, often by

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mixing elements of fantasy into her precisely described scenes. The Unicorn (1963) displays this technique and can be read both as a sophisticated romance with a Gothic flavour and as a parody of the Gothic mode of writing. Although Murdoch herself rejected the term “Gothic” as too narrow for her novels, The Unicorn, among her novels that tackle this theme, received the most critical acclaim (another example is The Time of Angels, 1965; 2010, where the protagonist, Carel Fisher, an eccentric Anglican priest, is engaging in devil-worship. His daughter, Muriel, finds out that his niece Elizabeth is his illegitimate daughter, and allows him to die following an overdose of sleeping pills). Tracy Chevalier, the American-born writer whose Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999) was unanimously considered by critics to be a revelation, has gone on, in subsequent novels, to manifest a special interest in two themes of great impact in a time of blurred aesthetic and genre boundaries and of a sometimes desperate search for one’s “real” identity–the status of the female individual and the role of art in social life. Taking a fantastic creature as her pretext, in The Lady and the Unicorn Chevalier writes a romance in a late medieval setting, with a famous work of art triggering the unfolding of the narrative speculation, giving birth to a parallel universe of authentic atmosphere and fabricated facts.

The unicorn, a medieval phantasm The unicorn is a proud, noble, powerful, fiercely courageous creature, which is also gentle, beneficent to its fellow creatures, and happily serene in the end. The unicorn has gained various symbolic meanings throughout history, while some of the most common descriptions of it include a horse with a horn, a beast resembling a rhinoceros, an ass with a horn, a goatlike creature, a stag, and sometimes a combination of these and other animals. It has both a secular and a religious, Christian significance. It represents various aspects of romantic love, magic, and providence, and it has also been seen as a symbol of Christ. The unicorn is a mythical beast, said to be famous for its virtue, courage and strength, while its horn was believed to be a powerful antidote against poison. According to legend, the unicorn could only be captured if a maiden was placed near a location the animal frequented. It would sense her purity and lay its head in her lap. During the Middle Ages, this was interpreted as an allegory of Christ’s incarnation, with the unicorn representing both Christ and the Virgin. Unicorns symbolize purity, elegance and charm. Until the 17th century, unicorns were believed to be real animals, their horns being prized commodities in rich collectors’ showcases and in alchemical laboratories,

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although surviving examples are now recognized as being only narwhal horns. The confusion was only natural in the context of medieval lore, in an age when bestiaries practised the juggling of species and the transference of animal attributes (Shepard 2012, 6). What is more, the unicorn is a popular heraldic symbol, being depicted as an animal with the body of a horse, the tail of a heraldic lion and the legs and feet of a deer. A unicorn (from Latin unus “one” and cornu “horn”) is also considered, in many traditions, to be a mythological creature. In even the earliest references, the unicorn is fierce yet good, selfless yet solitary, and always mysteriously beautiful. He can be captured only by unfair means, and his single horn can defend users against the hazards of potions (Tresidder 2004, 198). Ancient writings identified the unicorn as a creature from the East. Many other famous ancient writers and scholars, such as Julius Caesar, Pliny the Elder, and Aelian, make reference to the unicorn. In his Historia Naturalis, Pliny the Elder describes the unicorn as a horse which cannot be captured alive. Another ancient reference to the unicorn is a description by Julius Caesar of an animal found in the Hercynian Forest. The huge beast had the body of a stag and a single long horn above its brow, between its ears (Chevalier, Gheerbrant 1995, vol.2, 215-217). The King James translation of the Old Testament (1611) also contains seven references to the unicorn. According to the western tradition, when God commanded that Adam and Eve should name all the animals on the Earth, the first to be given a name was the unicorn. Because of this, God bestowed a special blessing on the creature and touched it on the tip of its horn. When Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s command and were banished from the Garden of Eden, the unicorn was given the choice of following Adam and Eve into the world or remaining in paradise. The unicorn chose to follow them into the world of pestilence, war, pain, and death, a choice generally believed to have stemmed from love for the human species. It was blessed forever after for this act of compassion. An animal called the re’em is mentioned in several places in the Old Testament, often as a metaphor representing strength. This view is supported by the Assyrian rimu, which stands for strength, and which is depicted as a powerful, fierce, wild mountain bull with large horns. The translators of the King James Bible employed unicorn to translate re’em, providing a recognizable animal for the public to imagine, a creature that was proverbial for its untameable nature (Le Goff, Schmitt 2002). The unicorn also appears in ancient oriental documents and legends. Though the qilin, in Chinese mythology, is sometimes called the Chinese unicorn, it is a chimera-looking creature, with the body of a deer, the head

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of a lion, green scales and a long forward-curved horn. These special animals rarely reveal themselves to humans. Only on two auspicious occasions does the unicorn choose to show itself: when the ruler is just and kind and when times are peaceful and prosperous. In addition, when a great leader is about to die, the unicorn appears as a sign of loss. With its thick mane and single horn, the animal, given a tawny colour in Eastern iconography, was fierce and had the ability to distinguish right from wrong, innocence from guilt. An Indian legend has the unicorn appear to the mother of Buddha before his birth, as an incarnation of divine will. The animal was reported to be like a graceful golden gazelle with luminous brown eyes. European knowledge of the fabulous beast stemmed from ancient sources, and unicorn scholarship, as Chris Lavers points out (2009, 13), is almost as old as the beast itself. The creature was variously represented as a kind of wild ass, goat, or horse. Early natural histories told fabulous stories about a unicorn being trapped by a maiden (representing the Virgin Mary). When the unicorn sees her, it lays its head on her lap and falls asleep. This became a basic emblematic tag that came to underlie medieval notions of the unicorn, justifying its appearance in religious iconography. The two major interpretations of the unicorn combine Christian and pagan symbolism. The pagan interpretation focuses on the medieval lore of beguiled lovers, whereas Catholic writings interpret the unicorn and its death as a reminder of the Passion of Christ. The unicorn has long been identified as a symbol of Christ by Catholic writers, allowing the traditionally pagan symbolism of the unicorn to become acceptable in Christian discourse. Attempts to search for an actual animal as the basis of the unicorn myth have added a further touch of fantasy to the figure of the unicorn. These quests have taken various forms, culminating in a scientific, rather than a wonder-filled approach, to match with modern perceptions of reality. Since the rhinoceros is the only known extant land animal to possess a single horn, it has often been supposed that the unicorn legend originated from encounters between Europeans and rhinoceroses (Lavers 2009). Visually, the unicorn has exerted a permanent fascination on the western imagination, with painters striving to reproduce the mythical beast. Among the most famous visual representations of the unicorn, the late Gothic series of seven tapestries, The Hunt of the Unicorn, is seen as a high point in the weaving industry, combining both secular and religious themes. In the series, richly dressed noblemen, accompanied by huntsmen and hounds, pursue a unicorn in a palace garden, richly decorated in the

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millefleurs style typical of that time. They bring the animal to bay with the help of a maiden who traps it with her charms, appear to kill it, but eventually bring it back to a castle; in the last and most famous panel, The Unicorn in Captivity, the unicorn is shown alive again and happy, but tamed, in a garden. Scholars speculate that the red stains on its flanks may be not blood but rather the juice of pomegranates, which were a symbol of fertility (Cavallo 2010). However, the true meaning of the mysteriously resurrected Unicorn in the last panel is unclear. The series dates from 1500 and was commissioned in Brussels. Another famous set of six tapestries of The Lady with the Unicorn, also woven in Flanders around 1500, show the five senses (the gateways to temptation) and finally Love (“A mon seul désir” the legend reads), with unicorns featured in each piece. This series inspired Tracy Chevalier in her own novel and, a few years later, Kelly Jones in her The Seventh Unicorn, (2005), yet another work giving an imaginary genesis of this famous Flemish tapestry.

Iris Murdoch and the unicorn In The Unicorn (1963) modern characters, educated in an atmosphere of conventionality, escape to a medieval world of fantasy. The novel combines topics that are central to Murdoch’s moral philosophy with a series of Gothic elements: legends, magical signs, mysterious suffering, a female victim, a domineering male figure, love triangles, a remote 18th century castle, dramatic scenery, etc. The unicorn is chosen as a central symbol because of the notion of spiritual suffering: Hannah Crean-Smith’s grief gives energy to the plot and characters, as a purified form of agony. Iris Murdoch’s main themes, which enable the reader to establish a connection between her story and the Cluny tapestries, are captivity, penance, and power. One character in the novel is an elderly Classics lecturer, Max LeJour, who attempts to explain the calamity of the tragic “Unicorn” in Platonic terms. He watches from afar and attempts to interpret and explain Hannah’s tragedy to the second main protagonist, a former student of his, who is in love with the tragic heroine. In a novel that has all the beauty of a fairy tale and the melodrama of a Gothic narrative, Murdoch explores the fantasies and ambiguities which beset those who are condemned to be passionately abandoned and yet hopelessly imperfect in their search for God. For readers who like philosophical novels or books which attempt to explore a metaphysical idea within the story, with touches of Existentialism, Platonism, and vague Christianity, Murdoch’s Gothic epic is a very good

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choice. The Gothic landscape is well constructed, based around some areas of Western Ireland, including the Cliffs of Moher; the constant need to carry gas lamps around the house draws an extremely powerful visual image in the reader’s mind of what living in the isolated main house would have been like. A mysterious story of love and fear gradually unfolds. Hannah Crean-Smith, the heroine, is the prisoner of her violent, domineering husband, her first cousin, Peter, her gaoler being Peter’s former lover, Gerald Scottow–a situation that has led critics to characterize the plot as an instance of “sexual feudalism.” (Bove 2008, 1) A remote castle, high up on a rock, its windows gleaming in the rays of sunlight reflected from the sea below, hides a solitary, sequestered woman, while several of the male characters, attracted by her very unattainability, try to become her rescuers. Hannah Crean-Smith’s unhappy marriage and unfortunate romance with her neighbour, Philip (Pip) Lejour, is projected even more powerfully against a fairy-tale background by the time span of seven years (the crucial number in folk tales) that separates the events from the arrival of the woman from whose point of view the whole story is written. Marian Taylor tutors Hannah in French and discovers her pupil’s unhappiness little by little, in a plot full of mystery and suspense, placed from the very beginning under the sign of the unknown: She saw now that it was foolish and even discourteous not to have announced her exact time of arrival. It had seemed more exciting, more romantic and somehow less alarming to come at her own pace. But now that the bedraggled little train which had brought her from Greytown junction had coughed away among the rocks, leaving her in this silence a spectacle for these men, she felt helpless and almost frightened. She had not expected this solitude. She had not expected this appalling landscape. (Murdoch 1963, 9)

Marian’s reasons for accepting this post, apart from the pay, include her own desire for adventure and change and her need to escape from an unhappy relationship. The other outsider in the novel is Effingham Cooper, a former student of Max Lejour’s, who pays him regular visits and who feels similarly attracted by the imprisoned lady in the neighbouring house. Although the lecturer’s daughter, Alice, is in love with him, he prefers the unattainability of Hannah Crean-Smith, whom he can observe through his binoculars and whom he tries to rescue. An element that transforms the usual love triangles (perhaps more numerous in this novel than elsewhere), a much darker, even perverted

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motif, is homosexuality. Peter is involved in a relationship with Gerald Scottow but cheats on him with an American, making Gerald, out of jealousy, betray Hannah and Lejour, thus pushing Peter towards violent revenge. Seven years later, Gerald is again dubiously involved, this time with the housekeeper’s younger cousin, Jamesie Evercreech, a Dickensian character by name and in the way he is portrayed morally. The Gothic substance of the story is well developed. The scenery and the décor of the complicated plot meet all the requirements of 18th century romances: The sea was a luminous emerald-green streaked with lines of dark puple. Small, humpy islands of a duller, paler green, bisected by shadows, rose out of it through rings of white foam. As the car kept turning and mounting, the scene appeared and reappeared, framed between fissured towers of grey rock which, now that she was close to it, Marian saw to be covered with yellow stone crop and saxifrage and pink tufted moss;” (Murdoch 1963, 11) The big house was out of sight now behind a dome of limestone. The landscape had become a trifle gentler, and a little dried-up grass, or it might have been a tufted lichen, made saffron pools among the rocks. […] Two immense upright stones supported a vast capstone which protruded a long way on either side. It was a weird lopsided structure, seemingly pointless yet dreadfully significant. […] As the car began to descend, Marian made out on the opposite hillside a big grey, forbidding house with a crenelated façade and tall, thin windows which glittered now with light from the sea. The house had been built of the local limestone and reared itself out of the landscape, rather like the dolmen, belonging yet not belonging. (Murdoch 1963, 17)

Traditional Gothic literature, during the pre-Romantic period, was characterized by a shift from character to setting and from the grotesque (which had been cultivated by most realistic artists of the Augustan period, including Swift and Fielding in prose and William Hogarth in painting) to the sublime (cultivated especially by the philosopher Edmund Burke). Burke, in his A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757; 1998), in “an increasingly fashionable commitment to the imagination unbound,” (Phillips 1998, 12) as the age required, saw the sublime as a distinct aesthetic category generated by strong emotions of amazement and terror. It was sustained by mystery, obscurity, power, and majesty. Under Burke’s influence, the caricature in painting was replaced by sensitive, refined depictions of nature, evocations of wild landscapes and wide open spaces, picturesque forests, rocks,

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castles, and ruins, dimly lit by the sunset, moonlight, or candlelight. Therefore, those who contemplated breathtaking landscapes were more likely to experience awe and fear, rather than admiration and pleasure; so the natural feeling derived from the sight of a great stone house dominating the seascape is, as in Marian’s case, that “elation and despair had so fiercely ebbed and flowed in her” (Murdoch 1963, 12) She was very frightened at the idea of arriving. But it was more than that. She feared the rocks and the cliffs and the grotesque dolmen and the ancient secret things. Her two companions seemed no longer reassuring but dreadfully alien and even sinister. She felt, for the first time in her life, completely isolated and in danger. She became in an instant almost faint with terror.” (Murdoch 1963, 18)

Just like the heroines of 18th and 19th century Gothic stories, Marian discovers the scenery gradually, this slow motion increasing the suspense and the solemnity of the discovery, causing a profound reaction in the viewer’s mind and soul. And just as in Burke’s argumentation, the sublime nature of the viewed landscape (the sea and the cliffs at sunset) or object (the solitary mansion) is bestowed by the intensity of the feelings they stir in the spectator. The woman’s fear and anxiety, states of mind very close to pain itself, are two experiences which, according to Burke, are more desirable–for one’s personal, inner development–than pleasure caused by beautiful, amusing, or relaxing things. The first author to have used the term “Gothic” was Horace Walpole (see Brînzeu 2001:55), who gave his novel, The Castle of Otranto (1765; 1986), the secondary title “a Gothic story.” While Gothic (usually spelt Gothick in that period) came to have a pan-Germanic meaning, referring to all early medieval German tribes, including the Anglo-Saxons, it also proclaimed a kind of “native” freedom-loving tradition in British culture, as opposed to dry, “foreign” conservatism and conventionalism. To celebrate the “Gothic” love of liberty was to argue for greater contemporary freedom through political reform (Stevens 2000, 10), hence Walpole’s transition from political ideology to literary discourse. His novel was then emulated by no fewer than 3,000 others, giving birth to a genuine “Gothic” craze, which was ridiculed by such authors as Oscar Wilde at the end of the 19th century (The Canterville Ghost, see Brockman 2002). “Gothic” writers adopted this term as a title for the new genre since most of them chose to set their plots in a remote period, usually the Middle Ages, in architectural settings that shared numerous features with Gothic buildings: dimness, height, stone as basic construction material, rich decoration, arches and vaults. Originating in 12th century France and

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lasting into the 16th century, Gothic architecture was known during the period as “the French Style;” during the late Renaissance it was however synonymous with bad taste (Le Goff, Schmitt 2002). A series of Gothic revivals began in mid-18th century England, going hand in hand with the taste for Gothic style in literature. The combination between an impression of majesty, a solemn atmosphere, an intelligently balanced interplay between darkness and colour, are the main characteristics of the Gothic style in literature, meant to inspire in readers the same intimidating feelings as those nurtured by the spectators of medieval cathedrals. An extension of the Gothic mode of storytelling is apparent in Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn. Placing the action of the novel in an old castle, among characters engaged in old-fashioned relations, is not the only element that brings the book–chronologically speaking–close to the Gothic period. The choice of the unicorn to symbolize Hannah Crean-Smith’s spiritual seclusion, victimization, and romantic suffering also frames the story as “Gothic,” since the symbolism of the unicorn had its heyday during the late Middle Ages. As stated earlier, Iris Murdoch justifies the choice of the unicorn as the main symbol of her novel in terms of its power to evoke and highlight specific motifs, such as captivity, penance, and yearning. Hannah Crean-Smith is a unicorn for all the other characters, both for her family and staff, her enemies and her lovers, and for the outsiders who discover her story as spectators of a distant show – where the distance is both temporal and psychological. When Marian is first surprised by the term Dennis Nolan uses to describe Hannah CreanSmith’s situation (“a prison”) and then wonders why she does not try to save herself from this place, from her gaolers, labelling her decision as “so unhealthy, so unnatural”, Nolan answers: What is spiritual is unnatural. The soul under the burden of sin cannot flee. What is enacted here with her is enacted with all of us in one way or another. You cannot come between her and her suffering, it is too complicated, too precious. We must play her game, whatever it is, and believe her beliefs. That is all we can do for her. (Murdoch 1963, 67-68)

Her suffering is just as fully assumed, just as sublimated and sophisticated as the apparent mental state, so detached and rarefied, of the lady depicted in the A mon seul désir panel of the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries. The notion of sublimation acquires yet another spiritual dimension in the love story whose object Hannah Crean-Smith is. Thinking about their encounter after a year has elapsed, Effingham Cooper, in love more with the idea of Hannah than with Hannah in flesh and blood, defines their

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relationship in the medieval terms of amour courtois (de Rougemont 2000), becoming the hero who worships a pure and noble lady in silence: When he was absent from her he felt almost perfectly serene about their relationship. Only when he approached her again, the real, breathing, existing Hannah, did he realize how large a part of the fabric was contributed by his own imagination. That, in some deliciously undefined way, she loved him, was even in love with him, was, in absence, a dogma. In presence it had to undergo the ordeal of being changed into a fact. Though even in presence Effingham later found the combination of the fantastic and the real quite felicitous and natural. Sex, love, these were after all so largely things of the imagination.” (Murdoch 1963, 85)

Tracy Chevalier and the unicorn Chevalier’s unicorn brings together notions of feminine identity, art and sacrifice, human suffering and loneliness, topics which recur in several of her novels. Feminine identity is built, preserved, and revealed through sacrifice. From Griet, the servant girl (Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1999) who has to marry a man she does not love only to save her family from disgrace, to Kitty Coleman (Falling Angels, 2001) who joins the Suffragette movement in order to make a statement before a traditionalistic husband and an authoritarian mother-in-law, women in Tracy Chevalier’s novels obtain a voice at a very high price. Griet, in love with her master, the Dutch painter Vermeer, agrees to be his model for a painting although she knows this will compromise her and possibly even prevent her from getting married. She also agrees to wear her mistress’s pearls in her ears for Vermeer’s painting although she knows she will lose her position if the lady finds out and although her ears are not pierced. She performs the operation herself, risking infection and enduring great pain, in front of the artist, who seems to be completely unaware of or insensitive to her sacrifice. Kitty, a young wife in a well-off English family, will pay with her life for choosing another path than the one designed by patriarchy– mother of many children, with exclusively domestic preoccupations. Although she joins the Suffragettes in the hope that she is doing the right thing for her daughter, who will be able to vote and go to university, thus potentially becoming free from the authority of any man, Kitty is very little understood even by Maude, her only child. In all three novels, women suffer severely from loneliness. In Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier is inspired by Vermeer’s inclination towards painting lone women engaged in various activities that range from physical chores, such as pouring milk or sewing, to artistic or intellectual

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activities such as playing the guitar, reading, and writing. The loneliest of all, however, seems to be the mysterious young woman in the painting that lends its name to the novel, the portrait of a female character who is not engaged in any activity and who is painted against a dark grey background, only her face and left shoulder being visible. In Falling Angels, Kitty’s miserable loneliness is best signalled by her obsession with warmth. At an evening garden party, with people sitting round a large fire, Kitty draws closer and closer to the source of warmth, until she realizes that everybody else is a couple of yards behind her. Being colder than the others present, she feels at a certain moment that if she took one more step forward she would catch fire. She is unhappy because she cannot find the right place: she is either too far from or too close to the source of heat. If she stayed with the others, she would be cold. By the fire, she is both uncomfortably hot and isolated from her family and friends. In The Lady and the Unicorn, Geneviève de Nanterre, the rich and noble lady whose husband, Jean Le Viste, has commissioned the tapestries, feels lonelier than ever when she is surrounded by swarms of ladies-in-waiting and servants. She has been unsuccessful in the only thing society and family expected from her–giving birth to a male heir–and therefore she is no longer needed by anybody. It is known that in premodern and early modern Europe, a woman’s inability to have sons bore connotations of failure and inadequacy. It was a stigma of shame. Dame Geneviève’s husband neglects her, never missing an opportunity to remind her of his disappointment. She has no friends, and the only way in which she could make good use of her isolation, entering a convent and serving God, is denied to her: It would be a mercy to let me enter a convent. But Jean is not a merciful man. And he still needs me. Even if he despises me, he wants me next to him when he dines at home, and when we entertain or go to Court to attend the King. It would not look right for the place next to him to be empty. Besides, they would laugh at him at Court–the man whose wife runs off to a nunnery. […] Most men would be like that–older women joining convents are usually widows, not wives. Only a few husbands will let them go, no matter their sins.” (Chevalier 2003, 57)

She sees that people despise her or are sorry for her as an unsuccessful wife. Her eldest daughter, Claude, a girl with a boy’s name who should have been male, shares the opinion of those around her. When Geneviève gives birth to her third daughter, Claude, although only seven, manifests her dissatisfaction openly by sniffing, as she has seen adults do, at the sight of the baby, whose sex does not make her father happy. This may

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also be the case, Chevalier suggests, drawing on the social history of medieval Europe, because female firstborns in aristocratic families, who were in line to inherit the family fortune, sometimes adjusted to this situation and this responsibility less easily even than their fathers. The other feminine character whose loneliness is linked to the symbolism of the unicorn is Aliénor, the daughter of the Brussels weaver who is working on Jean Le Viste’s tapestry. Although surrounded by a loving family, a physical handicap isolates her from the rest of the world: she was born blind. As, because of her handicap, she cannot bring her family a good alliance with another weaver, she feels useless and unhappy. She works twice as hard as the rest of the family, both in the kitchen and the garden during the day and in her father’s workshop, where she has learned to sew although she cannot see, during the night, when the others, who cannot work without light, are resting in their beds. However, when the opportunity of a profitable alliance appears, with a woad dyer who would supply blue paint for free (blue being one of the basic colours used in tapestries and clothing, alongside red), she prefers public opprobrium to this hideous prospect (Jacques Le Boeuf is old, brutal and smells of the fermented sheep’s urine he uses to fix the colour). She gives birth to an illegitimate child, which triggers her disgrace and leads to the financial ruin of her father’s workshop. As female versions of the fantastic wild beast they dream of, for many of Tracy Chevalier’s feminine characters freedom has a very high price. Kitty Coleman becomes a Suffragette because she cannot agree with her mother-in-law’s views on marriage: women don’t need to vote because their husbands are perfectly capable of doing so on their behalf and because “in any sound marriage, the woman is in perfect agreement with her husband.” (Chevalier 2001, 214) At the Suffragette march, Kitty feels totally free for the first time in her life. She is aware that none of the members of her family approve of her behaviour–in terms of social conventions, a riot is no environment for a lady. Revolutions are for working class women; the better off the husband, the less possible it is for a woman to express her dissatisfactions in public without her actions being considered incongruous and disgraceful. (Bock 2002, Goody 2000) Dressed like Robin Hood, Kitty leads a symbolic procession–a fighter against an unjust social and political order. In the clothes of the legendary hero, Kitty feels liberated from the constraints of etiquette and corset: “What I did feel sharply was the sun and air on my legs. After a lifetime of heavy dresses, with their swathes of cloth wrapping my legs like bandages, it was an incredible sensation.” (Chevalier 2001:301) But this feeling lasts only for a moment; a horse’s hoof strikes her chest and no doctor can save

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her. She dies with the wish that at least her daughter may find, one day, the ideal place near the fire, where it is neither too cold nor too hot. To Geneviève de Nanterre, both of the two routes to freedom are denied: she cannot find rest in the peace of the convent and she cannot commit suicide by throwing herself into the Seine because, suspecting that she is planning this, none of her five ladies-in-waiting leaves her unattended even for a minute. She is a pampered prisoner whose gaolers cannot conceal their boredom at having to be around her: I heard one of them just now, huffing behind me from boredom. For a moment I felt sorry for them, stuck with me. On the other hand, they have fine dresses and food and a good fire in the evening because they are with me. Their cakes have more sugar in them, and the cook is generous with the spices–the cinnamon and nutmeg and mace and ginger–because he is cooking for nobles. (Chevalier 2003, 57)

Being gaolers saves these women from the everyday hardships of life in pre-modern Europe, where survival was the most important preoccupation for the great majority. The ladies-in-waiting, although not servants from the lowest class, cannot be mistresses of their own homes because their social position is too low to secure them a substantial dowry, the only real guarantee of a good match–a custom that persisted in Western Europe until the late 19th century (Mendelson and Crawford 1998, Hufton 1997). Due to the technological and economic level of a lowenergy but expanding society, life–in terms of housing, food, clothing, security, and comfort–was not necessarily primitive, as most contemporary stereotypes present it, but rough and dangerous (Frances and Joseph Gies 2010; Newman 2001). For Claude, Geneviève’s daughter, freedom would mean a romance with the Paris painter her father has hired, a romance for which she is ready to sacrifice a marriage with a nobleman from the Court whom Jean Le Viste has chosen as an ideal son-in-law. To prevent her from meeting her lover, she is sent to the same convent which is denied to her mother. A longed-for reward for Geneviève, a frustrated, introverted mature woman, the convent becomes a dreadful prison for a hot-blooded and beautiful young girl. The erotic triangle is also an important motif in Chevalier’s novels. The triangle that takes the most conspicuously artistic and spiritual form is featured in The Lady and the Unicorn, where Nicolas des Innocents, the draughtsman who makes the cartoons for the tapestries, appears in all six tapestries as the unicorn. He imagines himself as a unicorn in relation to all the women around him: the unattainable lady, the weaver’s daughter he gets pregnant, and the girls’ mothers, who both disapprove of him.

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However, other people perceive the creatures he paints not as unicorns but as mere horses or dogs, a hypostasis which humiliates and saddens the proud male and artist. The indirect message is that the main character in the tapestry series is not the imaginary animal but the woman who manages to tame him, lure him, and decrypt his mysterious aura and body language. The ladies who accompany the beast are as unearthly, devoid of physicality and concreteness, as the unicorn is universally acknowledged to be: Aliénor’s blindness makes her so detached from the world of the senses that she appears ethereal, while Geneviève’s sadness and longing purify her to the point of sublimation. The décor and the background of the tapestries also suggest an exclusively feminine milieu. The millefleurs technique gives the impression that the Lady is always in the middle of a secluded garden. Two of the heroines in the novel are, indeed, intimately connected to this protective locus. Aliénor, being blind, seeks refuge from the town’s noise and traffic in the back garden of her home. Using her sense of smell, she grows the sweetest flowers and the most nutritious vegetables and fruit, thus making herself useful to her family and building a secret, inner world which is out of other people’s reach. Though they are endowed with sight, they fail to notice the simple details that make the complex mechanisms of the real world work. Aliénor’s garden is surprisingly symmetrical and orderly: six large squares, designed as a cross, with fruit trees at the corners, with each pair of two squares containing a different type of plants–vegetables, flowers, herbs and spices. Her garden clearly reminds us of monastic inner courtyards, built according to the same principles of symmetry. Loneliness is an essential quality of the enclosed garden: it helps Aliénor “see,” with the eyes of her mind, butterflies spreading their wings, birds nesting, flower seeds and pollen floating in the air. For Nicolas, who looks down on everything which is not Parisian, her garden is a unique thing, something he has never seen in the capital, a place he compares, significantly, with Paradise. Geneviève de Nanterre, in turn, has a secret garden, the cool, silent courtyard of the convent, to which she would like to retire and where she sends Claude before her wedding. At Chelles, contemplating the daffodils and the lavender in the main garden at dawn, with only the church bells disturbing the perfect silence, the lady envies her daughter. Initially she had thought that keeping Claude locked up in the convent would be a form of punishment; now, in the midst of the garden she compares, by no accident, with Paradise, Geneviève realises that this is her own punishment, because her social duties force her to go back to the town, a dark, greyish, dirty space, which she regards as a place of perdition. For,

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while orderly, enclosed nature is paradise-like, the urban labyrinth can only be infernal. This ideal garden we find in the weaving of the unicorn tapestries is the earthly space with the most significant symbolic charge in the western medieval imagination. Hortus conclusus (Delumeau 1997) is the garden of delights, the earthly replica of the biblical Eden. Jean Delumeau notes that when God sent Adam and Eve away, the only place that could have saved the pain and squalor of humanity was an enclosed space, somewhat resembling the original garden (1997, 106). Many medieval writings identify this space as the monastic garden or the Church itself. For Herrade de Landberg, a medieval saint, the garden of delights (Hortus deliciarum) is the Christian soul, virginity and the clear conscience. For St. Bernard, the utilitarian space of the monastic garden recalls Eden in its structure, with the four corners symbolizing the four rivers of the Old Testament. The garden or inner courtyard (usually with a well or a fountain in the middle), chiming with the Garden in the Song of Songs (the enclosed garden with a sealed well), stands for the very essence of monastic life, protected by the walls of discipline, which hide countless wonders: herbs to heal the body, as well as virtues to heal the soul. The segmented garden suggests a cosmic model, a possible diagram of Paradise, where the abundance of trees and plants corresponds to the abundance of virtues: spiritual gifts to quench the thirst of the searching, restless soul, or the divine inspiration that never fades away. Reaching its climax in the late Middle Ages, the image of the enclosed garden is then slightly altered, though it continues to contain a female presence (the Virgin Mary surrounded by the Tree of Life and all the known species of animals). Hortus conclusus becomes a happy island we all have the right to dream of, a favourable space for depictions of the Virgin, both at the Annunciation and with the infant Christ. Unlike the hell of extreme temperatures, of inorganic elements and hybrid creatures–like that featured in the iconography of Hieronymus Bosch–the earthly paradise is invariably evoked during the spring, with colours and smells symbolizing the Good: the lily, the rose, or the forget-me-not.

Conclusion Thus the reader discovers a permanent tension and dichotomy in the fantastic and ineffable figure of the unicorn: masculine vs. feminine, purity vs. sexuality and seduction, pagan vs. Christian, earthly vs. heavenly, lay vs. religious, powerful vs. fragile, animal vs. human, submissive vs. rebellious, love vs. fear, fantasy vs. reality. The unicorn and his stories, as

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told by Tracy Chevalier and Iris Murdoch, convince us that any of these interpretations–as well as many more–is valid. Beyond the enclosed garden, outside the mysterious castle, many paths are open for the unicorn.

Works cited Beagle, Peter S. 1991. The Last Unicorn. New York: A Roc Book. Brînzeu, Pia. 2001. The Protean Novelists. 7LPLúRDUD+HVWLD Brockman, Robin. (ed.) 2002. Great Ghost Stories. Gramercy Books. Bock, Gisela. 2002. )HPHLD vQ LVWRULD (XURSHL GLQ (YXO PHGLX SkQă vQ ]LOHOHQRDVWUH. ,DúL3ROLURP Bove, Cheryl. 2008. The Unicorn. Available at http:// www. litencyc.com /php /sworks. php?rec=true&UID=8019. Accessed 10/02/2012. Burke, Edmund. 1998 [1756.] A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, in Adam Phillips (ed.). Oxford and New York: Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford University Press. Cavallo, Adolfo Salvatore. 2010. The Unicorn Tapestries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Harper Perennial. Chevalier, Jean, Alain Gheerbrant. 1995. 'LFĠLRQDU GH VLPEROXUL Bucharest: Artemis. Chevalier, Tracy. 1999. Girl with the Pearl Earring. London: Harper Collins. —. 2001. Falling Angels. London: Harper Collins. —. 2003. The Lady and the Unicorn. London: Harper Collins. Coville, Bruce. 1994. The Unicorn Chronicles. Scholastic, Apple Paperbacks. Delumeau, Jean. 1997. *UăGLQD GHVIăWăULORU 2 LVWRULH D SDUDGLVXOXL. BucXUH‫܈‬WL: Humanitas. Gies Frances, Joseph Gies. 2010. Women in the Middle Ages. The Lives of Real Women in a Vibrant Age of Transition. Harper Collins e-books. Goody, Jack.2000. The European Family. An Historico-Anthropological Essay. Oxford: Blackwell. Green, Michael. 2008. The Unicornis Manuscripts: On the History and Truth of the Unicorn. Portland: Amber Lotus Publishing. Hufton, Olivia. 1997. The Prospect Before Her. A History of Women in Western Europe. Glasgow: Fontana Press. Hussey, Lorna. 2009. Little Lost Unicorn. New York: Sterling. Lavers, Chris. 2009. The Natural History of Unicorns. New York: Harper Collins.

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Le Goff, Jacques, Jean-Claude Schmitt. 2002. 'LFĠLRQDUWHPDWLFDO(YXOXL Mediu occidental,DúL3ROLURP Jones, Kelly. 2005. The Seventh Unicorn. New York: Penguin. Marquis, Jessica S. 2011. Raising Unicorns: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Starting and Running a Successful–and Magical!–Unicorn Farm. Avon: Adams Media. Mendelson, Sarah, Patricia Crawford (eds.) 1998. Women in Early Modern England. Oxford: Clarendon. Murdoch, Iris. 1963. The Unicorn. New York: Bard Books. —. 2010. The Time of the Angels. New York: Open Road, kindle edition. —. 2010. Interview by Jeffrey Meyers, in The Paris Review, taken from Iris Murdoch, “The Art of Fiction”, No.117. Available at www. theparisreview.org/interviews/2313/the-art-of-fiction-no-117-irismurdoch. Accessed 01/14/2013. Newman, Paul B. 2001. Daily Life in the Middle Ages. Jefferson: McFarland. Rougemont, Denis de. 2000. ,XELUHDúL2FFLGHQWXO. Bucharest: Univers. Shepard, Odell. 2012. Lore of the Unicorn. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Stevens, David. 2000. The Gothic Tradition. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Tibbets, John C. 2011. The Gothic Imagination. Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tressider, Jack. 2004. 1,001 Symbols. An Illustrated Guide to Imagery and Its Meaning. San Francisco:Chronicle Books. Walpole, Horace. 1764 [1986]. The Castle of Otranto, in Three Gothic Novels: The Castle of Otranto; Vathek; Frankenstein. London and New York: Penguin Books.

PART II CRITICAL FANTASY

CHAPTER FIVE DYSTOPIAN REALMS OF THE 2000S: THE ROAD AND NEVER LET ME GO CRISTINA C+(9(5(ù$1 Introduction Dystopias form a literary (sub-)genre commonly associated with the fantastic and the speculative. Although easily classifiable as “science fiction” due to their use of alternative temporal, spatial and mental frames, they have too long a history and too strong a following to be reduced to that particular kind of reading alone. Building apparently strange worlds and imagining dysfunctional situations may operate, in various cases, as a warning: a subtle, yet extremely effective form of social critique. Consequently, mainstream writers have been venturing into the realm of dystopias for quite some time in order to make points otherwise often left unspoken. Dale Knickerbocker’s 2010 analysis “Apocalypse, Utopia and Dystopia: Old Paradigms Meet a New Millennium” offers a statisticallyinformed account of this development: A subject search of the MLA Bibliography yields no fewer than 616 items containing some form of the word apocalypse published in the decade between 1999 and 2009. A similar survey offers 1,965 results for utopia (1,642) and/or dystopia (323). Moreover, such themes seem to permeate artistic genres both “high” and popular (Knickerbocker, “Apocalypse”, 345).

This almost unexpected popularity is the explanation this critic finds for the fact that a collection of articles on representations of postapocalyptic utopias and/or dystopias includes essays on such celebrated mainstream authors as Bernard Malamud (National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, O. Henry Award) and Cormac McCarthy (National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award) alongside articles on science fiction and what is possibly the

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least respected of literary species, the zombie-themed graphic novel. (Knickerbocker 2010, 345)

Indeed, while the new millennium appears to have brought about a renewal of the appetite for the exploration of the unknown, the tenebrous, the threatening, writers such as Cormac McCarthy and Kazuo Ishiguro may well have surprised their readers by publishing works that were to be instantly labelled as “futuristic” or “apocalyptic”. The present article will focus on McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road (2006) and Ishiguro’s 2005 Never Let Me Go, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. While the former follows a father and son struggling to literally rise from the ashes in a desolate, post-cataclysmic America, the latter steps firmly into the human cloning debate, by imagining love and loss in a world of artificially created organ donors. Both writers have recourse to the settings, suspense and symbolism typical of the dystopian discourse to articulate their own “inconvenient truths” and to create powerful meditations upon the future of a distressed humankind.

Worst case scenarios in a post-World Trade Center world The quasi-inflation of grim futuristic works on both bookstore shelves and cinema screens has been a topic of reflection for various observers of contemporary cultural phenomena. In a 2008 essay on “Dystopia and the End of Politics,” Benjamin Kunkel speaks about the “cultural prestige of disaster” as the overarching principle of the rehabilitation of worst-case scenarios in the challenging socio-political context of the 1990s and early 2000s. However, before bringing an impressive series of literary works into discussion, he makes a highly relevant observation which aptly applies to the two novels we will be discussing in what follows. In it he emphasizes the importance of the distinction between the dystopian and the apocalyptic, because these categories refer to different and even opposed futuristic scenarios. The end of the world or apocalypse typically brings about the collapse of order; dystopia, on the other hand, envisions a sinister perfection of order. In the most basic political terms, dystopia is a nightmare of authoritarian or totalitarian rule, while the end of the world is a nightmare of anarchy […] What the dystopian and the apocalyptic modes have in common is simply that they imagine our world changed, for the worse, almost beyond recognition. (Kunkel 2008, 90)

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Changed worlds undoubtedly lie at the heart of both Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and McCarthy’s The Road. Their essential natures are, nevertheless, easily distinguishable. While the former gradually introduces a clinical experiment that mimics real life situations to the point of overlapping and confusion, an exercise in power, control and manipulation taken to extremes, the latter plunges the reader into the barrenness of a control-less, chaotic universe, which has only just survived a devastating unknown catastrophe and now needs a complete reconsideration and reshuffling of values. It is precisely this questioning of principles that sets the two novels in motion, as they both enter third millennium debates on adaptation and adjustment in a contemporary framework which seems from a multitude of angles to be menacing, foreign and berserk. Published in the mid-2000s, Never Let Me Go has become one of the iconic books of the decade, particularly due to its obvious connection with a series of burning public debates. Set at some point in the 1990s, the story of Hailsham, a boarding school for “special” children, is told in retrospect by a former student, whose recollections of her personal experience unveil a universe of make-believe that sounds all the more plausible as its discourse is predicated on real controversies of the period. At a time when organ transplantation had inflamed the scientific imagination, the concepts of organ harvesting and human cloning were gaining ground not only in terms of the possibilities they seemed to be opening up, but also in terms of the debate about the decency, morality and sheer humanity of such procedures. As Michael Harris reminds us, The year was 1997 and the stage was England. Over three decades of biotechnological research culminated in the birth of the world’s first clone, Dolly the sheep. Her test-tube creation spurred worrisome speculations about “designer babies”, “the gay gene” and the possibility of human clones […] Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, Never Let Me Go is set conspicuously in “England, late 1990s” and spins a counterfactual history wherein our collective anxiety comes forcefully to life in the person of Kathy H. (Harris 2005, 34)

What exactly was the collective anxiety about? The book offers a vivid illustration of the ethical dilemmas a world of living surrogates might create. By imagining a parallel universe ostentatiously similar to ours, revolving around the idea of creating artificial life for the sole purpose of preserving, improving and prolonging natural life, Ishiguro spells out the dangers of such an experiment and articulates the fears of an entire host of opponents of the presumably rational, scientific approach to the matter. By investing his clones not only with functioning bodies and minds, but also

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with feelings, hopes and desires, he deconstructs all exclusively utilitarian argumentation and introduces the emotional unknown into the equation. Often looked down upon by the admirers of “serious literature,” the more ideologically permissive and mentally flexible realm of sciencefiction gives Ishiguro the perfect opportunity and framework for his chosen topic. To quote Harris, “lovers of Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day (1989) may balk. Science fiction usually ranks, along with fantasy novels and mysteries, as the fast food of literature. Perhaps that is why Ishiguro, with his penchant for genre-smashing, chose clones to dissect humanity rather than a more pedestrian subject.” (Harris 2005, 34) In fact, it is the more specific subgenre of dystopia and its subversion of preconceived ideas that the writer himself has confessed he favored: “It never really occurred to me that people would think of it as science fiction […] I don’t think it fulfills a lot of the expectations of the genre. It’s more like a dystopian novel, in the tradition of books like Brave New World.” (Chong 2005, 17) The spiritual kinship claimed by Ishiguro in this particular interview has not gone unnoticed by either readers or reviewers. Keith McDonald’s reading of Never Let Me Go as “speculative memoir” places the book in the company of both Huxley’s 1932 masterpiece and Margaret Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale, the former of which deals with the issue of cloning and the social implications of a eugenics program, and the latter of which focuses on the plight of a woman in a world where biological reproduction has been hijacked by a totalitarian state. Aaron Rosenfeld points out that the many “future histories” of science fiction “offer a critique of how we live and who we are now…they speak in and to the present, if not of it” (40). Never Let Me Go is no exception to this. It provides us with a window into a culture of genetic engineering and cloning technology in which people are exploited and killed by a state seeking the wider benefits of organ farming, a window that nevertheless reflects in part the decisions facing contemporary culture. (McDonald 2007, 76)

By reading the novel against a far larger and more complex background than the supposedly imaginary one of Hailsham and its progeny/products, one will be prompted to ask various essential questions, alongside its protagonists, who gradually become aware of their commodified condition. The potentiality its sci-fi dimension affords the story is liberating, as it exposes real issues with the mixture of empathy and nonchalance that only fiction can successfully deploy. Although the epic is carefully steered and suspense patiently built, the weight of the novel lies in its thought-provoking web of ideas. From the very first pages,

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in which Kathy introduces her adult self as a carer for donors, the real underlying issues are foreshadowed: “Carers aren’t machines. You try and do your best for every donor, but in the end, it wears you down. You don’t have unlimited patience and energy.” (Ishiguro 2005, 4) Although as yet unaware of the clone-world hierarchy or its particular purposes, the reader can already feel the tension that drives the novel: mechanical vs. emotional behaviour, robots vs. humans, design vs. execution. A different scenario and a different socio-historical background function in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. In this case, humanity seems to no longer be an issue, as there is very little of it left in the wake of an unnamed cataclysm. Given McCarthy’s long preoccupation with man’s proclivity toward evil, the apocalypse was likely manmade: perhaps an all-out nuclear war. There are few survivors. Civilization itself is a fading memory. A nameless father and a son wander the scorched landscape, “the cauterized terrain,” hoping to scavenge enough food to survive while evading roving bands of cannibals. (Bortz 2011, 39)

While the initial description of childhood days at Hailsham is dotted with clues that there is more to this boarding school than meets the eye, appearances of “normality” are fiercely maintained as Ishiguro’s novel progresses towards awareness and, eventually, resignation. By contrast, there is nothing “normal” about the “barren, silent, godless” (McCarthy 2006, 4) territory the two protagonists roam through in The Road. From the very first lines, the author resorts to every obscure shade possible to emphasize the gloom of their circumstances. “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.” (McCarthy 2006, 4) Both light and sight seem to be withering, barring all access to knowledge, truth, and wisdom. “Dust and ash everywhere” (McCarthy 2006, 7); the entire order of the former world has crumbled to the ground and the stray protagonists are left to make sense of the futile remnants on their own. Examining “The Advent of Literary Dystopia”, Carter Kaplan points out that, “except in rare instances, literary dystopia is not funny. The mood of dystopia is usually dark, pessimistic, and often reflects paranoia, alarm or hysteria […]” (Kaplan, “Advent,” 200). In the case of The Road, the atmosphere is clearly faithful to this description. While shapes of former cities rise against the black skies “like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste,” (McCarthy, The Road, 8) even recollections of order are gradually erased by an immutable fate: “He thought if he lived long

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enough the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory.” (McCarthy, The Road, 18) Although this is an imaginary space, its contours feel particularly real in the aftermath of a whole series of traumatic events which have shaken the world during the past decade. In his introduction to the utopian genre, Dale Knickerbocker makes a few points that are particularly interesting with regard to the novels under discussion: Even the etymological origin of the word utopia has been subject to debate, although I believe Margaret Atwood, who takes into consideration Thomas More’s reputation as a jokester, may finally have resolved the matter: “Utopia is sometimes said to mean ‘no place’, from the Greek outopos; others derive it from eu, as in ‘eugenics’, in which case it would mean ‘healthy place’ or ‘good place’. Sir Thomas More, in his own 16thcentury Utopia, may have been punning: utopia is the good place that doesn’t exist’ (n.pag.). The problematics of representing an ideal culture or its opposite is one of the issues with which the authors […] struggle–as well as one of the elements that make their narratives worthy of interest. (Knickerbocker, “Apocalypse,” 347)

Though quite different in structure, the worlds Ishiguro and McCarthy describe are both far from perfect. If literary utopia is meant to be the portrayal of the good place that does not exist, The Road rules out the very possibility of such a fantasy. “The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time.” (McCarthy, The Road, 28) While readers and critics have generally identified the deserted setting as a postapocalyptic universe within which survival is the only goal, there have been readings which take into account the particular date and circumstances of the novel’s publication. Thus, while Never Let Me Go was admittedly provoked by cloning experiments, The Road seems to present a ravaged America in the aftermath of disaster. Given the country’s recent history, many will be tempted to associate McCarthy’s highly visual poetry of destruction with the live images which shocked the entire watching world on September 11, 2001. Witnessing shattered pieces of former lives coalesce into a shapeless mass brings to mind the symbolic–and, tragically, physical–collapse of the World Trade Center’s twin towers, not only in terms of the action itself, but also in terms of reactions. Stupefaction, horror, and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness are ubiquitous in the novel; the boy’s mother has already fallen prey to doom and chosen death for a lover: “My only hope

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is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.” (McCarthy 2006, 57) The husband and the son are left to wander in search of a new order. The apocalypticism of The Road seems to be a response to an immediate and visceral fear of cataclysmic doom in the United States after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Dianne C. Luce claims that the novel “had its genesis in a very specific moment”: McCarthy imagined the apocalyptic setting while staying in a hotel in El Paso with his young son, John Francis McCarthy, “perhaps not long after September 11, 2001.” (2006, 9) Luce’s explicit association of the presentiment-laden darkness of the novel with the events of 9/11 is not further exploited but deserves exposition. The Road has at its core the desire to drive the reader’s imagination into contact with an extreme vision of an apocalypse-ravaged future America, there to discover what–if anything–remains. This desire to reconstruct the world by deconstructing it seems to reflect the fundamental fear underlying the novel, namely, the fear that human beings may not in fact deserve to survive. (Cooper 2011, 221)

Essential oppositions: human vs. non-human, good vs. bad, life vs. death In fact, the opposition between human and non-human beings is central to both The Road and Never Let Me Go. A confrontation between opposite forces is essential to dystopias, and the novels under discussion are no exception. The nature of the opposition differs, however, in accordance with the specific settings and purposes of the two texts, as well as with the essential questions they are putting forward. The world of Hailsham, The Cottages and the organ-removal wards is populated by surrogates, creatures whose sole purpose in life is to renounce it for the benefit of others. The actual human beings appear in positions of power, as teachers, guardians or “possibles.” (i.e. possible real-life models for the clones) They are simultaneously looked up to, admired and somewhat feared by the student population they keep under control. The two sets of characters appear to be involved in a natural education(al) relationship, but the growing children find out along the way that this collaboration is not preparing them for a job, a career, a family and the rest of the presumed benefits of a “normal life.” Instead, they find themselves programmed to function irreproachably within a system that manufactures them and uses them as commodities. Although there are clues that their development is not exactly a standard one (they are treated as “special” and constantly kept under close surveillance),

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their awareness of the whole situation comes quite late, rather by way of suggestion than revelation. There is, however, a moment of weakness on the part of one particular guardian, Miss Lucy, who cracks under the burden of responsibility and spells things out quite unmistakably: None of you will go to America, none of you will be film stars. And none of you will be working in supermarkets as I heard some of you planning the other day. Your lives are set out for you. You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs. That’s what each of you was created to do […] You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided. (Ishiguro 2005, 80)

This is when dystopia takes hold of the plot. The “special” children are henceforward seen openly as victims of their creators and users, wheels in a social mechanism that was not yet in place but seemingly in the making at the time the novel was published. Ishiguro goes beyond the utilitarian aspect embraced by scientists into the moral dilemmas cloning and organ harvesting may and should provoke. Although focusing mainly on the half-bemused, part-brainwashed non-human protagonists, he indirectly points to the struggle such procedures subject the human elements to as well. Awareness is raised by the use made of apparently normal circumstances, which prove shockingly misleading. This mimicry of normal life is part of the process by which the clones are lured into devotion to their noble mission. Although this horrifying practice is revealed as the narrative progresses, the text itself focuses on the everyday nature of the friendships and love affairs that flourish at Hailsham, and the novel has a particularly subdued air rather than a spectacular take on the institutionalized cloning of individuals and their harvesting. In this sense, the novel also alternates from some of the generic tropes of much Science Fiction, which often takes place in an otherworldly or spectacular environment. The world we are presented with is disturbingly similar to our own, and, crucially, the practice of harvesting has become a largely unspoken but widely recognized fact of life, drawing parallels with the everyday human injustices witnessed in contemporary culture. (McDonald 2007, 76)

Despite the fact that the protagonists are, in practice, pre-programmed machines designed to facilitate the improvement of human life, the contrast Ishiguro describes in the two-class Hailsham world paradoxically invests them with more feeling and genuine emotion than their human models and counterparts. While the human guardians act as programmers

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and ultimate holders of the truth, Kathy, Tommy, Ruth and their schoolmates are the ones who wonder and waver in their faith, not entirely challenging the system that has created them, but trying to evade it in some way. Strangely enough, love, the strongest of sentiments, appears to be this way. The clones are convinced that if they can overcome their artefact status and prove capable of genuine affection, they will be allowed to live like humans and postpone the fulfilment of their original mission. As they are dystopian, not fantasy characters, they are obviously mistaken: there will be no happy ending for devoted couples. Despite clinging on to the details they know and trying to figure out, from within, the workings of the mechanism they are helping to run, the protagonists stand no chance of overturning their predetermined fate. This is what triggers the whole of the questioning, in the minds of readers and characters alike. Miss Emily’s explanation, years after the students’ “graduation” from Hailsham, exposes the mental framework in opposition to which the entire plot has been woven and opens the novel up to militant interpretations, despite its predominantly low-key tone. She begins by trotting out some well-known arguments: “After the war, in the early fifties, when the great breakthroughs in science followed one after the other so rapidly, there wasn’t time to take stock, to ask the sensible questions. Suddenly there were all these new possibilities laid before us, all these ways to cure so many previously incurable conditions.” (Ishiguro 2005, 257) Thus, she frames things in such a way that the joint processes of cloning and organ-harvesting seem the inevitable outcomes of an irreversible course of events, which is exactly the type of discourse favoured by researchers and medical circles. Using the possibility of treating and curing terminal diseases to support their cause, such highly practical approaches tend to overlook a number of ethical aspects. Miss Emily’s summary of the students’ situation is a telling one for the entire debate: However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neurone disease, heart disease. So for a long time you were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you. And if they did, they tried to convince themselves you weren’t really like us. That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter. (Ishiguro 2005, 258)

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This particular speech, meant to shatter Tommy and Kathy’s illusions, comes towards the end of the book, as a belated clarification of the implacability of the donors’ destinies. The distinction between humans and non-humans is clear-cut (the former being beneficiaries, the latter sacrificed/victims). However, what is being questioned is the basic humanity of a society which can build its survival upon death. As the novel progresses, its metaphorical dimension becomes increasingly obvious, both as addressing the human condition and as acting as a “cautionary tale about the nature of the human animal.” (Allen 2005, 25) As such, it questions the rightfulness of a form of social organization that, despite its scientific advancement and high level of efficiency, proves cruel and careless as to the means it employs to its ends. The metaphor extends even further, beyond the mere opposition between humans and clones, which it uses as a pretext for a wider meditation on human paradoxes. Ishiguro avowed his intentions in an interview: The story could work as a metaphor for our condition as human beings: the fact that we have limited lifespans and at some stage we do lose various of our organs or our functions, unless something strikes us down in the meantime, and we’re kind of aware of this. At some point in our childhood we learn about our mortality. But in some sense, we end up fooling ourselves that we’re not going to die in the end, because maybe otherwise we wouldn’t have the same energy or incentive to learn and achieve, or the patience to work things out. (Chong 2005, 17)

Thus, the novel is not aimed solely at exposing the moral dilemmas cloning involves, but also at reminding the reader of the inherent frailty and eventual perishability of the human race. In this context, the whole debate is rendered futile and the mystery we feel in the novel with regard to the attitude of the main characters is resolved. While many have been intrigued by the protagonists’ apparent resignation and lack of actual resistance in their relationship with the higher powers, their position parallels quite closely that of humans living with the thought of imminent extinction. Tommy and Kathy know they will eventually be separated by the finalization of their mission and, implicitly, their existence. They do not go as far as to imagine that they can escape their fate completely, but they do still try to postpone the final act, just as humans do in their endless attempts to discover and preserve eternal youth and uncompromised health. The clones’ continuing plight is clothed in nostalgia rather than rebellion, as their development can, in fact, be seen as the progression/regression of human life.

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Chapter Five Insofar as the artificially created and controlled life of the Hailsham students is a condensed version of the normal human experience, its melancholy is also the melancholy of the brevity of ordinary life, its transience, the transience of the truest of true love, and the inevitable transformations that recycle another classical topos–that of the three ages of man: learner, “carer,” case. (Toker, Chertoff 2008, 178)

If Never Let Me Go appears to be a reflective mise-en-abyme of human evolution, The Road condenses the ages and evolution of human experience. Survival in the aftermath of trauma annihilates normal reactions, feelings, interactions; social and communal roles disappear altogether or overlap, as society and community themselves are rather memories of a forlorn and irretrievable past than working concepts belonging to the present or the foreseeable future. Time and space seem frozen in the perpetual “now” of a desperate race to the south, while all value scales and criteria have been shattered. The father and the son’s sole raison d’être is… être: being, surviving, staying on guard (“if trouble comes when you least expect it maybe the thing to do is to always expect it,” McCarthy 2006, 151). Even if the mother has been defeated by fear and given up on a life that seemed hopeless and purposeless, the two march on, step by step. “This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don’t give up.” (McCarthy 2006, 137) By focusing on a world suffused with unexplained terror, McCarthy explores the growing phenomena of fear, depression, and anxiety after the coming of tragedy. Although violence is a major coordinate in McCarthy’s other novels and their detailed descriptions of the American South, the events of The Road seem to unfold after the most critical episode of extreme violence. Everything is broken, and the obscure remains of what was push the survivors into self-absorbed, terrified, passiveaggressiveness. Humanity can no longer be assessed according to regular criteria and expectations, as the post-apocalyptic circumstances differ drastically from common life situations. As Shelly Rambo emphasizes in her analysis of the book, Temporal categories of past, present, and future shatter in experiences of trauma. The past does not remain in the past; a future is not imaginable. The past is relived in an invasive and uncontrollable way in the present, leaving persons and communities unable to move forward. Studies in trauma question the “after” in aftermath, by revealing the fact that the effects of an event are not contained or completed in the past; instead, they intrude into the present. Life is configured differently in light of the “death”-the radical ending-that one has experienced. (Rambo 2008, 108)

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Thus, while Never Let Me Go unfolds under the threat of imminent “completion,” The Road is placed after much of the known universe has been wiped off the face of a desolate earth. The entire setting is one of absence rather than presence; the past lives on in its objects, which remind the finder of lost “normality.” The reification of happiness, the concentration of former well-being in series of scattered objects (preserved food, clothing, appliances etc.) bear witness to the extinction of a fully commodified society. “The mummied dead everywhere” (McCarthy 2006, 24) coexist with better preserved goods: “A television set. Cheap stuffed furniture […] Everything covered with ash. A child’s room with a stuffed dog on the windowsill looking out at the garden […] two good woolen blankets […] three jars of homecanned tomatoes […] a Coca Cola.” (McCarthy 2006, 22-23) Indications of an American setting are quite clear throughout the novel, both geo-spatially and culturally. As already mentioned, many have projected the novel against the background of 9/11, deeming it a science-fictional outlet for irrational fear and apocalyptic scenarios. If the landscape is–thankfully!–futuristic and surreal, the concerns that motivate the two protagonists and their reactions are framed in a context that makes them highly plausible. Many of the instances of determination and actual survival are predicated upon endless repetitions of supposedly firm convictions and principles. Thus, the dialogues between father and son, elliptical and monosyllabic as circumstances make them, contain high doses of spiritual energy, attempts at symbolically “carrying the fire” (which is, in itself, a paradoxical promise in a world that seems to have been cremated). The protagonists talk, but not necessarily in order to communicate information, as their experience is shared between them and out in the open; it is rather that sharing ideas and stories keeps them alive. While not focusing exclusively upon the two novels under discussion, but rather emphasizing features of the (sub)genres they belong to in terms of political ideologies, Benjamin Kunkel makes use of a distinction that encompasses their content in quite a telling way. In the neoliberal dystopia, a totally commodified world transforms would-be lovers into commodities themselves and in this way destroys the possibility of love. In the neoliberal apocalypse, on the other hand, the wreck of civilization reveals the inherent depravity of mankind (excepting one’s loved ones) and ratifies the truth that the family is a haven in a heartless world. Both the neoliberal dystopia and the neoliberal apocalypse defend love and individuality against the forces threatening to crush them; the difference is that the clone novel sticks up for humanity from the standpoint of an implied or explicit critique of neoliberalism, while the apocalypse

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In the distinct cases of Never Let Me Go and The Road, love (in its romantic or domestic forms), commodification, kindness and competition are all at play to quite a major extent. Although the present article is not primarily ideology and politics-oriented, one cannot help but notice the critical stands both novels (and, implicitly, authors) take as to the shortcomings of contemporary (Western) societies. The father and the son in The Road keep company in a world of fierce competition. Although no longer framed by the solid walls of the corporate universe, the race is still on; nevertheless, the definitions of “extinction” and “survival” have changed completely, moving from the level of socio-economic ambition to the very basic one of pragmatic existential struggle. While the context has altered dramatically, competition seems still to be the order of the day; fear and the spectre of death challenge the human qualities of otherwise loving and loveable characters and cause basic instincts to gain ground. This appears to hold true at least in the case of the father, who struggles to find the right balance between the motivational speeches he makes to his son and the actual situations he is confronted with and decisions he needs to take. If, for him, the aim of keeping his son alive and safe overrules all other considerations, the child begins to question and dissent as he gradually discovers the rift between theory and practice. The father focuses on making their progress as smooth as possible: no extra burdens, no distraction. A key moment highlights the cruelty of the survival game: the child encounters a boy approximately his age, wandering about on his own in the backyard of an empty house. He pleads with his father to take pity on the stranger, but is bluntly refused. The scene is all the more heart-wrenching as the child’s insistence and his self-standing judgment become stronger. What if that little boy doesn’t have anybody to take care of him? he said. What if he doesn’t have a papa? There are people there. They were just hiding […] I am afraid for that little boy. I know, but he’ll be all right. We should go get him, pap. We could get him and take him with us. We could take him and we could take the dog. The dog could catch something to eat. We cant. And I’d give that little boy half of my food.

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Stop it. We cant. He was crying again. What about the little boy? What about the little boy? he sobbed. (McCarthy 2006, 85-86)

This exchange is one of the scenes that mark the boy’s beginning to question the principles his father keeps enouncing in order to keep him calm and confident. Given that their entire existence unfolds under the sign of one essential distinction–good guys vs. bad guys–ethical dilemmas are bound to appear even in times of crisis of meaning and identity. (The story of the little boy comes full circle when, at the end of the novel, the father’s last words, probably echoing his hopes for his own son, are “Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.”– McCarthy 2006, 281) When all fixed points melt away into the ashen atmosphere, the only reassurance lies in the stubborn belief in the ubiquity of human kindness. Definitions of goodness are a recurring motif all through the protagonists’ journey; in a world deprived of all known categories, the only ones left have to do with coping and survival. Thus, goodness is reduced to very basic notions: We wouldnt ever eat anybody, would we? No. Of course not. Even if we were starving? […] No. we wouldnt. No matter what. No. No matter what. Because we’re the good guys. Yes. And we’re carrying the fire. (McCarthy 2006, 128-129)

The novel’s symbolism has been discussed from various angles; the essentialization of relationships in a post-apocalyptic universe has even been associated with a defining national dimension: “The belief in an identity of ‘being chosen’ can translate into American exceptionalism and the belief that we are good and the others are bad.” (Rambo 2008, 103) What is more interesting, however, is the discourse of opposing values and the particular significance “goodness” takes on in times of crisis. In order to justify the many compromises (in terms of “standard goodness”) that he is forced to make in the course of a dangerous journey, the man explains the system to his son: “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you.” (McCarthy 2006, 77) Having been taught to believe in genuine affection and kind intentions, the boy, along with the reader, starts doubting and

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needs constant reassurance: “Are we still the good guys?” (McCarthy 2006, 77)

Conclusion By means of innumerable details and careful ideological and structural alignment, Never Let Me Go and The Road illustrate extremely faithfully the science-fiction categories they belong to, demonstrating the flexibility of the genre and its ultimate suitability for the purposes of iconic writers willing to experiment. Dystopia, generally speaking, is a subgenre of the gothic or horror novel, in which the hero or heroine discovers a barbaric truth (the nature of society) lurking beneath a civilized façade, and incurs the traditional gothic-novel penalties of madness, isolation, ruin […] The apocalyptic narrative, on the other hand, derives genetically from the historical romance or adventure story; the noble and free hero’s rescue of an innocent woman and/or child from danger has been a staple of such fiction. (Kunkel 2008, 96)

By exploiting fantastic tropes and projecting the plots of their novels against socio-historical backgrounds either fully contemporary or easily imaginable in contemporary circumstances, Ishiguro and McCarthy take a stand in Third Millennium debates, proving not only their literary talent and ability to create plausible characters and stir powerful emotions, but also their interest in and preoccupation with widespread concerns of their time. As such, they enrich their creative portfolios with the mastery of a different type of writing, while simultaneously affirming their cultural and political awareness. Moving beyond suspense-laden plots into the realm of psychological investigation, communal ethics and moral dilemmas, the two writers invest their fictional quests with the nobility of real-life attempts to raise awareness and elicit solutions from today’s leaders. Dystopian and/or apocalyptic, their grim fantasies are cautionary tales whose message extends well beyond their withered or ashen pages, penetrating into their readers’ consciousness.

Works cited Allen, Brook. 2005. “The Damned and the Beautiful,” in The New Leader 88: 2 (2005), p. 25. Bortz, Maggie. 2011. “Carrying the Fire. Individuation Toward the Mature Masculine and Telos of Cultural Myth in Cormac McCarthy’s No

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Country for Old Men and The Road,” in Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche 5: 4, pp. 28-42. Chong, Kevin. 2005. “Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro,” in. Books in Canada 34: 5, p. 17. Cooper, Lydia. 2011. “Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as Apocalyptic Grail Narrative,” in Studies in the Novel 43: 2, pp. 218-236. Harris, Michael. 2005. “Clones and their Shelf-Lives,” in Books in Canada 34: 4, p. 7. Ishiguro, Kazuo. 2005. Never Let Me Go. London: Faber and Faber. Kaplan, Carter. 1999. “The Advent of Literary Dystopia,” in Extrapolation 40: 3, pp. 200-212. Knickerbocker, Dale. 2010. “Apocalypse, Utopia, and Dystopia: Old Paradigms Meet a New Millennium,” in Extrapolation 51: 3, pp. 345357. Kunkel, Benjamin. 2008. “Dystopia and the End of Politics,” in Dissent 55: 4, pp. 89-98. McCarthy, Cormac. 2006. The Road. New York: Vintage International. McDonald, Keith. 2007. “Days of Past Futures: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as ‘Speculative Memoir,’” in Biography 30: 1, pp. 74-83. Rambo, Shelly L. 2008. “Beyond Redemption? Reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road After the End of the World,” in Studies in the Literary Imagination 41: 2, pp. 99-120. Toker, Leona, Daniel Chertoff. 2008. “Reader Response and the Recycling of Topoi in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go,” in Partial Answers 6: 1, pp. 163-180.

CHAPTER SIX SOUTH AFRICAN SPECULATIVE FICTION LUIZA CARAIVAN Introduction The multitude of themes and subject matters that have emerged in postApartheid South African literature is starting to fill the gap left by the literary topics of the grand Apartheid narrative. A new generation of writers are striving to maintain South Africa’s position on the map of universal literature as contemporary and original topics connected to 21st century South Africa focus on diversity, multiculturalism, multiracialism and other particularities of this “jagged end of a continent” (Gordimer 1998, 278). Two Nobel winners out of the former South African “white quartet” of J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, André Brink and Breyten Breytenbach (Caraivan 2013, 229) have also devoted their attention to issues connected with multiculturalism, the status of the writer, the banalisation of violence due to mass-media coverage, the issue of reconciliation with the violent past, the struggle against illness, globalization and loss of cultural and national identity, displacement, economic exile and emigration. The post-Apartheid literary generation has also introduced speculative fiction (or science fiction) on to the map of South African literature; critics consider that there is a growing speculative fiction movement in South African literature. Nevertheless, the rarity of science fiction writing in South Africa has been mentioned on several occasions by various writers on or observers of Apartheid and post-Apartheid literature. The most obvious explanation is that during the Apartheid period speculative fiction was not taken into consideration as writers preferred to engage their characters in the struggle for human rights or racial identity. However, depending on how we define this genre, some novels of that period may be described as belonging to speculative fiction. The present study is an attempt to identify the beginnings of speculative fiction in South Africa while underlining the fact that this

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literary genre is still in its early days and is strongly connected to the realities of (post)Apartheid society. In this respect, we analyse some definitions of this term and look at how South African writers have managed to adapt everyday life into their science fiction screenplays or novels. Secondly, we briefly describe the science fiction movement in Apartheid and post-Apartheid South Africa. Finally, we provide some examples of SF writings, starting with District 9, the film that marks the beginning of postcolonial speculative fiction in South Africa, and continuing with recent novels by Lauren Beukes and Henrietta Rose-Innes. Speculative fiction has a future in South Africa, as this country is home to a variety of cultures and ethnic groups that all have their myths and fairy tales just waiting to be put into written literature. It is what lies beyond the borders of our perception that makes the fantastic stories that contribute to the history of literature. Thus, the relationship between technological development, the resulting objects and the emergence of abstract and fantastic models is beginning to take shape in this part of the world. It is a well known fact that the hybrid nature of the fantastic arises from basic human conflicts, whereas technology and the media enable writers to (re)produce and distribute their materials across cultural, ethnic or state borders.

From science to speculation According to Edward James, (1994, 1) all we have is only “attempts at definitions” that “ seem to imply a belief in a Platonic idea of ‘science fiction’ rather than a bundle of perceptions about what constitutes sf”. In his opinion, these contents “are constantly changing, from decade to decade, from critic to critic, and from country to country”. These changes have also manifested in the terminology used to label the genre. Thus in the late 1960s the science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein was the first theoretician to extend the term science fiction to speculative fiction: a handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method. (1969, 22)

In the 1970s, various critics and writers introduced the labels “science fantasy” and “speculative fantasy” (Panshin 1976, 75) or “structural fabulation,” (Scholes 1975, 5) underlining the fact that “the future of

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fiction lies in the fiction of the future: future-fiction avoids the problems of both realism and fantasy.” (James 1994, 101) According to Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal, there is a war of definitions taking place within the genre of science fiction. In fact postcolonial literature does not have any standard settings (spaceships, imagined planets, pseudomedieval fantasy lands), motifs (time-travel, quests, war), and characters (scientists, aliens, knights, dragons, wizards) of science fiction and fantasy. The mode of postcolonial literature may vary from the realist to the magic realist and everything in between. (Hoagland and Sarwal 2010, 5)

Recent attempts at redefining the genre have been made by Eric D. Smith, (2012, 1) who points out that there is a desire for so-called “postcolonial science fiction” as the “imperialist preoccupations of traditional SF have long been a topic of discussion.” The former colonies are entering the vast field of science fiction, although they have never been strangers to this type of fiction. Nevertheless, due to the fact that postcolonial issues have become less pressing and demand less attention than 30 years ago, speculative/ science fiction writers are emerging from Africa and Asia. Globalization, the use of technology and last but not least marketing and advertising on a larger scale than ever before are also significant factors contributing to the expansion of science fiction writing: The genre may also, in its deployment of the globalizing models of Empire, provide the means for us to detect and decipher the ideological mystifications of global capital, the unique manifestations of globalization in particular national cultures, the emergence of technology as a cognitive mode of awareness, and the processes whereby individual national cultures exist alongside and engage the polymorphous bad infinity of the new global habitus. (Smith 2012, 2)

Writers from the margins of the former empire are redefining their places and are re-imagining borders, using and exploiting resources provided by first-world countries. As a result, more speculative or science fiction writers are “striking back” from the postcolonial world, while writers of the 1980s are redefining their works as speculative fiction (Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee are the most notable examples in South Africa). An explicitly postcolonial science fiction not only has to be written from outside the traditional strands of Western science fiction […] but explained and criticized from outside them too. (Smith 2010, 1-2)

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South African speculative fiction, along with fiction written in other postcolonial worlds, redefines otherness and points to different versions of the future, making use of the Other’s point of view, that is, the point of view of the former subject. The Other that forces a redefinition upon the Self is one of the main issues retained from Apartheid literature. However, the question of otherness poses itself in a more complex way, as blackness is no longer a distinctive feature of the Other. In this regard, contemporary representations of otherness are based on the fact that the Other is a former product of the colonized society, the result of a social reality “which is at once an Other and yet entirely knowable and visible” (Bhabha 1997, 71). The South African asymmetrical world of “skewed power relations” (Dimitriu 2006, 196) is inserted into speculative fiction as a world of fragmented and insecure identities. In South Africa, the process of othering has often been employed to identify differences and to distance the Self from the Other, which has caused exclusion or marginalization from mainstream. The historical result was catastrophic: the creation of stereotypical images, multi-generational hatred and violence that led to the Apartheid regime. However, acknowledging otherness also has positive outcomes: national identities are preserved, the “silent” and effaced Other establishes its right to speak (women, indigenous people, minorities, deviants, subordinates are able to speak for themselves), reorganizing the world order in radical ways. Michael Chapman (2008, 9) underlines the value of difference: “Difference […] does not confirm division, but transforms ‘othering’ from negative to positive premise.” On the same note, Pia Brînzeu (2008, 25) remarks that difference becomes possible when there is a combining of “involvement with detachment,” when we adapt “the images of otherness to suit self-images, completing the more frequent stereotypes of the natives with a new set of attitudes brought from abroad”. The articulation of otherness is possible in concordance with social or minority perspectives, with the on-going negotiations that seek to authorize cultural hybridities, with the persistence and/or re-invention of tradition, the restaging of the past, and the consensual or conflictual engagements of cultural difference. (Brînzeu 2008, 27)

Postcolonial theory and literature has been searching for new meanings of otherness, focusing on a better comprehension of the Self and the Other. Speculative fiction is a more appropriate term for the new South African writing, given the fact that there is more speculation than science in novels such as Moxyland or Zoo City by Lauren Beukes or Nineveh by Henrietta

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Rose-Innes. South African speculative fiction is still redefining the Other, which takes the form of insects, animals or mythological creatures emerging from the past or from the conquered environment.

South African Science Fiction movement The very beginning of speculative fiction in South Africa may be Rider Haggard’s ‘what-if’ novel King Solomon’s Mines. (1885) He explored issues such as racial and cultural differences, colonial relations and interracial relationships, which were to become major topics in 20th century South African literature. Although regarded as an adventure story, King Solomon’s Mines is also seen as the starting point of the Lost World genre, which belongs to the wider genre of science/ speculative fiction. 20th century speculative fiction was greatly influenced by the American fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazines Weird Tales and Strange Tales, in which the South African writer Ferdinand Berthoud published some horror short stories: The Man Who Banished Himself (1924), Webbed Hands (1931). Although Berthoud lived mainly in the U.S.A., he wrote about South Africa and the savage world that he had encountered during his travels through Africa. In his overview of South African speculative or science fiction, Nick Wood “aims to give a socio-historical account of the progress of the genre,” (Wood 2009) as it is agreed that fiction in general is better appreciated when we understand the context in which it was produced. Wood also remarks that Berthoud writes horror stories but with an underlying pseudo-scientific premise that the ‘brown savage’ monster at the heart of the story who is committing murders in locations throughout Cape Town is the product of a ‘renegade English promoter’ and an unknown–perhaps ‘unnatural’–mother from ‘the center of Africa’. (Wood 2009)

The Ship That Sailed to Mars by William M. Timlin and Loeloeraai by C.J. Langenhoven were both published in 1923 and are important landmarks in South African science fiction. As Tanya Barben (2012) observes, they are rare pieces of early South African science fiction and they both deal with a utopian future in which space travel is possible. In Timlin’s novel, the Old Man goes on an “exciting journey through space, sailing past the Pleiades, worlds without number, the Star of the Classic Myths and brushing past awesome planets inhabited by monsters. […] The ship lands on the Red Planet [where] the Martian Fairies have created a spectacular home for themselves, a remarkable zoo filled with wondrous but harmless monsters and beasts which previously roamed the planet.”

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(Barben 2012) Langenhoven’s novel introduces a visitor from the planet Venus, the civilized Loeloeraai, who is a lover of peace and tries to teach both “Coloured” (as defined in South Africa) and white people lessons on equality, technology and spirituality. André Brink believes that “the outrageous, the wholly unexpected, the truly miraculous informed much of his fiction.” (Brink 1998, 26) The Apartheid years made realist fiction the most important weapon against a regime that attempted to hide its atrocities. Authors writing in English or Afrikaans explored the issues of living in Apartheid South Africa, with many writers having their stories, novels or even newspaper articles banned or censored. The Western world was able to find out about the harsh reality of life in the country from such writers’ struggles to have their works published and translated. Science fiction was difficult to conceive when there were so many issues specific to Apartheid South Africa clamouring to be used by writers who were trying to keep abreast of reality. All the same, Claude Nunes, an English South African writer, published the novel Inherit the Earth (1966), which focuses on telepathic androids, aliens and “how to live in peace.” (Wood 2009) In his account, Wood (2009) also mentions an Afrikaans writer, Jan Rabie, “who wrote a number of overtly science-fiction books, such as Swart ster oor die Karoo (Black Star over the Karoo, 1957), Die groen planeet (The Green Planet, 1961) and Die hemelblom (The Heaven Flower, 1971).” Rabie was also one of the “Sestigers,” a group of influential Afrikaans writers during the 1960s, initiated by Andre Brink and Breyten Breytenbach. Unfortunately, many works in Afrikaans have not been translated into English and so have remained unknown to the wider public. In the 1980s, J. M. Coetzee published Waiting for the Barbarians, a silent confrontation between the brutal forces of Empire and the barbarians supposedly waiting to invade, and The Life and Times of Michael K. The former presents the gradual abandonment of a town due to soldiers’ fear of a barbarian invasion that seems to be suspended in time. The latter describes a gardener’s journey through an alternate South Africa confronted with civil war. Deirdre Byrne considers that Coetzee’s novels are “an obvious candidate for the title of speculative fabulation (if not science fiction proper) because he uses “defamiliarization to strip the South African situation of contextual specificity (time and place) and presents the essential crisis of racial tension and a failure of liberalism.” (Byrne 2004, 522-523) The same “extrapolation of South African conditions and a dystopic picture of race relations” (Byrne 2004, 523) are encountered in Nadine Gordimer’s novel July’s People (1981). She explores the effects of civil

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war on an ordinary white family, who are forced to adopt the position of ‘refugees’ in their black servant’s village. A change of power takes place both in The Life and Times of Michael K and in July’s People: the white society is no longer ‘the master’ and the white characters witness the collapse of their familiar South Africa. Both Coetzee’s and Gordimer’s novels are futuristic dystopias in which white families are forced to leave an urban environment now surrounded by rebels and to relocate to an unfamiliar village in the middle of a black community. The two Nobel Laureates focus on an imagined near future and in doing so draw attention to the possibility of writing speculative fiction instead of realistic novels. Michael Cope’s Spiral of Fire (1987) is another novel written during the Apartheid period. Due to the political situation, Cope’s book was almost ignored, even though it presented an anthropologist who goes to another planet to study a certain community that is the complete opposite of South African society, as it believes in equality. Finally, it is worth mentioning some South African science fiction and horror magazines that have been publishing short stories for some decades. Probe, which first appeared in 1969, publishes the winners of its annual science fiction short story competition. Something Wicked started in 2006 and became an online monthly in 2011. Chimurenga magazine has been in print or online since 2002 and has published various authors such as Njabulo Ndebele, Lesego Rampolokeng and Henrietta Rose-Innes, among others. Many critics and writers believe that speculative/ science fiction has a future in South Africa, especially since reconciliation with the pre-colonial and colonial past has become a major issue. In this context, André Brink considers that Africa has a brand of magic realism, peculiarly its own, to offer the world. In Black orature in Southern Africa it already has a venerable tradition. In Afrikaans literature, too, it goes back to oral beginnings, inter alia in many of the ghost stories first told by trekkers or itinerant traders at the camp fire, before electricity put an end to visitations from other worlds. […] And with the inevitable return to roots which political events and the fin de siècle have prompted in South African writing across the cultural spectrum, one may well expect a rediscovery of African magic realism. (Brink 1998, 26)

Nnedi Okorafor’s online post asks the question “Is Africa Ready for Science Fiction?” She has observed South African readers and publishers and concludes that

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in Africa, science fiction is still perceived as not being real literature. […] It’s not tangible. It’s sport. Child’s play. I can see how science fiction can be foreign to many Africans. Technology tends to play a different role on the continent. There is a weird divide and connection between the technologically advanced and the ancient. (Okorafor 2009)

The beginning of the 21st century has seen the appearance of a wide variety of South African speculative fiction with great potential to enter and conquer the Western market. The fact that science is playing an increasingly significant role in education and training and that technology is available on a larger scale in South Africa is becoming an incentive for writers to take up speculative fiction.

On postcolonial humans and animals The first major entrance of South African science fiction onto the Western stage was in 2009 with the release of the film District 9. The script is based on real-life events that took place in District Six, Cape Town, during the Apartheid era (1966), when the government declared the area to be the property of whites only and therefore started the forced removal of the black population. By 1982, more than 60,000 people had been relocated 25 kilometers away from their homes, which were destroyed in order to build a university and its campus, but in the end most of the so-called whites-only territory was left as undeveloped land. The film’s director Neill Blomkamp presents a quarantined neighbourhood where aliens (giant insects) are housed until the government decides that there are too many of them and that they have to be moved, as inner city residential areas must be kept clean. The movie is more than science fiction, since it was filmed on location in the slums of Chiawelo, Soweto, and it uses fictional interviews, news footage, and videos from surveillance cameras in a documentary-style format. The themes of xenophobia and social segregation are at the centre of the script: the aliens, some kind of “prawns” as the officials term them, are confined to District 9, a military camp set up by the South African government inside Johannesburg, a camp which immediately becomes a slum. The government’s reaction is to relocate the fast-breeding aliens to an internment camp outside the city, ironically called District 10. The attempt to evacuate the aliens to another camp leads to violence and slaughter by South African security forces. Besides being forced to live in a particular area, under their mother ship which delimits District 9 from human civilization, the aliens also suffer various types of oppression that remind one of the ways blacks were treated during the time of Apartheid.

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The support provided by multinational corporations (MNU-MultiNational United) to government funding for military equipment and training is one of the many similarities with what really happened in South African society. An MNU field operative, Wikus van der Merwe, is exposed to biotechnology that causes his DNA to mutate and he starts to metamorphose into a giant insect. Wikus is hunted by government officials attempting to find the secret of alien technology, that is, highly advanced weapons that can only function with alien DNA. Deirdre Byrne notes that “it is no longer acceptable in South Africa to kill off racial others, even in fiction, but discursive putdowns, stereotyping and caricature persist.” (Byrne 2004, 525) Thus, the movie ends with two aliens, father and son, leaving the Earth in their mother ship, helped by Wikus, who has completely transformed into a ‘prawn’ but has memories of his human life. As the plot of District 9 shows, South African speculative/ science fiction is strongly related to themes inherited from the Apartheid period: racial tensions, segregation, scarcity of resources, hostile landscapes and environment, frontier settlements. The same issues can be found in two more recent books: Zoo City (2010) by Lauren Beukes, winner of the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke award, and Nineveh by Henrietta Rose-Innes (2011). Zoo City is set in an alternate Johannesburg where lawbreakers are “adorned” with common animals that are, in fact, the mark of criminals. Johannesburg is the zoological city that Beukes describes in her nearfuture urban fantasy. These animals attached to criminals are known as mashavi–the spirits of people whose descendants no longer remember their ancestors. Thus we read about various “animalled” people who bear some kind of moral guilt and acquire an animal which follows them everywhere as they behave in an increasingly paranormal way. Zoo City is the story of a young amaZulu woman, Zinzi December, who has received a sloth after accidentally killing her brother. The animal gives Zinzi a special gift, that of finding things: lost objects or people, secret passages, storm drains, or shortcuts to escape from difficult situations: “the tunnels are a scramble of pitch-black termite holes, some of them narrowing away to nothing […] the original gold diggings, maybe, when Johannesburg was still just a bunch of hairy prospectors scrabbling in the dirt.” (Beukes 2010, 212-213) The animal reflects personality characteristics, and acts both as a companion and as a “scarlet letter,” a social marker that differentiates Zinzi from the inhabitants of Johannesburg and places her in the urban ghetto of Zoo City. The ghetto is an underworld of lost passages and former mines where criminals strive to keep alive both the self and the animal-other. What is more, the non-

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criminal inhabitants of this alternate Johannesburg have completely isolated the “animalled” other: “they’re so cloistered in suburbia that they don’t get to see zoos (2010, 18), they build “gated communities fortified like privatized citadels” (2010, 97). The residents of suburbia are “colonial slumlords who would sit around divvying up diamond fields and deciding on the fate of empires” (2010, 42) and they refuse to see the Zoo until the moment they desperately need help. Zinzi only enters the Suburbs when a rich owner of a record label is looking for his missing celebrity who is refusing to work for him. Zoo City resembles District 9 as far as the main characters are concerned: both Zinzi and Wikus had a former life when people could live in a carefree way. However, they both transform when squatters or alien insects occupy the place and when attempts at relocating them are made by official authorities: there was big talk about comebacks and gentrification a few years ago, which led to months of eviction raids by the Red Ants, with their red helmets and sledgehammers and bullhorns […] But the squatters always found a way back in. We’re an enterprising bunch. (2010, 51)

Walls are built around the suburbs “not so much keeping the world out as keeping the festering middle-class paranoia in.” (2010, 97) District 9 and Zoo City also have a sympathetic side: aliens are shown in their homes playing with their babies, “animalled” people are seen taking “their animals out for fresh air or a friendly sniff of each other’s bums.” (2010, 132) Although alternate Johannesburg is surrounded by “ugly valleys […] gorged out and trucked away by the ton to sift out the last scraps of gold”, a “self-cannibalising place of gold,” (2010, 288) it is also a “dream city” that “is dreaming.” (2010, 316) The city of contrasts is part of a country of contrasts: “maybe it’s not peculiar to Hillbrow. Maybe it’s South Africa. You do what it takes, you take the opportunities. (2010, 346) As Elzette Steenkamp observes District 9 intersects in interesting ways with Beukes’s Zoo City, most notably in its representation of an alternate Johannesburg, its concern with the issue of xenophobia in South Africa, and its challenging of the kind of anthropocentricism which serves as justification for the human population’s continued dominion over our animal others. (Steenkamp 2011, 141)

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Nevertheless, there are differences between the transformation of the human into an alien insect in District 9 and the transformation of the criminal into an “animalled” being in Zoo City. The former is a longer process and aims at making humans understand the sufferings of others, whereas the latter is a quick and painless process: an animal (or insect) appears near the criminal and the two are bound together for life. In both cases, separation is impossible and unbearable. Cutting the “shavi” loose implies finding a substitute: If I could leave Sloth back I would. But the feedback loop of the separation anxiety is crippling. Crack cravings have nothing on being away from your animal. (Beukes 2010, 142)

The “animalled,” or “zoos,” are consumed by the Undertow, an inexplicable and deadly blackness that approaches the moment when their animals (mashavi) die. They said that the animals were the physical manifestation of our sin. […] They said everyone could be saved, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who has had their animal magically dematerialized […]. Not without the Undertow coming from them. (Beukes 2010, 62)

The “animalled” human that results after the arrival of the animal is called an “aposymbiot,” a postcolonial product that lives in the ghetto and bears the characteristics of a human being and of the spirits that created and brought the animal to life. It designates the return to nature and to the past in order to recover forgotten features and tradition: Apos aren’t human. It’s right there in the name. Zoos. Animalled. Aposymbiots. Whatever PC term is flavour of the week. As in not human. As in short for ‘apocalypse’. This is part of the stealth war on good citizens disguised as apo rights. […] Hell’s Undertow. Destruction of the detestable. God is merciful, but only to actual, genuine, REAL LIFE human beings. Apos are criminals They’re scum. They’re not even animals. They’re just things […]. (Beukes 2010, 76-77)

Another type of metamorphosis takes place in Henrietta Rose-Innes’s novel Nineveh, which borrows its name from an ancient Assyrian city. It is related more to the South African landscape than other speculative narratives, as it emphasises the specificity of the South African city and the vlei at its borders. Nineveh presents the tale of the city of Cape Town being invaded by a swarm of insects which cause chaos in the luxurious suburbs. Ticks,

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caterpillars and beetles play a part in the novel, as Katya Grubbs, the main character, runs a business which relocates pests: Painless Pest Relocations. In a 2012 online interview posted on ‘Africa Is a Country’ website, RoseInnes declares that “insects are a good metaphor for insidious, cumulative change: they are the small but numerous agents of chaos in the cracks and foundations of our solid-seeming reality, and they can eventually bring down a city.” (Rose-Innes 2012) In fact, the dystopian view of the city reflects the anxieties of the suburban white or black middle class that regard the city as an unstable, insecure and unsettling environment dominated by “the Other”, in this case a swarm of insects. However, not everyone finds this environment oppressive or frightening. For people like Katya and her father, who make a living from relocating or exterminating pests, it offers personal freedom, individual anonymity and peacefulness: She hesitates, trying to read the landscape. The beach is a public place, relatively safe, as is the walled compound behind her, but she’s not sure about the stretch of ground that lies in between. […] no litter or other signs of human habitation, no stands of alien wattle. The place seems pristine. (Rose-Innes 2011, 72)

In all her work, Rose-Innes is preoccupied with archaeology and the palimpsest city. She excavates layers of history, substance, interpretations of contemporary South Africa and Cape Town, and a sense of “downness” comes to the surface. “Depth, which the city conceals with its surface bustle” comes forth from obscurity” and the Suburbs are confronted with “a sudden vision of the deeps beneath the city, alive with a million worms, with buried things.” (Rose-Innes 2011, 29) These dystopian Suburbs reflecting the fears not only of a social group but also of a particular moment and location in history (post-Apartheid South Africa) are contrasted with the image of “the real city beyond: fullcolour, blurred, gigantic.” (2011, 39) Katya is the intruder (as are Zinzi December in Zoo City and Wikus van der Merwe in District 9) and she knows everything about hidden places and about creatures that stick on trespassers. The process of metamorphosis begins when she enters the area that has to be cleaned and ends when she returns to it, after having done her job, to see if Nineveh–the residential area–is inhabited. Although the insects seem to have left the place, Nineveh is full of squatters, selling car spares. Katya gives up the comfort and ease of “walls that would never crumble,” (2011, 206) considering Nineveh a grandiose and doomed dream. She now lives in her van, searching for

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The main female character of Nineveh is transformed by the places she discovers, by the numerous layers of Cape Town. Thus, she uncovers District Six “alive and then in ruins”, the dreary, empty “Victorian Cape Town”, the Cape Town that dates from the 1950s, with “streets populated entirely by white people–except for the picturesque flower-sellers,” and the contemporary city left with “so little of the original Cape Town.” (2011, 96) In fact the squatters use bricks, tin, wood, and scavenged scrap from Nineveh to build their houses around the residential area and tunnels under it. Katya enters the vlei with one of the Nineveh settlers as a guide, understanding that what she used to consider as pristine wetland is an “urban bush: utilised, compromised,” (2011, 107) with paths made for the natives to use. When she deciphers the labyrinth under Nineveh, “the cavity beneath the structure,” the “lower storey, an underneath that did not exist before,” (2011, 109) she feels disoriented. The real “pests” that populate the luxurious housing development are not insects but natives who know the vlei and who are at home in the wetlands just as much as the swarms of insects are on their own territory. Her journey through the underground tunnels marks her metamorphosis, as she comes to understand that she cannot relocate the ‘pests’ that have been living there for ages. “Perhaps it is the swamp itself that is the problem, one gigantic pestilential creature.” (2011, 118) She crawls like a bug to get the “pest’s eye view,” sniffing the “dank perfume of the underlayers of the earth.” (2011, 109) Her final encounter with the suburban area is also an encounter with its rightful inhabitants: insects and natives who are not a plague. She is running through the maze of a ruined city. A city emptied out by plague, sheathed in mud, scattered with the small, ruined bodies of its meanest inhabitants. Carapaces crunch under her feet as she runs. She can make out muddy human footprints, overlapped by paw prints in the muck. (Rose-Innes 2011, 185)

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The place that once seemed so stable is not at all. [...] And as the substance of Nineveh unravels, the swamp winds it up like yarn into a ball. Knitting new patterns, weaving Nineveh into the shacks and the city beyond. (RoseInnes 2011, 193)

All three pieces of speculative fiction analysed present a dystopian view of the post-Apartheid South African city (Johannesburg or Cape Town), and we can identify three categories of inhabitants: the middle class or upper-middle class destroying in order to (re)construct and develop either former slums or wetlands (the vlei); the intruders–the Other, seen either as pests that have to be relocated/ exterminated or as “animalled” Others who have to be put into confinement; and the “inbetweener,” a postcolonial human in close relation to nature, a product both of society and of the natural environment. The postcolonial human is represented in the the pieces of fiction discussed by the completely metamorphosed Wikus, the human being transformed into a giant insect, but preserving all the memories and skills from his life as a human; by the half metamorphosed Zinzi December, attached to her animal Other, manifesting paranormal powers; and by Katya Grubbs, metamorphosed only on a psychological level, who behaves like an insect and isolates herself from the human beings that might crush her, searching for her own kind. In conclusion, the postcolonial human is definitely returning to nature, drawing their energy from it and respecting its products in order to feel at home in an ever-changing environment. Helen Tiffin and Graham Huggan notice the “coming together of postcolonial and eco-environmental studies” (Tiffin and Huggan 2010, 2) as “environmental literature may well appeal to broader ecological systems and processes that animal literature rejects in favour of more specific human-animal interactions, while postcolonial literature is more likely to show the conflicts that arise when different forms of advocacy are brought together.” (2010, 14) Consequently, human and nonhuman (animal/ insect/ alien) communities transform and create bridges or break down older ones in order to construct newer forms of communication, intersection and cohabitation.

Conclusion In perspective, South African science/ speculative fiction will catch up with American and European science fiction, as South Africa has a rich tradition of the fantastic–either fantasy or magical realism. Moreover, SF literature emerging from Africa is avoiding “the trap of stereotyping others

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as immiserated, faceless, primitive masses. It neither sentimentalizes nor avoids the reality of racial and cultural differences.” (Byrne 2004, 525) Due to their past links with this ancient land, South African authors are likely to make use of everything related to tradition in their writing. The issue of the white writer conceiving black characters remains as sensitive as it was in Apartheid literature, as many authors writing in the other nine official languages (apart from English and Afrikaans) are not accessible to the wider public. Nevertheless, SF writers are still using South African reality when conceiving their stories, as Lauren Beukes makes clear in an interview posted on The World SF blog: I read books on Hillbrow, like Kgebetli Moele’s Room 207, watched documentaries and movies and turned to Twitter to get expert first-hand info on city details like storm drain entrances and good places to dump a body (!). I visited the Central Methodist Church where 4000 refugees were sheltering in the worst conditions that were the best possible option for them in that moment, got bounced from The Rand Club, paid for a consultation with a sangoma […] to make sure I was on track on the details before I twisted them to my fictional purposes. And I spent a week just walking round Hillbrow and talking to people. (Beukes 2011)

These South African speculative narratives explore the problem of identity, based on the former issues of racial and social segregation. The postcolonial human is strongly related to the animal within or to the “animalled” other, while there is a challenging of the blurred boundaries between self and the other. The question of identity formation is accompanied by a return to nature, ecology and environmentalism. Furthermore, “it has been suggested that South African speculative fiction presents a socio-historically situated, rhizomatic approach to ecology–one that is attuned to the tension between humanistic and ecological concerns.” (Steenkamp 2011, 189) Thus, issues such as racism, xenophobia, the banalisation of violence due to mass-media coverage, reconciliation with the violent past, the implications of economic and cultural globalization, unemployment, poverty, economic exile and migration, the struggle against illness (HIV/AIDS), sexual liberation, globalization and loss of cultural and national identity, displacement, and technological development are used in connection with the shifting notion of postcolonial human. Whether the human is to be renewed, even as humanism is discarded, must remain an open question in a postcolonial context: one which – for better or worse – has often expressly articulated both the centrality of human

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experience and a variety of humanist concerns. (Tiffin and Huggan 2010, 22)

Therefore, South African speculative narratives interpose themselves between the larger American SF discourse and the European SF tradition while accentuating differences that emerge from the South African context. Individualizing the others, acknowledging diversity, emphasizing variety and accepting heterogeneity maintains national cultures, encourages reconciliation and multiculturalism. As Kwame Anthony Appiah remarks, “since it is too late for us to escape each other, we might instead seek to turn to our advantage the mutual interdependencies history has thrust upon us.” (Appiah 1993, 72) Twenty-first century South Africa has more social and environmental issues than political ones to solve, more races and ethnicities to tolerate and integrate in this new postApartheid, postcolonial, multicultural, multiracial and ecological era. As a consequence, speculative fiction writers have preserved numerous topics from the Apartheid period, combining and connecting them with recent issues in order to provide an invigorating and original wave of South African writing.

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Caraivan, Luiza. 2013. “Re-Assembling the City in Ivan VladisODYLü¶V Novels.” Romanian Journal of English Studies. Volume 10 Issue 1:229–234, 10.2478/rjes-2013-0021. Accessed 02/20/ 2013. Chapman, Michael. 2008. “Postcolonialism A Literary Turn”. British and American Studies, vol. XIV, pp.7-19. Dimitriu, Ileana. 2006. ‘Postcolonialising Gordimer: The Ethics of ‘Beyond’ and Significant Peripheries in Recent Fiction’. English in Africa, 33 Issue 2:159-180. Available at: http://english.ukzn.ac.za/Files /cvid.pdf. Accessed 02/20/2013. Gordimer, Nadine. 1998. The House Gun. London: Bloomsbury. Heinlein, Robert. 1969. “Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults and Virtues.” In The Science Fiction Novel. Imagination and Social Criticism, edited by Basil Davenport. Chicago: Advent Publishers, pp.14-48. Hoagland, Ericka, and Reema Sarwal, eds. 2010. Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World. Essays on Postcolonial Literature and Film. Jefferson: McFarland. James, Edward. 1994. Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lotz, Sarah, Nick Wood and Tanya Barben. 2012. “2011 – South African Speculative Fiction Gathers Momentum.” Available at http://nickwood. frogwrite.co.nz/?p=794. Accessed 04/14/2013. Okorafor, Nnedi. 2009. “Is Africa ready for science fiction?” Available at http://nnedi.blogspot.ro/2009/08/is-africa-ready-for-science-fiction.html. Accessed 04/12/2013. Panshin, Alexei, and Cory Panshin. 1976. SF in Dimension: A Book of Explorations. Chicago: Advent Publishers. Rose-Innes, Henrietta. 2011. Nineveh. Cape Town: Umuzi. Sawyer, Andy. 2010. Foreword to Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World. Essays on Postcolonial Literature and Film, edited by Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal, 1-3. Jefferson: McFarland. Scholes, Robert. 1975. Structural Fabulation: Essay on Fiction of the Future. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Smith, Eric. 2012. *OREDOL]DWLRQ, Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction: New Maps of Hope. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Steenkamp, Elzette Lorna. 2011. “Identity, Belonging and Ecological Crisis in South African Speculative Fiction”, PhD. thesis, Rhodes University. Stobie, Cheryl. 2012. “Dystopian dreams from South Africa: Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland and Zoo City”. African Identities, Vol. 10 Issue 4, pp.367-380.

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The World SF Blog. 2011. “Lauren Beukes on Writing the Other”. Available at http://worldsf.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/guest-blog-laurenbeukes-on-writing-the-other/ Accessed 05/12/2013. Tiffin, Helen and Graham Huggan. 2010. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. New York: Routledge. Wood, Nick. 2009. South African Speculative Fiction over the Ages. Available at http://nickwood.frogwrite.co.nz/?p=598. Accessed 04/12/2013.

PART III THE FANTASTIC IMAGINATION ON FILM

CHAPTER SEVEN SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE MIDNIGHT: GOTHIC FANTASY IN TIM BURTON’S ALICE IN WONDERLAND DANIELA ROGOBETE Introduction The fantastic has always appealed to readers and has never stopped exercising a strange fascination due to its particular combination of reality and fantasy, the characters that populate these realms, the settings it uses and the moods it creates, and the recurrent arsenal of motifs, themes and elements it plays with: dreams, magic, monsters, supernatural occurrences and epic confrontations. Functioning according to a definite set of internal rules, fantasies oscillate between alternative worlds, real or magical, possible or impossible, and generate a permanent sense of wonder and suspension of disbelief. Suspending the critical sense of reality and surrendering wholeheartedly to the internal logic of these magic worlds also implies a total adherence to the constant substance of a fantastic reality, finely balanced between strangeness and familiarity. Over time, fantasy as a genre has been differently conceived, defined and imagined, according to the reality in which it is grounded or from which it departs. In the Encyclopedia of Fantasy John Clute defines fantasy as a “self-coherent narrative. When set in this world, it tells a story which is impossible in the world as we perceive it; when set in an otherworld, that otherworld will be impossible, though stories set there may be possible in its terms” (see online text). Confusions have frequently been made between fantasy stories and elements pertaining to the fantastic genre or to science fiction, and various theorists starting with Tzvetan Todorov, Eric Rabkin, Rosemary Jackson, Christine Brooke-Rose and many others have theorised the genre. The task was and continues to be an extremely difficult one, given that fantasy in various forms has been a

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constant presence in world literature since early times. Since it is very difficult to draw definite demarcation lines and come up with strict definitions, these attempts to theorize fantasy have largely been limited to the fantasy/reality opposition, though not even this simple dichotomy is unproblematic when one thinks about pre-eighteenth century literature and what was considered unrealistic back then. All the subgenres usually associated with fantasy share the same preference for magic and supernatural occurrences and rely to a greater or lesser degree upon medieval and folkloric inspiration in order to build alternate worlds that are not completely severed from reality but stem from it and make it more vividly significant, according to Egoff’s definition: Fantasy was used to illuminate (indeed to intensify) reality, not to disturb it; to propound a set of universal values, not to preach; to link the natural and the supernatural worlds without degrading either; these aspects of fantasy keep it close to its roots in myth, legend and folklore. (Egoff in McGillis 2003, 12)

By taking on allegorical, satirical, political, bleak or fairy-tale-like aspects, fantasy has split into a multitude of subgenres that cover an extremely wide range of topics and perspectives (epic, juvenile, light, dark, comic, gothic, high, romantic, sword and sorcery, animal fantasy, etc.). For a long time it was considered that the main purpose of fantasy was to effectively criticize the reality whose distorted or upside-down reflection it was supposed to represent, and to expose its flaws, while its remarkable capacity to engender self sufficient worlds which allow no possible escape into the present was disregarded. Farah Mendlesohn, one of the main theorists of fantasy, has devised four categories by considering the strategies through which fantasy is introduced into the narrative: the portal-quest (an entrance into the fantastic), the immersive (the fantastic becomes the only possible world with no possibility of escape), intrusion (the fantastic enters the fictional world) and the liminal (magic makes passage between the two worlds possible.) (Mendlesohn 2008, xiv) The enjoyable plunge into fantastic worlds has also represented a plunge into the recesses of the human soul and unuttered human desires or secret expectations. Very frequently assuming the form of quests, of extraordinary travels, of journeys of initiation, of passages from a state of “bondage”, of “thinness of goodness” and “recognition of wrongness” to metamorphosis, Eucatastrophe and final healing, (Clute and Grant 1999) literary fantasies not only focus on the unexpected outcomes of ontological quests but also provide a good opportunity for setting off on psychological quests that offer insights into the mechanisms of the human mind, of self-

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knowledge and self-assertion. Most of the protagonists of such fantastic travels generally try to make sense of the worlds they inhabit and the ones they are experiencing, to reconcile them and, most importantly, to “know” them. In the opinion of Eric S. Rabkin, this “problem of knowing” constitutes a definite feature of fantasy. Fantasy represents a basic mode of human knowing; its polar opposite is Reality. Reality is that collection of perspectives and expectations that we learn in order to survive in the here and now. But the here and now becomes tomorrow; a child grows, a culture develops, a person dreams. In every area of human thought, civilization has evolved a functioning reality but the universe has suffered no reality to maintain itself unchanged. The glory of man is that he is not bounded by reality. Man travels in fantastic worlds. (Rabkin 1976, 227)

Even if its origins may be placed roughly in the eighteenth century, the main ingredients of fantasy have existed from times immemorial, inspired by Norse mythology, old Germanic literature and folklore. Peter Beagle considers that there was a time when “all literature was fantasy”, when “story… was a means of keeping the inhabited dark at bay, and of making some kind of sense out of survival.” (2010, 9) Survival is a key element, since fantasy has always survived, continuously feeding on and evolving from medieval stories, Romantic romances, children’s literature and gothic narratives, in spite of its constant rejection as undeserving of the status of serious literature and the fact that it has generally been relegated to the fringes of literary genres as childish and escapist, lacking any serious intention or moral. One decisive factor in the survival of fantasy is its remarkable capacity to appeal to readers’ sense of wonder, to meet their expectations as a “fiction of consensual construction of belief,” (Mendlesohn 2008, xiii) and to devise strategies for turning the real into fantasy and particular techniques for introducing fantasy into narrative. Apart from the utilitarian explanations, the traditional psychological interpretations in terms of archetypes, apart from the political, dystopian allusions that Marxist or Historicist critics look for in these works, fantasies seem to have provided little other meaningful substance for critical research. Or at least this is what Ursula le Guin claims in her highly influential essay The Critics, the Monsters and the Fantasists, in which she criticizes the general tendency to underrate the genre of fantasy and the abysmal ignorance related to the history of fantasy shown up by the hugely popular and successful Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Rowling’s Harry Potter being reviewed as absolute novelties and totally original texts. She suggests an imaginative exercise that would allow us to

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read modernist texts as fantasies and fantasies as realist productions in order to discover the articulations they are built on and their essential differences. She envisages fantasy as “a construction of meaning,” with “a strong inner coherence” (Le Guin in Beagle 2010, 358) based on rules that are never broken, situated at the opposite pole from anthropocentrism. Le Guin emphasizes our vital need for fantasy as a means of counteracting a reality increasingly dominated by a “monstrous homogenization” that transforms it into a huge Mandelbrot fractal where the large and the small are the same and “the same leads always to the same again; there is no other; there is no escape, because there is nowhere else.” (2010, 365) Introducing an imaginary “somewhere else,” otherness and alternative strategies for envisaging the world is the solution offered by fantasy.

Where childhood dreams and nightmares intertwine Tim Burton appears to have wholeheartedly embraced fantasy as the main dimension of his cinematographic universe in which strange worlds and bizarre creatures that lie at the fringes of social acceptance or even for beyond it, all of them misfits that speak of a dark side of humanity in search of redemption, find their rightful place. The gothic atmosphere that prevails in Burton’s Alice is a recurrent element in the director’s filmography, while being by no means a new way of approaching Carroll’s text. A famous predecessor universally praised for his gloomy adaptation that combines live action and stop motion animation, Jan Švankmajer, felt the same need to focus upon the sombre side of the story instead of continuing a long tradition of joyful representations of Alice’s adventures. Unhappy with most previous adaptations, especially the by now classic 1951 Disney animated film, Burton decided to make a sequel by preserving the outline and the spirit of the story, starting from the ending of the first Alice book and constantly coming back to the world of the text in order to create an entirely new story. He thus continued his “mission” to “reclaim a children’s classic, resharpen its edges and remind everyone that sapping the weirdness out of a tale often renders it flat and forgettable.” (Boucher, Los Angeles Times 2008) “A lot of things you see as a child remain with you…you spend a lot of your life trying to recapture the experience.” (Woods 2002, 5) Tim Burton’s words go far towards explaining his lifelong and career-long preoccupation with revisiting children’s texts and suggesting new visual representations and unconventional interpretations. A lover of science fiction and horror films from an early age, Tim Burton confesses he has always found catharsis in gruesome stuff “when it’s not rooted in reality,”

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and he has worked upon this source of inspiration; he was drawing nightmarish worlds when still a young artist working for Disney Studios. While he was working as an animator his signature visual style and directorial vision started to be shaped by the strange combination of weird, expressionistic settings and fragile though disturbed characters. “Burton’s exuberant mix of slapstick horror and social satire” (Andac 2003) in Beetlejuice (1988), his dark adaptation of a comic series in Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992), followed by Edward Scissorhands (1990), a suburban gothic horror that turned out to epitomize an irresistible otherness, Ed Wood (1994) which celebrated his admiration for the “worst director of all times” with whom he shares a complete disregard for Hollywood conventions of story and character approach, the loose adaptation of one of Washington Irving’s short stories Sleepy Hollow (1999) and his sci-fi remake The Planet of the Apes (2001) have all contributed to his becoming firmly established as a unique producer and director. His work carries a visual symbolism that reminds one of the Expressionist and Impressionist masters and retains a similar emotional quality, so that his films “are not trying to assimilate reality but are highly symbolic and stylized in order to capture and convey the complexity of emotions within the narratives.” (Page 2009, 11) Painting, drawing and photography find their rightful places in his work and he has frequently been criticized for the fact that he sacrifices the coherent structure of the story and of his characters in favour of image and visual effects. He has repeatedly admitted that the visual symbolism of his films provides him with the best means of communication, which favours images over words. “In animation”–he says–“you could communicate through drawings and I was perfectly happy to communicate in that way and in any other way.” (2009, 14) “Like most kids I felt like a foreigner in my own neighbourhood and in my own country.” (Burton in Page 2009, 11) His tendency to identify with monsters, misfits, outcasts and awkward characters unable to properly express their emotions made him find something appealing in Alice, an iconic figure in children’s literature, although one who stands apart in the gallery of girl characters in Victorian fantasies, not to mention the eccentricity of her author. Alice continues to fascinate children as generation succeeds generation, just as her fantastic adventures in Wonderland persist in providing the pretext for new interpretations and reconsiderations and a source of inspiration for contemporary fantasies for children. Carroll created a subversive type of fantasy that managed to grasp something universally true about children’s amazing intellectual

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capacities; he provides an active meditation upon the world of childhood, along with a critical reassessment of Victorian children’s texts and of the image of the child they promoted. His works broke with set patterns of representation and intrigued their readers by creating an unconventional fictional realm where nonsense combines with exercises in logic and where parody shows up the rigidly didactic character of many children’s stories of the time. He offered instead a playful journey into the wonderful world of a child’s mind, “an enigmatic allegory,” (Bloom 2006, vii) an entertaining exercise of wit, humour, logic, deduction, memory and language games that can be enjoyed at any age, at different levels of understanding. As has been often remarked, Carroll’s merit lies in his capacity to create a children’s story which loses none of its charm when read by adults. “Since childhood remained in him entirely, he could do what no one else has ever been able to do”–Virginia Woolf states in her Essays–“he could return to that world, he could recreate it, so that we too become children again. It is for this reason that the two Alices are not books for children; they are the only books in which we become children.” (Woolf in Green 1971, xxii) The Alice books thus set out to recover the forgotten child inside each of us. Carroll himself tells us how to do this, how to read Alice’s adventures and make sense of her wondrous world: I will give you clearness of thought–the ability to see your way through a puzzle–the habit of arranging your ideas in an orderly and get-at-able form–and more valuable than all, the power to detect fallacies and to tear to pieces the flimsy illogical arguments […] Try it! That is all I ask of you. (Carroll 1977, 53)

Tim Burton shares the same delight in breaking with conventions, in engendering fallacies and then demolishing them, in creating selfsufficient worlds that function according to a combination of internal rules: in Carroll’s books, linguistic, textual, or logical ones that revolve around games of chess, croquet or cards, whereas in Burton’s film the rules are specific to the visual medium he uses. Though he never pretends to be adapting Carroll’s Alice, Burton’s sequel brings him closer to the spirit of the text than does the work of many of those who have tried to give a visual rendering of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland. When speaking during a press conference about his encounter with Alice in Wonderland, Tim Burton confessed: I’m from Burbank so we never heard about Alice in Wonderland except for the Disney cartoon, Tom Petty video, Jefferson Airplane. It was interesting

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He uses the same combination of fantasy and humour, playing with parody and cinematographic intertextuality in the same way as Carroll played with his contemporaries’ didactic poems for children, which he parodied, pastiched and reversed to produce a totally different effect. What critics generally recognize as Burton’s most important artistic qualities could also be applied to Carroll’s fictional universe. “A unique artistic sensibility, somehow both dark and mischievous, sinister and childlike” that could “in little more than a decade produce a love story about a man with blades for hands, a biography of a much derided director, a not exactly faithful adaptation of an American literary classic and a comedy in which the lead characters die within the first reel” (Smith & Matthews 2010, 4) could not have resisted the temptation to give life and voice to Carroll’s entire collection of animated objects and weird characters. Lewis Carroll belonged to a generation of authors who encouraged an active reading of their texts by introducing informational gaps, nonsense, parodies, double-meaning words, humour, ellipses, all in all pleading for a complex type of literature addressed to educated, acculturated children deeply integrated within their familial, social and cultural environment, thus blurring the boundary between adults and children. He treated children as collaborators, not only as narrators of the stories but also as active readers, engaged in the creation and the reception of these stories in which images of childhood acquired ambiguous outlines and the emphasis was placed upon the experience of reading and of activating their knowledge of other, previously-read texts. To a certain degree this is what Burton to achieves as he involves his viewers in following an already known yet unexpected story, in trying to find the answer to his recurrent question “Is this the right Alice?” and in deciphering and making sense of his dramatic visuals. The great merit of Victorian authors such as Carroll, Barrie and even Thackeray is that of having demolished the myth of childhood innocence being weakened and corrupted by knowledge, by suffusing their stories with cultural references that many of their contemporaries considered to be too difficult for children to understand. Their manner of portraying children, drawing attention to the “belated nature of the child’s subjectivity” (Gubar 1965, 6)–hinting at the fact that children grow up reading stories about them, written by adults and designed to shape their

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development while leaving them without a say in the matter–enhances children’s capacity to reshape these stories and assimilate them selfconsciously and selectively. The child-characters they create, boys and girls who experience fantastic adventures that finally help them define their identity and make sense of the world around them, become, in Gubar’s opinion, “artful dodgers” who skillully collaborate with adults in rewriting stories, thus dodging “the fate of functioning as passive parrots.” (1965, 6) Burton’s Alice is one such “artful dodger,” eschewing trodden paths and setting out to give new interpretations to a classic text. The streak of unconventionality and subversion that is characteristic both of Carroll and of Burton certainly appealed to the screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, who confessed that her greatest challenge was to find the right tone so as to honour the original work and to create something entirely new that might inspire young viewers to go back and read the book to discover the real Alice there (Boucher 2010). The fact that Carroll does not imagine his Wonderland and Alice’s ensuing adventures as an innocent, harmless experience gave Burton the opportunity to deploy his gothic paraphernalia. At the end of her adventures Alice is supposed to have learned something about herself, about the real world she inhabits and about the dangers lying ahead at every step both in the real and in the imaginary worlds. This dangerous aspect of the adventures, the gothic atmosphere and the possibility of visualizing impossible things are what Burton focuses upon in his film. He admits to being attracted by the cruelty inherent in any apparently innocent fairy tale. Because I never read, my fairy tales were probably those monster movies. To me they’re fairly similar. I mean, fairy tales are extremely violent and extremely symbolic and disturbing, probably even more so than Frankenstein and stuff like that, which are kind of mythic and perceived as fairy-tale like. But fairy-tale like the Grimms’ fairy tales, are probably closer to movies like The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, much rougher, harsher, full of bizarre symbolism. Growing up, I guess it was a reaction against a very puritanical, bureaucratic, fifties nuclear environment… That’s why I think I’ve always liked the idea of fairy tales or folk tales, because they’re symbolic of something else. There’s a foundation to them, but there’s more besides, they’re open to interpretation. I always liked that, seeing things and just having your own idea about them. So I think I didn’t like fairy tales specifically. I like the idea of them more.” (Burton & Salisbury 2006, 3)

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So many other curious things to think about… Although Carroll’s Alice has already received a multitude of contradictory interpretations, it will continue to engender “so many other curious things to think about.” (Carroll in Green 1971, 182) Tenniel’s illustrations for the first edition of the book fixed the visual characteristics of Alice and of her wonderful adventures in our minds forever. Critical analyses of Alice generally focus upon what Carolyn Sigler summarized as “the experience of growing up and the construction of agency and identity.” (Sigler 1997, xiv) These analyses have however led to opposite conclusions regarding Alice’s submission to or rebellion against male authority and the permanent dialectics of control and desire. Whereas modern critics such as Nina Auerbach (Alice in Wonderland: A curious Child, 1973) read Alice as a rebellious, inquisitive character eager to grow up and embrace adulthood, others, such as James Kincaid, prefer a sexualized reading, seeing Alice as an “eroticized Other” (Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture 1992) created either by a desexualized author or by a paedophile in disguise, an invader of Wonderland who finally betrays innocence (1973, 96). Psychological readings of childhood that emphasise the problems of “growing up absurd” (see Goodman 1960) are matched by other approaches (Knoepflemacher 1998) that try to link autobiographical details with Carroll’s treatment of childhood, either analysing his attempts to stop Alice’s maturing and his final defeat by an inevitable growing up, or perceiving the issue of maturation as characterized by “reciprocal aggression.” (Gubar 2009, 93124) If critical studies range between the extremes of making Alice either a passive, submissive Victorian girl confined in a wondrous yet absurd world populated by nonsensical creatures or an empowered heroine actively rejecting any type of control or authority, cinematographic adaptations have followed the same patterns of representation. One of the all-time favourite characters to figure in screen adaptations ever since the invention of the moving picture, Alice has featured in silent and talking films, musicals, ballets, animated films, pantomimes, re-adaptations of all kinds and mediums and, more recently, even soft porn productions, video games and gothic movies. Most Alice adaptations have tried to change the story to make it fit the public taste and follow a particular ideological view regarding children’s education. The majority opt either for a domesticated version of fantasy, full of didacticism, or for an exaggeratedly absurd fantasy where everything tends to push Alice back home, to the safety of her parents’ guidance. Instead of liberating the heroine from the

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constraints of realism, most of these adaptations have only reinforced her ties to the real world, emphasizing the importance of adult guidance and parental care through the prevailing feeling of loss, confusion and disorientation they attach to Wonderland, as seen, for example, in Disney’s 1951 animated film. Instead of encouraging children’s curiosity, imagination and desire to seek and discover, inspired by fantasy and particularly by Carroll’s books, Disney’s 1951 version censored curiosity as one of the worst flaws of childhood and repeatedly showed its tragic consequences by using some of Carroll’s famous parodic reformulations of children’s poems not to suggest the unappealing world of adulthood and the ensuing temptation to remain a child forever, but to scare Alice and make her want to leave the dangerous world of Wonderland. Instead of urging viewers to participate in the story, to empathize with Alice and become involved in her adventures, as Carroll had invited his young readers to take part in the creation of the story, Disney chose to provide them with an always external perspective, preventing them from fully identifying with Alice, detaching them from her adventures and disregarding the spirit of the original text, which relies heavily upon logic, language games and humour. This view is by no means shared by Tim Burton, who prefers to come back to the main problems Carroll tackled in Alice: the issue of identity and the metafictional turn represented in the overall relation of agency, control and desire exercised by the author over his character, suggested in Lewis Carroll’s story by his efforts to retain Alice in a world of perpetual childhood and by Alice’s gradual break with his authority and her wish to grow up. “Oh, Mister Dodgson, I wish you would write out Alice’s Adventures for me!” (Green 1971, xi) was the request that generated one of the most beloved children’s stories of all time. The events leading to the creation of Alice are a well-known story by now, as is Charles Dodgson’s fascination with little girls, whose wonderful world he constantly explored in his stories and photographs. The little excursion on the 4th of July for the amusement of Dean Liddell’s three young daughters, which inspired the fairy tale spontaneously told for their entertainment, is one such happy incident that changed forever the development of children’s literature. “I distinctly remember”–Dodgson confessed in his Diary–“how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line in fairy-lore, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards.” (Carroll in Green 1971, 234) A focus on narrativity and didacticism and an indictment of unbridled imagination seemed to have prevailed in Victorian books written for little

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girls. Taking their inspiration from the tradition of eighteenth-century didactic texts, girls’ stories adopted an ambiguous position towards fantasy and imagination, at times sharply criticizing the unhealthy tendency to indulge in fantasizing about impossible things that contradicted the duties of modesty, decorum and common sense, while at other times mildly encouraging female imagination. Carroll’s portrayals of girls contradict the stock features of the Victorian ideal angelic child, obstinately isolated in a world of inaccessible purity, by defying conventions and traditional gender roles, by boldly confronting his readers, teasing, playing, intriguing them and resisting their expectations. That is what Alice does too, by setting out on a personal quest in a fantastic world of absurd characters and surreal incidents. Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book’, thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’ So she was considering, in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly, a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her. (Carroll 1971, 9)

The reader’s first encounter with Alice offers a glimpse of the world of girlhood Carroll creates and of the relationship he establishes between author, character and reader. Alice’s tiredness could be an allusion to Carroll’s decision to subvert an entire tradition of children’s didactic stories, to reverse the traditionally passive roles assigned to girl characters and to reject the representations of the Child of Nature (slightly sleepy, stupid and interested in making daisy-chains). He focuses instead upon a “drawing-room child”, interested in books, pictures and conversations, in discovering the magic around her and questioning everything she encounters. Sensible, extremely curious and inquisitive, Alice stumbles upon or rather plunges into an enchanted though most of the time dangerous and threatening world. Trying to make sense of this world proves to be a difficult endeavour since it is defined by absurdity, nonsense and an apparent lack of rules, even though it centres upon various games (croquet and cards in the first Alice book and chess in the second). Alice’s inquisitive mind is confronted with a world where she is constantly in danger of being mistaken for somebody else, eaten up, beaten, executed, shrunk, blown up to an enormous size and constantly

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ordered around, verbally abused and offended. In this world that strangely fascinates her she is repeatedly called on to act as a mediator and a voice of reason, and to try to impose some meaning and order onto a nonsensical chaos. Adopting an unconventional perspective and preferring to continue rather than to adapt Alice, Burton’s 2010 film proposes a highly intertextual, conflict-ridden, gothic sequel that rediscusses many of the issues Carroll’s stories had focused upon and keeps within the consecrated conventions of fantasy, while blending elements of Victorian and contemporary fantasy. The fantastic wonderland of girlhood as imagined and represented by Burton, a master of horror fantasies, keeps alive the spirit of Carroll’s texts and becomes a battleground for self-affirmation, identity struggle and deviations from mainstream representations, from social and ideological conventions. The thorny question of the little girl’s isolation in an eternal childhood or her capacity to find self-fulfilment in full-grown womanhood, vividly debated by scores of literary critics who have analyzed Carroll’s Alice texts, is also tackled by Burton. He prefers to embrace his own vision, more akin to the perspective of the twenty-first century, by breaking not only with the traditional Romantic and Victorian representations of the Child of Nature, the Angel in the House, or the Eternally Innocent Child but also with many stereotypical representations introduced by twenty-first century children’s literature and fantasy. This can be seen even in the introductory shots of the film, which opens with the image of an impressive Victorian mansion entirely plunged in darkness except for a single lighted window. The opening scene is a hint of the gloomy perspective adopted by Burton’s film and of his unconventional approach to the events in the two Alice books. Instead of the traditional sisterly beginning and the feminine bonding emphasized by most adaptations as they major on Alice’s break with and necessary return to adult guidance and control, Burton focuses upon this lit window through which the viewer enters the house and chances upon a serious gathering where Alice’s father is expressing his visionary views and during which he utters what is to become the motto of the film: “The only way to achieve the impossible is to believe it is possible.” Alice’s first appearance seems to reproduce the time-honoured Alice looks and the image of her as an angelic fair-haired Victorian girl, in sharp contrast with the masculine, exclusivist world of adulthood. Up to this point and judging from the introductory scenes, Burton seems to be constructing Alice’s universe as the opposition of two mutually exclusive worlds–the patriarchal adult world and the innocent world of girlhood. However, he introduces a different perspective, as Alice’s father appears not only as a

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mediator between the two worlds but also as a role model who leaves a whole legacy of visionary dreams, creativity and sublime madness to his daughter. “Do you think I’m mad?” Alice asks her father. “All the best people are,” replies her father, introducing another leitmotif of the film, madness–which comes to be equated with courage, unconventionality, creativity and the refusal to submit to stereotypes and conventions, and which triggers a subsequent theme, the dream–a recurrent element in fantasies. Alice’s story centres upon a dream of a wondrous world where girls might discover some truths about themselves and the urge to grow up, about the dangers of womanhood and the inevitability of leaving the world of childhood. Burton’s film similarly revolves around dreams and the problematic area of growing up and entering adulthood. Alice’s re-entry into her childhood dream and saving of Wonderland, now a wild, chaotic realm under the tyrannical rule of the Red Queen, form the core of the film text. We are also given Alice’s maturation and her final victory over the Red Queen, as well as her decision to follow her heart, to revive and continue her father’s dream. The first Alice book ends with images of dull reality proper to adulthood, corresponding to the character of Alice’s sister, whose age places her somewhere on the verge between adolescence and maturity. The final question, as to how Alice will grow up, seems to be the jumpingoff point for Burton’s film. Lastly she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland long ago. (1971, 111)

Burton introduces his reader to an adolescent Alice (played by the Australian actress Mia Wasikowska) about to attend a surprise engagement party–a fancy, snobbish gathering whose particular features, though only slightly suggested, remind the viewer of the motley crowd in Alice’s Wonderland–without knowing that she is supposed to be the brideto-be. The Alice we know, who pays insufficient attention to her sister’s book and is reluctant to begin a boring girlish outdoor activity such as daisy-chain making, finds her counterpart in Burton’s Alice, a young woman who misses her father and finds it difficult to go along with her mother’s attempts to educate her as a proper Victorian young lady. Bold and outspoken, defying social convention by violating the dress code and

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thus committing the crime of offending the Victorian sense of decorum and decency, Alice flaunts her detachment and aloofness from Victorian society. She seems to be more at home in Wonderland than among her peers, who are far stranger than the absurd creatures of Carroll’s world. Reaching Wonderland after a more violent fall than the one depicted by Carroll, via what Mendlesohn has termed the portal-quest type of fantasy, Alice discovers a world she once knew in the vivid dreams of her childhood, now changed into a desolate Wasteland in need of a saviour who can end the capricious reign of the Red Queen and heal Wonderland by restoring it to its former glory. This turn of events and the epic confrontation at the end, though typical in a fantasy, seem far from the nonsense-based, unconventional fantasy Carroll had imagined. 19-year-old Alice chances to find herself inside the same dream she used to dream as a child, but this time there is no beautiful garden to be lured into, no innocent realm of childhood where she could stay forever, no colourful Wonderland. She is already an adolescent and the world of womanhood is just around the corner, with no possibility of escaping it. This scenario seems to fit the general postmodern concern in children’s literature with the “disappearance of childhood,” hence the sense of urgency and imminence conveyed by Burton’s film. The identity problem which is so important in Carroll’s books preserves its centrality in Burton’s film. In Carroll’s story Alice’s process of coming to know herself starts with a very hesitant sense of self–“I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” (Carroll 1971, 18) The disparate pieces of this puzzle are given by a sense of utter loss and loneliness in the absence of her family, by a strong social awareness that makes her define herself in negative terms, first establishing who she is not, and by a form of practical knowledge. This kind of knowledge is given by the “several nice little stories about children who had got burnt and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things” (1971, 13) that she had read at home and that provided her with “very good advice (though she very seldom followed it.)” (1971, 15) The shakiness of her sense of identity is also an effect of a totally unreliable memory that makes her doubt everything about herself and the world she discovers. Much of Alice’s knowledge comes from what she has been taught so far by family, educators and all the didactic texts she has read, and this becomes a form of impersonal knowledge she tries to apply in Wonderland in order to recover her identity. She soon discovers that this is not of much use here, that “I” can be a very different entity today

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from what it was yesterday and that her inner sensation that she is in fact two people may have a grain of truth in it. The identity issue takes on new dimensions in Burton’s film, since Alice is an adolescent, soon a bride-to-be, disenchanted with the world she lives in, tired of being treated as a doll, of constantly hovering on the verge of two worlds: a feminine universe whose absurd rules she cannot keep and that makes her feel alienated, and a masculine world that either shuts her out or shuts her up: “When in doubt, remain silent” is Hamish’s advice to an ironic, inquisitive Alice. Her plunge into Wonderland comes as a much-needed search for self-discovery and self-affirmation. The frequently repeated question “Who am I? / Who are you?” is now reduced to “Is she the right Alice?” a question that also acquires metafictional connotations in the context of so many adaptations of Alice. Is she Carroll’s Alice or just another sweet girl who resembles her? “How could I be the wrong Alice if this is my dream?” is her answer. Out of the well-known characters in Carroll’s books, Burton shows a particular preference for the Mad Hatter, who becomes Alice’s friend and ally, and for the Cheshire Cat, but he also introduces new characters and modifies existing ones. Starting from the need to give Alice’s return to Wonderland a stronger sense of narrative cohesion and a centre of gravity, which in Burton’s opinion were lacking in other cinema productions, and relying upon Carroll’s poem The Jabberwocky, the director reimagines part of the adventures in both Alice books from a different perspective by focusing upon intertextuality and rewriting. Carroll’s intertextual references, parodies and allusions find their visual counterpart in Burton’s film (there are obvious allusions to Steven Spielberg’s Hook, to Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia and the older :L]DUGRI2], and to a number of other modern productions for children and teenagers.) In his analysis of the phenomenon of children’s literature, with which fantasy is often associated, Seth Lerer spoke about a “medievalized child’s reading” (2008, 13) which originated in the tendency towards infantilizing medieval times that we find mainly in Renaissance and Enlightenment historians. Over time this has become an obvious preference for medieval romances and adventures, which have come to be included among the recurrent features of fantasy. In Lerer’s opinion the medieval period was and continues to be a source of inspiration for children’s books and fantasies, with a focus not only “on medieval content but on the imagined speech of medieval English men and women” meant “to coat their adventures with the patina of the exotic.” (2008, 13-14) This tendency has been extensively embraced by twentieth century writers such as C. S.

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Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Burton, too, alludes to this trend in children’s literature and its cinematographic adaptations by having Alice play the part of the rescuing Knight who redeems Wonderland and saves its ethereal, Gandalf-like White Queen. An adolescent now, Alice comes back to her childhood dream, but she is unwilling to become involved in anything that is going on there, decisively refusing to kill the Jabberwocky and become the Rescuing Knight of Wonderland. “You’ve lost your muchness” is the Mad Hatter’s reproach to Alice for her aloofness and reluctance to go beyond the position of a simple witness and passive mediator and take up the role of a more actively involved participant. This is perhaps Tim Burton’s way of engaging with and commenting upon his predecessors’ various adaptations of Alice, his manner of censoring their lack of consistency and their failed attempts to capture the spirit of Carroll’s stories. “Every other version”–he confesses in an interview with Gina McIntyre–“I’ve ever seen I’ve never really connected to because it’s always just a series of weird events. She [Alice] is passively wandering through, meeting this weird character, that weird character. It’s fine in the books but the movies always felt like there wasn’t anything underneath them.” (2009) His attempt consists in making “an engaging movie where you get some of the psychology and kind of bring a freshness but also keep the classic nature of Alice” but conferring upon it a centre of gravity. (Boucher 2008, Oct. 15) He considers that people’s familiarity with a story that had been retold and readapted in so many versions and clearly lodged “in the subconscious and in the culture” was an incentive to him rather than an obstacle. The fact that he did not like any other film version was something else that helped him not to feel pressured to “match or surpass anything.” (Rother 2010) The final result is a version of Alice that is “dark, surreal and comedic” according to Burton’s description, dark but “essentially benign.” (Rother 2010) Burton’s Alice breaks with a long line of predecessors when she decides to take control of the story and save Wonderland. “Lost my muchness, have I? […] I make the path”, she says, alluding to the similar episode in Disney’s 1951 version when Alice complains that she cannot find her way. This time she undertakes the mission of rescuing Wonderland and, implicitly, her dream.

Shining Knights and Damsels in Distress What made Alice’s adventures so enjoyable for Victorian children was the exquisite combination of humour, curiosity and the abolishing of rules. Humour is engendered by the impossible situations Alice is confronted

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with, by the discrepancy between her attempt to make sense of this world and its pervading nonsense and by the numerous instances of linguistic play. Curiosity, like many other elements in Carroll’s stories, works in two directions, propelling the story which is permanently generated by Alice’s inquisitiveness, characterized as “benign callousness” (Taliaferro and Olson in Davis 2010, 192), and at the same time fuelling the curiosity of its readers. It also functions as a “critical component of sanity, acting as a check against excessive sympathy and empathy or, in short, pathos” (2010, 188) which sometimes seemed to prevail in Victorian children’s literature. The lack of or the imposition of rules–another recurrent element in fantasy–in Alice’s Adventures is related to the way in which Carroll distributes power relations in a fluctuating proportion echoed by her frequent changes in physical size and by the relationships established at a metafictional level between the author and his rebellious character, who senses the control she is being subjected to and wants to break free (Alice’s reluctance to be a dream in somebody else’s dream, picturing herself instead as a fictional character in a book that ought to be written, or the two cases in which she subverts male fiction-writing authority–when she guides the King’s pen, and when she steals the Lizard’s pen during the trial). Curiosity and control (whether self-control or lack of it) seem to be two of the major ingredients of Alice’s adventures, governing her quest to assert her identity. Burton’s Alice is confronted by the same predicament, further complicated by the familial and social pressures and control exercised over her, and by the fact that she is now an adolescent who comes back to a childhood dream and is forced to leave it as an adult. She has to constantly prove herself and her identity in a world which is in fact the dream of a dreamt childhood dream that holds the old, familiar characters as well as new ones. In Carroll, Alice has to master the processes of rule proliferation–linguistic, logic-based, social, pragmatic, etiquette, card playing and chess–and of rule annihilation by means of self-control and logical thinking, whereas in Burton this process is reduced to dream proliferation. Gilles Deleuze has spoken of a “play of sense and nonsense” that reigns over Alice’s world, creating a paradox of sense visible in the combinations of “grids, codes and decodings” (1990, xiii) of the story where language becomes the element that “transcends the limits and restores them to the infinite equivalent of an unlimited becoming.” (1990, 3) With Burton the transcending linguistic element is replaced by the image, which brings a recognizable quality to his style that is “strongly visual, darkly comic and morbidly fixated, rooted just as much in his affection for monsters and misfits.” (Itzkoff 2012)

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George Dunn and Brian McDonald theorise Wonderland as a “sophistical” world characterized by a nonsensical manner of thinking (in Davis 2010, 61-77), where creatures of all sorts are only interested in defeating their interlocutors’ arguments in conversational battles and where madness–the general illness–seems to come from a general lack of proportions and from the impossibility of using logic. It all comes down to a competing melée futile arguments and contradictions, logical and pragmatic fallacies, linguistic tricks and allusions, assumptions and premises whose overall outcome is nonsense instead of truth. In this sophistical world Alice is granted the position of an inquisitive Socrates who maieutically dismantles fallacies and attempts to engender meaning. Carroll’s sophistical world retains its wit and its nonsensical quality in Burton’s film but its extraordinary features are reinforced by the visual dimension. Lush colours, pictorial settings, stunning visual effects work together in creating an unforgettable cinematographic Wonderland. In this endless interplay of jumbled memories, dreams and figments of imagination, in the constant competition between possible and impossible things–“So many out-of-the-way things had happened lately that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible” (1971, 13)–between tolerable and intolerable nonsense, riddles and arguments, logical fallacies and puns, Alice is required to make her way without getting lost. She is smart enough to end up victorious at the end of this “unlimited becoming,” with a very clear notion of what and who she is. The healing process Clute and Grant spoke about when defining the main elements of fantasy represents in Burton’s film the redemption of Wonderland, its restoration to its former magical beauty and Alice’s selfassertion as a young woman. The thorny issue of gender problems that exists in Carroll’s text, so painstakingly analyzed and interpreted from different perspectives, is somehow sidestepped in the animated version and in most earlier adaptations but comes back in an unexpected form in Burton’s film. Carroll’s much-discussed eccentricity, mainly deriving from his introverted temperament and his predilection for little girls, have often been the most important aspects taken into consideration in analyses of the gender issues in his texts. The authorial control exercised over Alice, against which she rebels at the end, has been interpreted as Carroll’s desire to confine Alice in a realm of perpetual childhood, thus clearly revealing his scorn of the adult world and of womanhood. For Carroll, girlhood is the realm of eternal bliss whereas womanhood acquires threatening aspects that are visible in the way in which he constructs his adult female characters: the Duchess, the Cook, the Red and White Queens.

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Although the majority of the adaptations produced in the 1950s were not particularly keen to discuss sexual or gender matters, the attempt to pass over these issues seemed to have had the opposite effect of promoting them. The Disney animation, for instance, puts forward a world of desexualized characters that finally turns into a masculine world. After leaving her sister in pursuit of the White Rabbit, Alice reaches Wonderland and becomes lost in a world of men. Every character she meets there seems to be male, except for a couple of flowers which are however just as aggressive and threatening (lily-tigers), by contrast with the daisies she was toying with while her sister was reading. Everything in Disney’s Wonderland seems to transmit the idea that Alice is out of place in this exclusively masculine world of nonsense. Disney’s Red Queen, the ultimate female character, is masculinized and transformed into someone ambiguous and frightening. Alice is driven out of this world and eagerly returns to the security of the female universe of her home. Her little domestic and feminized universe contains safe within its boundaries her sister, her cat and the innocuous flowers depicted in the introductory scenes. Gender roles are well established since the final message is that girls should not venture into forbidden territories of wild imagination but rather stick to a traditional femininity equated with childhood and a measure of infantilisation. Burton’s Red Queen (played by Helena Bonham Carter) is as frightening as the one imagined by Carroll due to her unpredictable mood changes and her constant need for flattery, but her appearance–a hydrocephalous head atop a tiny body, “with a lollipop-heart shaped hairdo, a motif reproduced in a horrid little lipstick pout” (Bradshaw 2010)–reveals her as a terrifying though dangerously sensual and sexy person, rendered vulnerable by her need for affection. While Disney prefers clear-cut gender distinctions, Burton turns out to be more nuanced and ambiguous in his approach. Unlike Carroll, who prefers to describe a desexualized innocence at a time when children’s literature was populated by girls and feminized boys, Burton chooses to resexualize Alice though transforming her into a warrior. If Carroll vilifies womanhood and Disney confines it within the boundaries of strict gender roles, Burton’s film seems to redeem womanhood as Alice finally tames the Bandersnatch, vanquishes the Jabberwocky and drinks its blood in a new rite of passage towards womanhood, emerging from Wonderland as a new, powerful person, self-possessed and with a will of her own. Rescuing her childhood dream also means rediscovering the little Alice inside her. The dénouement of Burton’s sequel takes an unexpected turn when Alice reemerges from her dream as an androgynous knight, a winner, ready to defend her dream, to make it come true and continue her father’s visionary

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aspirations. Her being accepted into the world of men, assuming an active part in her father’s affairs and setting off on a journey to China would have been a highly atypical ending for a Victorian girls’ story, even for a fantasy. The Carroll-Alice relationship–so nuanced and ambiguous in the original texts–seems to find its counterpart here in the close relationship between the Mad Hatter, one of Burton’s favourite characters in the film, and 19-year-old Alice. It is a relationship based on mutual help and admiration. The Hatter embodies the crazy visionary mind she admired most about her father. The identification Gardner makes in the first annotated Alice edition between Carroll and the hilariously ineffectual White Knight no longer operates here. The Mad Hatter, played by Johnny Depp, who creates yet another eccentric character, memorable for his gingery hair and strangely enlarged orange pupils (a literal representation of the phrase “mad as a hatter”, an allusion to the orange tint induced by poisoning by the mercury used in hat-making), comes close to becoming a Carroll-like figure. Carroll’s affection for Alice–both as the real Alice Liddell and as his character–is translated here into the Mad Hatter’s eternal longing for Alice. He gathers around him an entire panoply of resistance against the tyrannical Red Queen and becomes the prototype of the “right” kind of madness, which grants him an excuse to always denounce hypocrisy, shallow flattery, despotism and cowardice. His relationship with Alice is ambiguous in nature, ranging between parental, friendly, mentoring and sensual. The disappearance of the Hatter, together with the entire world of Wonderland, marks Alice’s coming back to the real world, where she finds the courage to refuse an imposed marriage and to embark on a voyage to China, where her father had planned to open a factory. The final redemption of womanhood that Burton’s film suggests in the end is itself ambiguous since it appears to promote a virginal image of womanhood symbolized by the White Queen and the victorious Alice/Savior Knight and to emphasize female empowerment, illustrated by Alice’s gradual transformation from a pawn on a chessboard into a powerful Warrior Queen.

Conclusion “He is an artist, a genius, an oddball, an insane, brilliant, brave, hysterically funny, loyal, nonconformist, honest friend” was Johnny Depp’s appreciation in his Foreword to Burton on Burton. “He is him and that is all” (2006, xii) and all his productions have an unmistakably recognizable quality, an “obvious gifted wizardry” (2006, x) consisting of

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a “hippy-trippy riot of glorious colour, amazing design and delightful imagination.” (2006, xx) Inspired by Alice’s wondrous adventures in a magic world of strange encounters, self-discovery and growing-up, Tim Burton’s sequel is a dark contemporary fantasy that rejects former interpretations of Alice as a passively submissive victim and gradually transforms her into a shining androgynous knight who rescues the enchanted world of Wonderland. In clear opposition to the Victorian traditional representations of the Child of Nature, the Angel in the House or the Eternally Innocent Child type of woman and to the twentieth century Cinderella complex that continues to bedevil a large part of fantasy teen literature and films, Burton seems to promote another type of adolescent better suited to his gothic universe: that of the Sensual Amazon, able to fight her own battles and follow her dreams. In Alice through the Looking Glass the White Queen speaks about six impossible things she imagines before breakfast. Burton’s film also speaks about impossible or almost impossible things in terms of revisiting Carroll: first of all, the unconceivable thing of altering Carroll’s story, criticized by many as a blasphemous transformation of a canonical text; the alteration of the traditionally imagined Wonderland, firmly fixed in our collective visual consciousness, and its transformation into a barren wasteland in need of redemption; stepping out of the visual horizon of expectation created by Tenniel’s illustrations and by a long tradition of cinematographic adaptations and introducing an adolescent Alice who, just like Absalom, the wise caterpillar, is metamorphosed from an uncertain girl into a Tolkien-like knight, and endowing her with a capacity for selfdiscovery, wisdom and power of transformation that are atypical in Victorian fantasies for girls. Jenny Woolf considers that “the books [Carroll’s texts] are a kind of Rorschach test, a screen onto which people projects their own ideas” (Rother 2010) and that is precisely what Burton’s film does, adding yet another shade to an already impressively patterned canonical “inkblot.” Whether Burton’s 2010 Alice is “the real Alice” among so many other cinematographic namesakes is a tricky question unlikely to ever find an answer, one of the six impossible things Burton makes us face before midnight, but the sure thing is that all the versions are merely steps in the “unlimited becoming” Deleuze was speaking about, which is definitely not going to stop here. In the meanwhile we can only join the Mad Hatter in his Fudderwacking dance and try to answer his riddle: “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” …

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Works cited Andac, Ben. 2003. Tim Burton. Senses of Cinema. Great Directors, Issue 25, March 21. Available at http:// sensesofcinema.com /2003/greatdirectors/burton/. Accessed 11/25/2012. Auerbach, Nina. 1973. “Alice in Wonderland: A Curious Child,” in Victorian Studies, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, September, 1973, pp. 31-47. Beagle, S. Peter (ed.). 2010. The Secret History of Fantasy. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications. Bloom, Harold (ed.). 2006. Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations– Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with an Introduction by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House. Boucher, Geoff. 2008. “Tim Burton Talks about Johnny Depp, Alice in Wonderland and The Dark Knight”, Los Angeles Times, 15th October, 2008. Available at http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2008/10/15/tim-burtontalk/. Accessed 02/27/2012. —. 2010. “Alice in Wonderland” screenwriter is ready for haters: It’s audacious what we’ve done.” Available at http://herocomplex.latimes. com/2010/02/08/wonderland-screenwriter-is-ready-for-haterswn-pathits-audacious-what-weve-done/. Accessed 02/27/2012. Bradshaw, Peter. 2010. “Alice in Wonderland–Tim Burton’s gothic treatment of Alice is all-too conventional,” in The Guardian, 4 March 2010. Available at http:// www.guardian.co.uk /film/2010/mar/04/alice -in-wonderland-review. Accessed 01 /17 / 2012. Burton, Tim, Mark Salisbury. (1995) 2006. Burton on Burton. Second Revised Edition. London: Faber and Faber. Burton, Tim, Paul A. Woods (ed.). 2002. Tim Burton: A Child’s Garden of Nightmares. London: Plexus. Carroll, Lewis. 1971. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Through the Looking Glass, in Roger Green (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 1977 [1896.] Symbolic Logic. New York: Clarkson & Potter. —. 1960. The Annotated Alice–The Definitive Edition, Introduction and notes by Martin Gardner. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Clute, John, John Grant. (1997). 1999 (online edition). Encyclopedia of Fantasy. Available at http: //sf-encyclopedia.co.uk/fe.php?id=0&nm= introduction_to_the_online_text. Accessed 12/20/2012. Davis, Richard Brian (ed.), William Irwin (series editor). 2010. Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series: Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy–Curiouser and Curiouser. New Jersey, Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.

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Deleuze, Gilles. (1969) 1990. The Logic of Sense, translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, in Constantin V. Boundas (ed.). London: The Athlone Press. Dunn, George A., Brian McDonald. 2010. “Six Impossible Things before Breakfast,” in Richard Brian Davis (ed.), William Irwin (series editor). Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series: Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy–Curiouser and Curiouser, New Jersey, Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 61-77. Egoff, A. Sheila. 2003. “A Tale of Three Tenses”, in Roderick McGillis (ed.). Children’s Literature and the Fin de Siècle. Westport, Connecticut, London: Praeger. Goodman, Paul. 1960. Growing Up Absurd. New York: Random House. Gubar, Mahar. 1965. Artful Dodgers–Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Itzkoff, Dave. 2012. “Tim Burton at Home in His Own Head” in New York Times, Sept. 09. Available at http://nytimes.com/2012/09/23/movies/ tim-burton-at-home-in-his-own-head.html?pagewanted. Accessed 12/20/2012. Kincaid, James. 1973. Alice’s Invasion in Wonderland, PMLA, 88, No. 1, (January), 1973, p. 92-99. —. 1992. Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture. New York: Routledge. Knoepflemacher, U. C. 1998. Ventures into Childhood: Victorians, Fairy Tales and Femininity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Le Guin, Ursula. 2010. “The Critics, The Monsters and the Fantasists”, in Peter S. Beagle (ed.). The Secret History of Fantasy. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, pp. 355-365. Lerer, Seth. 2008. Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. McGillis, Roderick (ed.). 2003. Children’s Literature and the Fin de Siècle. Westport, Connecticut, London: Praeger. McIntyre, Gina. 2009. “Tim Burton on past ‘Alice’ films: ‘There wasn’t anything underneath them,’” in Los Angeles Times, 26 July, 2009. Available at http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2009/07/26/tim-burton-on -dark-shadows-alice-in-wonderland-and-9-part-two/. Accessed 02/14/2012. Mendlesohn, Farah. 2008. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

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Murray, Rebecca. 2010. Director Tim Burton Talks About “Alice in Wonderland”. Available at http: //movies.about.com/od/aliceinwonder land/a/tim-burton-alice.htm. Accessed 02/14/2012. Page, Edwin. (2007) 2009. Gothic Fantasy: The Films of Tim Burton. London: Marion Boyars Publishers. Rabkin, Eric. S. 1976. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rother, Larry. 2010. “Drinking Blood: New Wonders of Alice’s World,” in New York Times, 26 February, 2010. Available at http://www. nytimes.com/2010/02/28/movies/28alice.html?_r=1&ref=timburton. Accessed 02/14/2012. Sigler, Carolyn (ed.). 1997. Alternative Alices–Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Smith, Jim, Clive Matthews. 2010. Tim Burton. New York: Virgin Books. Taliaferro, Charles, Elizabeth Olson. 2010. “Serious Nonsense”, in Richard Brian Davis (ed.), William Irwin (series editor). Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series: Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy–Curiouser and Curiouser. New Jersey, Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 183-196.

Films cited Alice in Wonderland. Directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske. Producer Walt Disney. Walt Disney Production Studios. 1951. Animated film. Alice. Directed and written by Jan Švankmajer. Produced by PeterChristian Fueter. Condor Films & Channel Four Films. 1988. Fantasy thriller film. Alice in Wonderland. Directed by Tim Burton. Produced by Richard D. Zanuck, Joe Roth, Suzanne Todd, Jennifer Todd. Tim Burton Productions & The Zanuck Company. Distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. 2010. Fantasy 3D film.

CHAPTER EIGHT SON, LOVER AND SCAPEGOAT: THE PROGRESSION OF HORROR IN TIM BURTON’S EDWARD SCISSORHANDS ADRIANA RĂ'8&$18 Introduction Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus has spawned a fair number of literary and cinematic offspring over the years. One of the most recent and significant of these is Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990), a film which has fuelled multiple debates among aficionados and critics of various backgrounds, due to its elusive, slippery features. These are best recognized in terms of the film’s simultaneous affiliations to a variety of genres, a fact which consequently inspires multiple interpretations. To be more specific, when discussing Edward Scissorhands, critics generally record an affinity to fairy tale, science fiction, and Gothic romance. As already implied, all these affiliations are problematic and partial, since none of them actually offers an exhaustive reading of the cinematic substance. Nevertheless, the avatars of orphaned son, unfortunate lover and dejected scapegoat embodied by Tim Burton’s “dark hero” can be encountered in all the three genres mentioned above, albeit in different disguises. Moreover, the feeling of “horror” which accompanies our witnessing the tribulations of such avatars is also a feature common to the psychological impact of fairy tale, science fiction, and Gothic romance. With these observations in mind, the present study will focus on a detailed analysis of the protagonist, as well as on his uncanny resemblance to the person of Tim Burton, one of Hollywood’s most tormented as well as most creative directors. Journalists, acquaintances and even friends often feel hard-pressed when it comes to finding the right word to describe Tim Burton. This Hollywood director always escapes his admirers’ (and his detractors’)

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attempts to categorize both the person and his achievements. His physical appearance, to start with, is symbolic of “a sweet grotesque,” assuming that such an aesthetic and psychological category can be conceived of: black, unruly curls, too-big clothes which threaten to overpower the wearer instead of offering protection and comfort, heavy-rimmed sunglasses to hide far-too-piercing eyes, and hands that seem to be always moving, always on the lookout for what words fail to express. If Burton’s physical persona confuses and frustrates, his beliefs, his visions, the psychological contours of his imagination at times terrify. There is a strange process that commenced in his childhood and has continued ever since: Burton’s acquaintance with evil as the direct result of an early life spent in loneliness and isolation. As mentioned by one of his reviewers, Simon Garfield: “Burton knows scary, knows evil. You can bet he knows ghoulish. Why, he confronts these demons every time he peers in the mirror.” (2002, 34) At the time when those his age were forming more or less enduring friendships, intermediated by the usual games of childhood, Burton was exploring the world of fantasy and horror: sometimes the visual, the bloody, the obvious one (as embodied by the great masters of the horror genre, such as Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff and Vincent Price), at other times the more poignant one which dwells in the deepest recesses of the mind and would later constitute the reservoir for his own oeuvre (as a director, and as a writer of short stories and poems.)

The movie Edward Scissorhands is the film that constituted an introduction to the world of fame for two very major Hollywood stars: the director himself, and Johnny Depp, the actor who played the leading role and whose extraordinary talent had not up to then been acknowledged by A-series directors. It was the actor who first “noticed” the uncanny similarity between Tim Burton and Edward, his “screen son:” The hands–the way he waves them around in the air almost uncontrollably, nervously tapping on the table, stilted speech (a trait we both share), eyes wide and glaring out of nowhere, curious, eyes that have seen much but still devour all. This hypersensitive man is Edward Scissorhands. (Burton 2006, x)

The 1990 film is myth revisited, or rather Gothic novel revisited, since the similarities between Burton’s work and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus are too obvious to be disregarded. Edward Scissorhands, like Frankenstein’s monster, is an artificial creation of a

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human “father”, a mad yet benign scientist, who lives in a mansion which reproduces the Gothic castles of distant lands, although it is located close to an ordinary American suburb. Like his predecessor, Frankenstein’s monster, Edward is a far from perfect creation; he is not “finished,” and neither physically nor psychologically does he come close to being an ordinary individual. For some peculiar reason that we never learn, instead of hands his creator has equipped him with scissors, and instead of being taught how to function in the real world and communicate with other people, he is taught obsolete, yet charming table manners, rules of courtesy and poetry. Edward’s strange destiny almost takes a turn for the better when as a Christmas gift his creator presents him with rubber hands to replace his menacing-looking scissor ones. However, the Inventor’s heart attack causes Edward to tear these soft material hands into pieces in panic, so that he is now left to live by himself in the huge mansion, an orphan and a freak completely isolated from the outside world. He is accidentally found by Peg, the Avon saleslady, who takes pity on his loneliness and takes him to live in the house she shares with her husband and children. While living with the Boggses, Edward occupies himself with topiary (as he had always done, in the garden of his lonely mansion) and with cutting the hair of the entire local female community. He also falls in love with the Boggses’ daughter, and after a while his love is reciprocated. Happiness, though, is not Edward’s destiny; in a fight with the girl’s previous suitor while trying to protect her, he ends up becoming a murderer. This also marks the end of his suburban existence and his final return to his Gothic castle, away from the “normality” of ordinary people. As Burton himself confesses, Edward as an atypical hero is the artistic equivalent of his own sense of isolation and alienation when confronted with the harsh realities of growing up in American suburbia: The idea actually came from a drawing I did a long time ago. It was just an image that I liked. It came subconsciously linked to a character who wants to touch but can’t, who was both creative and destructive–those sort of contradictions can create a kind of ambivalence. It was very much linked to a feeling. The manifestation of the image made itself apparent and probably came to the surface when I was a teenager, because it is a very teenage thing. It had to do with relationships. I just felt I couldn’t communicate. It was the feeling that your image and how people perceive you are at odds with what’s inside you, which is a fairly common feeling. I think a lot of people feel that way to some degree, because it is frustrating and sad to feel a certain way but for it not to come through. So the idea had to do with image and perception. (Burton 2006, 87)

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Burton’s source of inspiration, the drawing linked to “a character, who wants to touch, but can’t” bears uncanny similarities to Walpole’s dream, his source of inspiration for the Gothic romance The Castle of Otranto: Shall I even confess to you what was the origin of this romance? I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head like mine filled with Gothic story and that on the uppermost banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour... (Walpole 1963, xi)

Both Walpole and Burton, therefore, place the metal hand/s at the centre of their artistic endeavour; in their works, the hand seems to communicate the horror of future events, through its mere size, the material that it is made of, and its appearing as either different to or detached from the rest of the body. However, in both the Gothic romance and the Hollywood film, the hand only appears to contain the terror and generate it, but the real locus of its expression lies outside it and is embodied by other characters. In Burton’s film, the horror of human existence plagued by the reality of its inevitable end originates with Edward’s creator, the seemingly benevolent father, who is the first to wrong his son, albeit not by choice. As noted by Vasileva: By actually having a heart attack, the Inventor undermined his status as an omnipotent, magnificent god. Even he, the most perfect of Burton’s cinematic fathers, betrays and abandons his creation, if only in the most exceptional of circumstances. Thus, Edward has come to grips with his father’s humanity and mortality. By being imperfect and by dying, the Inventor causes distress to his son who also inherits his father’s divine imperfection. (2008, 91-2)

Edward Scissorhands is not the only film of Tim Burton’s which draws on the complex relationship between father and son. The situation of the little boy Oliver in Frankenweenie (1984), Willie Wonka’s dictatorial parent, and Penguin’s insensitive father are all examples of irresponsible parents who are the main cause of their sons’ lifelong misery and who, either by choice or by fate, are unable to take care of their offspring (Vasileva 2008, 89). Bad parenting is also a fairy-tale and Gothic novel theme, from Cinderella, Snow White, or Hansel and Gretel to The Castle of Otranto and Frankenstein. Bad parenting, therefore, is the instrument of the child’s early exposure to trauma, betrayal, loss and ultimately the horror of life and death.

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The framework of Edward Scissorhands suggests that the horror of life followed by the implacability of death, the best-known and darkest secrets of human existence, can be temporarily held at bay by scientific endeavour; thus, science may bestow the gift of permanence and usefulness, freeing the individual from obsessive concern with his own frailty. Edward’s human father is, as previously mentioned, a scientist, a recluse who dedicates his life to producing machines. These are harmlesslooking machines, most of them household appliances of various kinds. Interestingly, all the Inventor’s previous inventions–such as the cookiemaking assembly line–appear not to accomplish anything of significance, in that they all “do less well something which could be done far more easily by hand.” (Potter 1996, 2) This is the “scientific” environment in which Edward sees the light of day and that will mark his destiny, that of a “consummate machine” who, because he lacks hands, “does everything less well, except cutting.” (Potter 1996, 2) Hence, a careful consideration of the question of science in Burton’s film is in order at this point. What place does science occupy in Edward Scissorhands? To what extent can this cinematic endeavour be said to draw on science, so that the film may be regarded as belonging to the genre of science fiction? Would it be more constructive for the interpretational exercise to concentrate more on the blurring of boundaries between science fiction as a genre and two other closely-related genres, the Gothic and the fairy tale? In her analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go and its affiliations to various genres, Gabrielle Griffin points to three key elements that make up a scientific basis for the assessment of a literary text. They are: First, the accuracy in the depiction of the state of scientific knowledge at the time of the production of the novel; secondly, the presentation of actual scientific intervention, the actualization in fiction of a scientifically plausible scenario, and thirdly the use of scientific, “expert” vocabulary. (2009, 648)

These three characteristics form what Griffin calls “acute science” as opposed to “science as effect” or “mediated science” “in that they drive towards and aspire to a mimetic relation to science as a particular epistemic field and practice.” (2009, 648) Reading science and/or science fiction in Edward Scissorhands through this particular lens demonstrates the loose affiliations of the film to the genre of science fiction considered in its rigid orthodoxy. Rather, in Burton’s film, to use Griffin’s words again, science is used as “mediation,” as “symbolic form,” as “a process of

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transformation that removes science from its lamination to procedure and shifts it into the realm of implication and effect.” (2009, 660) Thus the purely science fiction aspect of the film, or the aspect of science gone wrong, is downplayed and replaced with “implication and effect”. Such effects and implications are centred on the demands of the plot-construction as well as the characters; they thus help to articulate complex psychological profiles of some of the characters, who experience a maelstrom of strong emotions. In this way Gothic and fairy-tale take centre stage and displace science fiction, although this process is achieved in a subtle manner, since the origins of science fiction and of Gothic are barely distinguishable. Brantlinger, in The Gothic Origins of ScienceFiction (1980), claims that these two genres frequently cross boundaries; arguably the same can be said about fairy-tale as a genre. All three genres rely heavily on the replacement of realism with anti-realism, or the realism of human emotions. They are also frequently vehicles for authorial concerns and fears (see the Gothic author Shelley’s obsession with motherhood and dead mother figures, and Burton’s concern with the freak, the monstrous), and, as previously argued, they emphasize the problematic relationship between father and son. Brantlinger, in noticing the similarities between Gothic romances and science fiction, claims that: “Science-fiction is thus really anti-science fiction, a form of apocalyptic fantasy, verging on religious myth.” (1980, 31) He refers mainly to the fact that “the conventions of both Gothic and science-fiction involve a rejection or a symbolic putting to sleep of reason; they are both forms of apocalyptic nightmare fantasy characterized by themes of demonic possession and monstrous distortion”, they both focus on the idea that “reason taken to extremes ‘produces monsters’”, either in “the form of revolutionary or religious fanaticism” (in Gothic romances) or “in the form of science itself and of its chief manifestation, technology” (in science fiction) (1980, 31). In Edward Scissorhands the “apocalyptic nightmare fantasy” and the feelings of horror that accompany it are not contained and inspired by the figure of the protagonist (notwithstanding his Frankensteinian birth) but are rather the basic features of human life, as embodied by his Inventor father and the inhabitants of American suburbia, which, despite its benign appearance, is the site of profound psychological disturbances, despair, boredom, and personal terror and isolation. Burbank, Los Angeles, California, the suburb where Tim Burton grew up, was a symbol of mainstream America during the 1950s and 1960s, often remembered as “the Eisenhower era world of mass conformity with its standardized houses and lockstep mentality,” where “all were expected to do and believe and behave the same way.” (Hanke 1999, 26) However,

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although the suburbia that the film features has a correspondent in the nottoo-remote American past, chronology is less than accurate in Burton’s cinematic achievement: (...) commodities, like the clip-art cutouts of postmodern collages (...) 90s appliances, such as CD players, exist side-by-side with 50s fixtures such as boomerang tables and lava lamps, the parents are from 60s sitcoms but the kids are from 21 Jump Street. The cars—at least those we see up-close— are of early-70s vintage, as are the houses seen in exterior shots. Yet even here, the pastel coloration—one might even say, colorization—of those houses refuses a simple mimesis (...) these houses are in effect coloringbook reproductions whose hyperveracity gives the lie to realism. The final effect is a kind of timeless time, a place without chronology or geography – in short, the suburbs as seen by those whose lives remained somehow untransgressed by history.” (Potter 1996, 8)

This “timeless time” unencumbered by geography or history makes the dreadfulness of Burton’s world all the more poignant. Thus, the initial shock that the audience experiences when confronted with the horrible truth of Edward’s birth–his being assembled, made up of disparate parts (like Frankenstein’s unnamed monster)–pales in comparison with the domestic horror composed by the secrets, the frustrations, and the broken dreams of the apparently “normal” suburban residents. With the intervention of Peg, who tries to smooth away Edward’s self-inflicted scars, we are right to presume that the Gothic loneliness and alienation experienced by the protagonist in his mansion will be cured by his becoming part of a social structure. We may also assume that the horrific immediacy of the episode in which the son saw his father die will be erased by the care and kindness of a substitute family. Nevertheless, the peace, the care and the loving atmosphere that appear to be the characteristics of Edward’s new life are deceptive and do not express the essence of life in the suburbs, which is shot through with hatred and selfhatred. In Edward’s new world, all the characters are daily experiencing a double alienation–from others and from self. The women in the neighbourhood are today’s “desperate housewives” who pour their frustration into an endless game of competing with each other for less than probable sexual favours, almost never granted by equally bored men. The teenagers are trapped in a war of the generations with their parents and oscillate between problematic role-models which mainly involve the figure of the rebel, yet are ironically and pathetically paralyzed by the thought of an open confrontation with their fathers. The men obsess about economic achievements but prefer to turn a blind eye to the engulfing unhappiness that is the quintessence of their family life.

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Yet all these deep suburban scars are begotten and continue to fester in neat, pastel-painted houses. The soothing atmosphere rendered via this Wendy-house colouring may be read as an unconscious attempt on the part of the inhabitants to aestheticize and/or alleviate personal pain and suffering. Edward’s arrival and his obvious ‘condition’ paradoxically reinforce the said attempt, which explains why he is initially welcomed and becomes the centre of affection/attention. His being scarred is obvious, as his being different is all too visible. That being so, Edward’s presence is almost cathartic for a while, as it helps to divert attention from the suburban characters’ better disguised but perhaps deeper wounds. However, as Potter observes: Edward’s secrets–that no amount of make-up will cover our scars, that the libido has nothing to do with families and everything to do with society at large (economics, houses, hedges, malls, talkshows, food), that our sanity has been purchased as the result of a kind of extortion or holding-hostage of our bodies–are in the end too much to bear. (1996, 6)

The “holding-hostage” of our bodies that Potter mentions can also be read as body being held hostage by the implacable laws of suburbia which sustain and encourage couples formed of neighbours, of those who are (or seem) alike. When Edward falls in love with Kim, the daughter of his adoptive family, and when this love is reciprocated, the body-bondage suburban dictate is under threat. At this particular moment, marked by the possibility of the future consummation of love resulting in the birth of children of Edward, the Other, the stranger, the monstrous entity, and Kim, the suburban girl, the Gothic and fairy-tale characteristics of the film become very obvious. Edward thus shares similarities with Frankenstein’s monster who clamours for a mate, with the vampire Dracula who lusts after Mina, but also with the Beast who finally finds his Beauty. However, the audience’s fairy-tale expectations are thwarted, as Edward Scissorhands does not provide us with a happy ending and the Lover’s role that Edward only briefly interprets actually signifies a further exploration of horror. When he accidentally inflicts a shallow wound on Kim’s hand, he becomes painfully aware of the dormant dreadfulness at the heart of yet another profoundly human experience, Love. In one scene when the whole neighbourhood is out looking for Edward on a lynching campaign, we see him alone with Kim in the house. When Kim asks him to hold her he replies: “I can’t!” He has already learnt that love, like life and death, cannot be conceived of outside the circle of suffering, physical as well as psychological. At that moment both of them (and we, the audience) understand that such a pure heart is not destined to survive

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among people and that it is not his scissor hands but his loving heart which condemns him to solitude. Thus his short-lived experience as a Lover is tainted by images of the crowd who by the end of the film fall under the murderous spell of communal rage directed at the “monster” who is now perceived as a potential murderer and a rapist (of Joyce, the bored housewife who had tried to seduce Edward and failed) As Potter argues, such powerful scenes in Burton’s work are reminiscent of the filmic Frankenstein: And, as the inheritor of that tradition, Edward is driven to re-enact–albeit with many suggestive differences–the inexorable expulsion and persecution of the monstrous. The scene is so familiar as to be a cliché; all one needs is a few dozen “peasants” armed with torches storming the door of some castle. Yet Burton’s film displaces that cliché by rendering ambiguous any comfortable distances of time, place or social class–in the process indicting the very audiences most likely to view this film. Indeed, by taking Edward out of the mansion and into the suburbs Burton re-enacts the history of the Gothic; “Mrs. Radcliffe” (of Udolpho) moves in next door to “Mrs. Smith” (of Mrs. Smith’s Pies), and it turns out they have known each other all along. (1996, 7)

The scenes which present the mob bent on killing Edward are mirrored by those that communicate his own rage and violence. Once he is put in the position of being hunted down and realizes that he is forever estranged from the same neighbours who had showered him with love and compassion and had appeared to have unconditionally adopted him, Edward starts destroying objects. Thus he vents his fury against one of the tree sculptures which he had so lovingly created (significantly, he chops its leg off) and slashes the tyre of a car in the neighbourhood. Although as an audience we sympathize with his plight and find justifications for his anger, we become aware of the fact that the Frankenstein pattern (as made visible in Burton’s film) does not only relate to Gothic as a genre, and that Mary Shelley’s work is also the first science fiction novel (Aldiss 1976, 20-31). Moreover, we also acknowledge that “the science-fiction film...is concerned with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, making a mess” and that “it is in the imagery of destruction that the core of a good science fiction lies.” (Sontag 1969, 215) Most importantly, in the scenes where Edward acts in a destructive frenzy whose end we cannot foresee, we are reminded that “even optimistic science fiction” (Edward’s creator is a benevolent eccentric, not a mad scientist bent on taking over the world) “is still about the monstrous or the demonic, and about at least the threat of social or cosmic disaster.” (Brantlinger 1980, 35) Nevertheless, in spite of the common roots of the

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two genres, the Gothic romance dwells on “the scale of disaster” “which “tends to be individual and inward, while it is external, social, often cosmic in science fiction.” (Brantlinger 1980, 35) Although Edward causes a suburban mini-disaster, he does not metamorphose into a killing monster on the rampage, nor does he go after his neighbours and hack them in pieces one after the other. Thus, the horror is contained, “individual and inward,” it is Edward’s and Edward’s alone. Significantly, Edward destroys his own creation and the tyres of a car; these particular objects symbolize what makes him different and unacceptable to the community. The piece of topiary is the effect of an unusual talent which, given that he has now fallen from favour, he comes to perceive as a stigma; the car is a signifier for the sameness of the suburban residents, which will forever mark him out as the Other, the Intruder, and ultimately the one who needs to be expelled. His one and only murder, of Jim, Kim’s jealous boyfriend, is paradoxically what makes him fully human since it is both an act of self-defence and one that stems from his fury at having seen his beloved hurt by Jim. The film ends on a note of uncertainty and leaves us wrapped in a sweet sadness. We are left to assume that Edward goes on living in his Gothic castle and leading a lonely but creative life, surrounded by his various sculptures. A now-elderly Kim tells the story to her granddaughter and points out that: “You see, before he came down, it never snowed... but now it does.” It did snow, earlier in the film, when Edward made a beautiful ice sculpture for Kim and she, in a dream-like sequence, danced under the snowflakes created by his swift carving. In Potter’s words, the annual snow: turns out to be the detritus from Edward’s relentless sculpting, a statement of love via surreality and excess, even as Edward effectively is pushed back into the mythic realm, to the status of a kind of local sky-god. A fairy-tale after all–or is it? In some strange way, the narrative is unable to quite contain Edward–he is neither killed in the manner of Frankenstein’s monster, nor saved (like the Beast in Beauty and the Beast). Kim pronounces what ought in the circumstances to be the magic words: “I love you”–and yet nothing happens. Edward remains untransformed and unassimilated; his ice sculptures freeze time, and in them Kim remains a young woman dancing in the snow. Immaculate in their lifelessness, these figures of ice themselves constitute a kind of machine, a memory palace, where Edward is not the fabricated but the fabricator. From the shreds of these fabrications, snow descends on us all, the snow of our doing-and undoing. (1996, 10)

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Alternatively, as Higley explains it (although she does not fully embrace this particular interpretation of the film), the character of Edward Scissorhands ends his cinematic journey as a Christ-figure, and therefore as an embodiment of the classic Scapegoat: I am dissatisfied with Edward (Johnny Depp) as a Christ figure, although with some critical cutting and snipping he certainly may be read as such: a son of sorts, fashioned by a creator of sorts, through a virgin birth of sorts. He comes down from on high to the materialistic world below, beloved by women (especially the mothering Peg (Dianne West) and the promiscuous Joyce (Kathy Baker), though not the pharisaical Esmeralda (O-Lan Jones), suffering punishments for others’ sins, and vying with a violent character for the love of a beautiful soul, eventually turning her away from narcissism and toward himself. He is castigated and driven out; he expels the devil from his house: he is presumed dead by the populace when shown the false sign in the form of a substitute hand with its cross pieces (like St. Andrew’s Cross); and his legend is kept alive by a witness who does not know but “believes” that he is still up there. Finally he pours down his Holy Spirit in the form of snow at Christmas, the icy shaving from his angelic making. (1993, 440)

Whichever of the two above interpretations we may choose to opt for, the ending of the film presents us with the image of Edward, as either “local sky-god” or “Christ-figure,” as the protagonist who has come full circle in his exploration of the human horrors of life and death. Now, finally and irrevocably separated from his former friends and from Kim, the love of his life, Edward may still have to explore the problematic gift of eternal existence and reconcile himself to the possible dread that it entails.

Conclusion As stated at the beginning of this chapter, in terms of genre affiliations, Tim Burton’s film Edward Scissorhands is situated at the crossroads between the Gothic, science fiction and the fairy-tale. The protagonist performs an exterior and interior journey mapped by three significant moments of becoming. Thus, he initiates his adventures on screen as the artificial son of an eccentric yet benevolent scientist, later he discovers but is prevented from fully experiencing the wonders of a fairy-tale love, and he ends his tribulations in a permanent exile spent in the Gothic mansion that hosted his birth, away from the suburban world of those who had unjustly cast him as the scapegoat for other people’s sins and personal frustrations. Horror is the dominant feeling that informs all the three

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genres discussed above in association with Edward Scissorhands, as it is experienced by the protagonist at each and every step he takes on his path towards discovery and self-discovery. As has also been argued, the similarities between Tim Burton, the director, and Edward, his cinematic son, are easy to discern. Burton is perceived by all who know him as a rather eccentric creator–in this he embodies both the father and the son in the film–whose relationship with ‘ordinary humanity’ is rather imperfect and strained, who longs to be able to touch and hold, but more often than not “ends up damaging and often fails in his attempts to communicate his desires and fears to the outside world.” (Vasileva 2008, 95) Nevertheless, Burton succeeds where he seems at his most imperfect; his artistic message may be difficult to convey and receive, but if we, his less than perfect audience, can conjure up a cinematic holy trinity and bravely bear the wounds unwillingly inflicted by the son, the lover and the scapegoat, we may be able to reach deeper into ourselves and leave behind the multiple horrors of mediocrity and suburban dread.

Works cited Aldiss, Brian W. 1976. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. New York: Schocken Books. Brantlinger, Patrick. 1980. “The Gothic Origins of Science-Fiction,” in NOVEL: A Forum of Fiction, Duke University Press, Vol.14, No.1 (Autumn, 1980), 30-43. Available at http://www.jstore.org/stable/ 1345322. Accessed 02/07/2012. Burton, Tim. 2006. Burton on Burton, edited by Mark Salisbury, with a Foreword by Johnny Depp. Chatham: Mackays of Chatham. Garfield, Simon. 2002. “Beetle Mania,” in Paul A. Woods (ed.). Tim Burton: A Child’s Garden of Nightmares. London: Plexus, pp. 34-9. Griffin, Gabriele. 2009. “Science and the cultural imaginary: the case of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go,” in Textual Practice. 23.4 (2009): p. 645-663. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502360903000570. Accessed 12/03/2011. Hanke, Ken. 1999. Tim Burton $Q 8QDXWKRUL]HG %LRJUDSK\ RI WKH Filmmaker. Los Angeles: Renaissance Books. Higley, Sarah L. 1993. “Cunning Work: Edward Scissorhands and the Topos of Utility,” in Christianity and Literature, Vol. 42, No.3, 1993, Seattle, Washington: Seattle Pacific University, pp. 435-45. Perin, Constance. 1988. “Penalizing Newcomers”, “Tattling on Neighbors”, and “Imperfect People”, in Belonging in America: Reading Between the Lines. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

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Potter, Russell A. (1992) 1996. “Edward Schizohands: The Postmodern Gothic Body,” in Postmodern Culture, Vol.2, No.3, May 1992, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Available at http://muse.jhu. edu/content/oai/journals/postmdodernculture/v002/2.3potter.html. Accessed 02/07/2012. Sontag, Susan. 1969. “The Imagination of Disaster”, in Against Interpretation. New York: Dell, pp. 211-23. Vasileva, Lena. 2008. “The father, the dark child and the mob that kills him; Tim Burton’s representation of the creative artist”, in Susan Rowlands (ed.). Psyche and the Arts; Jungian Approaches to Music, Architecture, Literature, Painting and Film, London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 87-97. Walpole, Horrace. 1963. “Letter to William Cole (March 9, 1765),” in Andrew Wright (ed.). The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Northanger Abbey. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

CHAPTER NINE LADY AND THE ALIEN: AVATARS OF AN ICONIC DUO GABRIELA G/Ă9$1 Introduction “Science fiction films are one of the purest forms of spectacle; that is, we are rarely inside anyone’s feelings.” (Sontag 1965) In her seminal essay on the structures of science fiction films, The Imagination of Disaster, Susan Sontag explores some of the most relevant nuclei of meaning identifiable in this particular area of popular culture. The Alien series, comprising four parts directed by different filmmakers, challenges not only Sontag’s argument concerning the representation of feelings in SF films, but also many of the clichés and stereotypes consolidated by the industry of the genre in recent decades. Given its development over almost two decades (the first film of the series, Alien, was released in 1979 and the fourth, Alien: Resurrection, in 1997), the series bears the distinct stylistic prints of each director who worked on the films, but also reveals the many shifts and turns in the evolution of its heroine, Lt. Ellen Ripley, and her complex, ambiguous relationship with the alien villain. Once her feelings become part of the action, the story gains depth and the perspective greatly widens. A vast amount of scholarship devoted to the series, its protagonists and underlying philosophy has investigated the many aspects of Ripley’s iconic juxtaposition with the monstrous creature designed by the Swiss Surrealist artist H. R. Giger. While it has been established that “what occurs over the four films is a loosening of the depiction of the alien as rampaging, predatory Other, to a mutual absorption of the alien and the human subject,” (Smith 2001,184) the particularities of this metamorphosis are of greater interest than the outcome of the process. Indeed, the entire saga is centered upon issues concerned with identity and otherness, exploration and nostos (as a permanently postponed project of

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returning to Earth), humanity and the artificial/mechanical, discerning between nuances, values and genders and accepting their ultimate ambivalence.

“You’ve been in my life so long, I can’t remember anything else…” In what sounds more like the affirmation of a symbiosis, Ripley, in fact, seeks to free herself from the tension of a pursuit that has rendered her exhausted and helpless in the face of a foe that seems to have refined its survival and reproductive skills to perfection. Moreover, it is by this observation that Ripley confirms her status as the other half of a hero/monster duo, a structure in which borders are gradually blurred by Ripley’s contamination with (in Alien 3) and kinship with the alien (in Alien: Resurrection). The alien, as a complex metaphor of otherness, has been the focus of critical attention in many studies of the series, and feminist critique has specifically emphasized the multiple layers of difference the monster embodies. Much like the alien itself, Ripley goes through several stages of transformation–from the not-so-experienced fighter in Alien to the physically “alienated” clone of Alien: Resurrection. The present study, while also revisiting some major critical perspectives, will particularly aim at revealing the most striking connections and fractures pertaining to issues of identity and otherness and their involvement in the articulation of this duo. In the first two films, Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986), Ripley indubitably directs all her resources towards fighting and eliminating the alien. The mounting tension in both films culminates in dramatic final scenes, when Ripley fights the alien (first, a warrior alien, then, in Aliens, the alien queen) and, as if by activating some kind of superhuman powers, each time she manages to eject the monster into space. Both instances leave no doubt regarding Ripley’s position as the alien’s nemesis, her animosity being increased by the maternal conflicts developed in Aliens: Ripley sets the alien queen’s nursery ablaze, and the queen, in her turn, tries to capture Newt, to whom Ripley has already become a maternal figure. In Alien 3, where the bleakness of the setting is matched by the inner conflicts and tribulations of the characters, Ripley’s position gradually shifts from adversity/difference towards ambiguous similarity to the alien, as she shockingly discovers she has been impregnated by the monster while she was in hypersleep and has thus become the carrier of a queen embryo.

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The critical debate around the origins and meaning of monstrosity in the series has highlighted the radical role played by the alien’s parasitic mode of reproduction and its echoing of the “essential parasitism of Nature,” (Mulhall 2002, 19) as all life in nature ultimately depends on an incorporation/victimization cycle. But, in the end, as the boundaries between the heroine and the monster are erased by Ripley’s “reconstruction” and revival through cloning, the real evil seems to be none other than the Company in its wish to include the alien in its bioweapons division, and not necessarily the alien beast who is merely trying to survive and perpetuate its species. Representations triggered by the notion and nature of monstrosity become more intricate once Ripley’s contamination occurs, this being the subject of the third film in the series, Alien 3. Although it was received with little critical enthusiasm, the main merit of Alien 3, besides the fact that it provides the story with a real denouement, resides in the recalibration of Ripley’s relationship with the alien. Once identity and difference are merged into a state of hybridity in which human and alien elements overlap, the story itself is rerouted towards a new set of questions. By the time she finds out she is the alien queen’s carrier, Ripley has already experienced motherhood (both biologically, on Earth, and symbolically, in space, as Newt’s mother figure) and consummated a sexual encounter (with Clemens, the doctor of the Fiorina 161 colony). Therefore, she seems ready for the most complex role possible, one that will challenge her very nature and values, in Alien: Resurrection, that of “the monster’s mother”, as she will later call herself. Ripley’s character undergoes a dynamic process of change throughout the series, a process that culminates in her spectacular self-sacrifice at the end of Alien 3. The highlights of this process are: her encounter and confrontation with the alien queen in Aliens, her impregnation with the queen embryo and her consequent suicide in Alien 3, the torching of the cloning lab in Alien: Resurrection, her encounter with the alien queen and the birth of the humanoid alien, and, finally, her choice to eliminate the monster en route back to Earth, where she ultimately lands accompanied by Call.

The metamorphoses of Lt. Ripley The final scene of Alien confers upon Ripley’s character a heroic status that is to become the framework of her actions in the following episodes of the series. It is a scene of cardinal importance in the evolution of the character, as it sparks the long-lasting tension between the heroine/alien

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duo. Alone with Jones, the cat, Ripley is the last survivor of the Nostromo. She takes off her fatigues, revealing her, until then, anonymous hidden body. In her underwear, she is, for the first time, simultaneously erotic and vulnerable. It is now that she discovers she is alone with the alien monster, as it lies hidden behind a tubular structure that camouflages its body, and she swiftly prepares for a final fight. In an interesting reading of this scene, Harvey Greenberg notes that this confrontation is charged with an energy simultaneously alluding to sexuality and terror, one that probably triggers an intense, ambivalent reaction in the viewer’s mind (Greenberg 1993, 159). Breathing heavily in the spacesuit she manages to quickly slip in, making some firm, yet sensually feline movements, as the alien emerges from its hiding place, Ripley activates the shuttle’s control panel and manages to poison the monster with toxic gases; finally, she ejects it into space. While the conception of the alien is violent, its birth is lethal and its whole existence can be interpreted as a metaphor of death, the entire Alien film can be understood “as a radical metaphor for abortion” (Cobbs 1990, 200), since the ejection of the monster into space is what saves Ripley’s life. From a feminist perspective, the scene carries other layers of significance, as well: “Ripley has become resexualized as a woman. The message is that it is fine for a woman to act tough and take control in outer space, but she had better be a lady when she returns to society.” (Inness 1999, 107) Now it is beyond doubt that Ripley has become a new prototype of the female heroine in science fiction cinema. Later, Terminator’s Sarah Connor would take this type of character to new levels of success, although Ripley’s depth and complexity have established her as a unique, unparalleled category. The film closes with Ripley’s tired voice reporting the events that led to the deaths of the Nostromo’s crew, after which she falls peacefully asleep in her cybersleep pod. It is significant to observe that, while the first two films, Alien and Aliens, end with the image of Ripley in cybersleep, Alien 3 ends with that of Ripley’s, Newt’s and Hicks’ empty pods onboard the Sulaco’s emergency escape vehicle that has crashed on Fiorina 161. The metaphor of the maternal womb is central in all four films, as part of an entire symbolic web developed around gestation and birth and the fears associated with them throughout the series. The maternal function of the ship (“Mother” in the first Alien) and the pod as a womb replacement are easily identifiable symbolisms, present from the very beginning of the series–the first scene of Alien shows the crew of the Nostromo emerging from their pods and resuming their activities on board the starship. By displaying the empty pods and the computer screen information that the

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work prison of Fiorina 161 has been closed and sealed and that the refining equipment is to be sold as scrap, Alien 3 reaffirms David Fincher’s “purifying desire for closure,” (Mulhall 2002,118) that is, his intention to be the author of the finale of the saga. The notions of gestation, pregnancy and delivery are, however, adapted to the strange, terrifying situation that gives them meaning; the alien’s unstoppable drive to reproduce lies at the heart of the parasitic and abominable method it pursues in order to fulfill this essential need; the actions it performs can be associated with the imagery and ritual of human reproduction, and the way in which the “foetus” is inserted into and ultimately emerges from its host’s body creates “a nightmare vision of sexual intercourse, pregnancy and birth.”(Mulhall 2002, 20) It is not without significance that the alien invades not only humans but other creatures as well–in Alien 3, the newborn alien bursts out of the body of a dog. Moreover, it is not only humans it attacks; these aliens can turn against their own kin, as they do in Alien: Resurrection, when aliens fight in a cage and their acid blood perforates the floor, setting some of them free. As Kane, the alien’s first victim, writhes in labour and the alien finds its way into the world by bursting out of his chest, the viewer witnesses an extremely violent cinematic metaphor of evil coming to life. The infant alien kills its “mother,” thus establishing itself as a creature whose existence starts with the act that will define it from then on: the killing of all beings that are, in their turn, alien to its species. Besides the striking originality of its villain, Alien has also been considered a groundbreaking film as a result of its innovative perspective on sex and gender: “when Kane’s chest exploded and that phallic little beastie escaped from the depth of our unconscious and onto the screen, with it went the primacy of the sexed body in science-fiction films.” (Gallardo, Smith, 2004, 14) The other three films of the quadrilogy clearly continue to dwell on these central issues, taking the innovativeness of Alien to new heights. Alien sets the tone of the series from another perspective as well. Its imagery and visual metaphors draw on the exuberantly sexual (often bordering upon the pornographic) universe of H.R. Giger. Not only does the alien exude an unearthly sensuality, but the spacecraft it comes from displays an openly sexual architecture: “Vaginal doorways, cervical mazes on the walls, phallic sculptures on the alien starship, and bulbous mammary projections everywhere–virtually every scene works itself out within a matrix of sexual suggestiveness.” (Cobbs 1990, 200) In fact, “the entire craft resembles a stupendous uterine-fallopian system.” (Greenberg 1993, 153)

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It is in Aliens that Ripley refines her character, despite the fact that James Cameron’s project seems to follow closely the Hollywood action movie recipe, one that paradigmatically favours the action show dimension rather than the psychological one. The alert rhythm of the film leaves little time for contemplation or feelings, yet Ripley takes the maternal affection she felt for Jones the cat, in Alien, one step further: she bonds with an orphan found in the devastated colony, a little girl named Newt. This relationship plays an essential part in establishing Ripley as a heroine whose primary role is not only that of living up to a warrior code, but also that of defending and caring for a child. This type of connection places her in a more traditional context, one in which the maternal softens the harsh contours of her Amazon image. There are, nevertheless, some observations that need to be made before we tackle Ripley’s maternal dimension. Her celibacy and “virginity” have been addressed in many critical contexts, and it has been stressed that there is a direct connection between her heroic status and her nonsexual presence and behaviour: “extending a long-familiar mythological trope, Ripley’s emergence as the human hero of this tale is empowered or underwritten by her implied celibacy.” (Mulhall 2002, 24) Ripley’s sexual chastity in Alien and Aliens is matched by her maternal role in a manner that evokes the mythological, her heroic status being amplified by her absent sexuality. Once she integrates the sexual dimension into her life, her heroic status and her relationship with the alien are once again challenged and adjusted. The “offspring” of a technological Mother, the computer heart and brain of the Nostromo, Ripley enters an equation she will be able to exit only by resorting to another essentially mythological gesture, sacrifice: she becomes Newt’s “adoptive” mother, she fights the alien queen, defeats her, and then, after she and the queen have been cloned, she chooses to sacrifice the human/alien monster the cloned alien queen gives birth to. This string of violent acts centered on motherhood is, in fact, instigated by the initial violence of insemination, the impregnation of the human body by the alien “face-hugger.” Another agent of violence, this time one that alludes to the sexual act, is Ash, the android scientist of Alien, who was assigned by the Company to secure aliens for breeding purposes. In an outburst of rage against Ripley, he tries to insert a rolled-up magazine into Ripley’s throat, an act that might suggest sexual penetration, or, at a deeper level, could imply an identification of science with the alien and alienation. (Mulhall 2002, 30) If Aliens widens the gap between Ripley the warrior and her sexual identity by directly endowing her with the attributes of motherhood, Alien

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3 bridges this gap. The minimalism of the third part of the Alien quadrilogy is well calculated, since the inhospitable setting and the constant threat of the irrational (given the violent nature of the convicts who inhabit the colony) convey the perfect background to mirror Ripley’s interior torment. Moreover, this metaphor becomes literal, as the alien grows inside her chest and starts to move, causing her pain and discomfort. Alien 3 presents Ripley in a context that might seem out of character for a heroine who could at most be linked to a domestic, maternal role: the only woman in a penal colony of rapists and murderers, Ripley is the absolute stranger, stripped of any sign of gender differentiation, surrounded by aggressive convicts whose predator instincts are kept under control by religious fervour. Her body is hidden in masculine fatigues, and her shaven head and muscular, athletic figure articulate an androgynous appearance, one calculated to ease her adaptation to the hostile, dangerous atmosphere of the colony. As has been indicated above, in Alien 3, Ripley seems to have reached another stage in her metamorphosis: she suggests sex to Clemens, the doctor of the Fiorina 161 colony. Their first encounter occurs on the occasion of Newt’s autopsy and thus they bond in somewhat morbid circumstances. As he opens up the little girl’s dead body, looking for what Ripley seemingly fears may be signs of cholera (while, in fact, she wants to make sure Newt had not been impregnated by the alien), they share a moment that could be regarded as an emotional stage preceding intimacy. Clemens is a mysterious man with a past, whose presence in the script is short-lived. He is among the first victims of the alien brought on the Fiorina 161 in Ripley’s capsule as an egg, then carried to term by the facility’s dog. David Fincher is no less fascinated by the bloody birth of the alien than were his predecessors, Ridley Scott and James Cameron: as the bodies of Newt and Hicks are lowered into the furnaces of the foundry, the alien bursts out of the dog’s chest, in a brutal affirmation of life against the grim background of the lost-in-space prison. The solemnity of Dillon’s discourse is matched only by the terrifying intensity of the monster’s birth. It is also relevant to point out the fact that this is the first and only time an animal carries the alien embryo and ‘delivers’ the infant, as if this proximity to the animal realm is intended to stress the bestial nature of the creature. In an austere environment that recalls the privations of a medieval monastery and the squalor of a pre-modern jailhouse, Ripley is confronted with some of her most feared limits. In fact, Fiorina 161 might be seen as the incarnation of her fears, (Mulhall 2002, 100) a place where she is the

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alien, an outsider, the embodiment of temptation and sin in the eyes of the prisoners, whose excesses are kept in check by religious faith. Fincher’s interest in essences and the primitive becomes more explicit once Ripley finds out that there are no weapons in the prison, since the inhabitants of the place are dangerous convicts, and therefore Alien 3 introduces a dramatic shift from the excessive use of ammunition seen in Alien and Aliens. Humans can only use fire to scare off the monsters, yet it is in this film that we see one of the most spectacular ‘executions’ of an alien: emerging from the hot lead being poured from above, the apparently invulnerable monster is showered with cold water, and the sudden change in temperature leads to the virtual explosion of its body. Fincher connected to the imaginary of the story in a way that shows a different understanding of both the protagonist and the alien. His vision has deep spiritual and psychological undertones, thus clearly contrasting with the universe of Cameron’s Aliens, where the pace of the action leaves little space for the affirmation of the interior lives of the characters. In Alien 3, Ripley’s relationship with the alien takes a spectacular turn once she discovers she is the carrier of a queen embryo. More than that, her identity is shaped according to a different set of rules, as the director seems to be “reducing Ripley to skin and bone, in search of the ineliminable essence of who she is.” (Mulhall 2002, 100) Indeed, Ripley becomes aware of her implacable fate–not only is she going to die, but the alien inside her will lay and hatch thousands of eggs, leading to a potentially catastrophic death toll. It is not surprising she asks Dillon to kill her. But she can serve the colony better if she helps to trap and eliminate the alien, as it will not kill her–it senses the unborn alien queen growing in Ripley’s chest and refrains from attacking her. In one of the most iconic images of the entire Alien series, Ripley and the monster meet face to face. The border between identity and otherness is definitively blurred and an even deeper connection emerges: “the scene when the male alien for the first time senses the queen inside her also establishes a visual similarity between Ripley, with her clean-shaven head, and the alien’s skull-like jaw, further emphasizing Ripley’s alignment with the other.”(Melzer 2006, 134) This closeness seems to announce the biological, genetic kinship of Alien: Resurrection, when Ripley shares with the alien the very foundation of her physical existence, her DNA. The image implies a nexus of meanings, since it aligns Ripley’s pure vulnerability and the alien’s essential monstrousness. On a larger scale, the scene is unusual–it does not end with the woman’s death, as Ripley lost her human “appeal” once she became the carrier of the queen embryo. The alien perceives her as one of

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its kind, and this is one of the elements that were to structure an entire paradigm of identity shifts and deviations in Alien: Resurrection. Ripley is uncompromising when it comes to the annihilation of the alien, despite Bishop’s promise that, if she agrees to let the Company extract the alien from her chest, they will allow her to live. The distant dream of having a family and a normal existence has long lost its appeal, and she remains adamant in carrying out her plan as intended. But, as she plunges into the incandescent furnace, the hungry-for-life alien queen bursts out from her chest. Ripley places her hands on the baby monster, in a gesture that captures a fleeting motherly affection: she seems to be caressing it, while also firmly holding its body close to her own, as if to make sure it cannot escape death. Ripley’s self-immolation coincides with the moment she gives birth to the creature that embodies her ultimate counterpart, and as, Stein remarks, “she acknowledges that identification with the alien with a caress before both plunge to their deaths.” (Stein 2004, 203) A certain spiritual component can be traced here, although it is rather implicit than explicit. One might see “Fincher’s presentation of her deathdive as a crucifixion through which the human race is redeemed,” (Mulhall 2002, 107) or simply as a liberating fall into an abyss of oblivion. “Mysteriously ungraspable, viciously implacable, improbably beautiful,” (Greenberg 1993, 154) the alien is the driving force behind Ripley’s metamorphosis. An ultimate embodiment of the ferocious outer space beast, the alien is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating villains in science fiction cinema. Cunning and mindless, the alien is more than a creature blindly seeking to kill. A clear metaphor for otherness and difference, it can be seen as a projection of the stranger turned scapegoat. As Kearney argues, “it is humanity’s tampering with this different order of being that causes havoc and carnage. It is we who have turned these strangers into scapegoats.” (Kearney, 2003, 52) Therefore, the alien is “monstrous only from its victims’ viewpoint. Objectively, there is nothing evil in its nature, for its ceaseless feeding and breeding merely fulfills the imperative of its genetic code–to survive in shifting, inimical environments.”(Greenberg 1993, 165) Ash, the mad scientist/android of Alien, memorably synthesizes the triple opposition between technology (he himself being a product of it), civilization (humans) and nature (the alien): “I admire its purity. A survivor. Unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” In a way, the alien is a construct, too, but its origins can be traced in the realm of the natural, governed by raw energy and instinct. Coming from an android, the remark aimed at the implicit burden of conscience, remorse

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and morality functions strictly as a lament for the ethics of humans, since they are pursuing the elimination of the alien, thus preventing the Company from breeding it as a bio-weapon.

The rise of the hybrid monster The final film of the quadrilogy, Alien:Resurrection, revisits some of the series’ recurrent issues and themes: Ripley’s heroic status and ethics, her increasingly complex relationship with the alien, artificial life and the human/android opposition, identity and otherness, sexuality and the irrational. The film’s most radical innovation lies in the abandonment of the clear divides and distinctions between categories and in a progressive blurring of the limits of these concepts and notions. Ripley’s biological identity is the first and most strikingly problematic issue the film challenges: a perfected clone of the dead Lt. Ellen Ripley, this Ripley has alien blood and expresses a well-camouflaged sympathy and understanding for the creature, now being carefully bred by the Company. Although she resembles Ripley in her physiognomy, clone Number 8 is rather a biologically improved version of the initial heroine, not an identical duplicate. When asked about her past encounters with the alien and what happened to her, she does not hesitate to utter the truth: “I died.” Call, the childlike female android, points out even more intransigently: “You’re a thing, a construct. They grew you in a fucking lab,” as the real Ellen Ripley had died two centuries earlier. A physical freak of the monster kind, Ripley’s kinship to the aliens is undeniable. She has superhuman physical abilities, is verbally arrogant and uses sexually explicit language, displaying a blunt self-confidence that arouses both a great deal of male interest onboard the Auriga starcraft and Call’s hostility. This negative aura soon vanishes, as the two female characters strangely discover an area of common ground: “they are mirrors in their shared freakishness and unnatural origins, in as vicious a parody of the idea of soul mates as Ripley’s bond with the male alien was in Alien 3.” (Stein 2004, 205) The two “freaks” bond over their unnatural origins, uncertain identity and ambiguous status in their limited environment and, significantly enough, over men’s strong reaction of fear and rejection once their origins are revealed. Besides some evident queer accents (Melzer 2006, 142), the Ripley/Call union is sealed by a solid common belief, sublimated in Ripley’s remark: “no human is so humane.” Their distancing from the human race is, paradoxically, what makes them trustworthy keepers of human values: Call accesses the ship’s main computer in order to delay its

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landing on Earth, and declares her disgust at what she herself is – a construct, a machine. Unlike Call, Ripley seems to have come to terms with her own monstrosity: when asked by Call how she can stand being what she is, Ripley replies: “Not much choice.” The climax of Ripley’s identity quest takes place in the medical lab where she discovers the imperfect clones that preceded her creation. Dead and preserved in gigantic tanks, or tied to hospital beds and artificially kept alive, Ripley’s previous, nonviable versions offer a tragic and grotesque panorama of genetic engineering’s most notable failures at mixing human and alien genomes. These gigantic contorted fetuses revealing predator dentition or enormous reptilian spines cannot prepare Ripley sufficiently for her encounter with the painfully bedridden clone that is her immediate predecessor. “Kill me”, it mutters, and, in doing so, Ripley severs the ties with her convulsive past and frees herself from the vicious circle of identity. By recreating the suicidal scenario that has previously helped her escape the Company and their treacherous plans, Ripley overcomes the unbearable drama of her status among humans and aliens by a symbolic self-annihilation. But her greatest challenge is yet to come. In order to be able to claim her human identity, Ripley must make a string of choices that will allow her to overcome the destructive, negative coordinates of her alien side. Indeed, as Patricia Melzer has observed, in Alien:Resurrection “Ripley’s identity is defined by her merging with the other. Here the focus is on the development of Ripley’s identity […] towards an acceptance of the other as part of the self.” (Melzer 2006, 109) While she embraces the empowerment entailed by her “posthuman identity,” (Melzer 2006, 109) she must cut herself off from the violence and rapacity of the aliens. They welcome her like one of their own, taking her to the place where the cloned alien queen, recreated from the DNA of the former Ellen Ripley, is enduring the labour pains of a mammal while giving birth to a humanoid alien. Ripley enjoys the journey and the sensuous touch of the slippery skin of the drones as they engulf her body in a tight net of limbs and tails. She is there when the new, never before seen monster is born, and it marks its entrance into the world by killing its mother. Then it immediately bonds with Ripley, acknowledging her as its mother. It approaches her with a cooing sound–once again, she is lured by alien affection and, for a brief moment, surrenders. Torn between the irreconcilable sides of her hybridity, relentlessly followed by the alien humanoid on board the Betty as it heads towards Earth, Ripley can no longer postpone the unavoidable. By intentionally cutting her hand on the monster’s teeth as she caresses its face as if to

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tame it, she is able to project a few drops of her acid blood on to a porthole. Meanwhile, as the blood is penetrating the glass, she enjoys one final moment of tenderness with her half-human kin. The ending of all three previous films of the quadrilogy, when the alien is ejected into space, is repeated here, this time with the “new” alien starring in “a grotesque parody or inversion of its birth.” (Mulhall 2002, 134) Sucked out by the void, the humanoid is reduced to fluid organic matter dissipating like a thin trail behind the ship as it enters Earth’s atmosphere. Overwhelmed by remorse, Ripley watches in tears the monster’s excruciatingly painful annihilation, and, while she is seared by the bewildered panic in its human eyes, she is also purified and liberated by this sacrifice. Her tragic choice redeems her humanity, problematic as it may be. Ripley’s landing on a post-apocalyptic Earth, accompanied by Call, may be seen as the dawn of a post-human era defined by hybrid identities and bio-technological mutations. But, as Ripley concludes, in her closing line, “I’m a stranger here myself,” one might infer, at the end of the series, that alienation and estrangement are states of mind that potentially engender monsters.

Works cited Cobbs, L. John. 1990. “Alien as an Abortion Parable” in Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 3, 1 July 1990, pp. 198-201. Constable, Catherine. 1999. “Becoming the Monster’s Mother: Morphologies of Identity in the Alien Series,” in Alien Zone 2: The Spaces of Science Fiction Cinema, edited by Annette Kuhn. London: Verso. Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Gallardo, Ximena C., Smith, Jason. 2004. Alien Woman. The Making of Lt. Ellen Ripley. Continuum International Publishing Group. Graham, Paula. 1994. “Looking Lesbian: Amazons and Aliens in Science Fiction Cinema,” in Diane Hamer and Belinda Budge, The Good, the Bad and the Gorgeous: Popular Culture’s Romance with Lesbianism. London: Pandora. Graham, Elizabeth (ed.).2010. Meanings of Ripley: The Alien Quadrilogy and Gender. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Greenberg, Harvey Roy. 1993. Screen Memories. Hollywood Cinema on the Psychoanalytic Couch. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Inness, Sherrie A. 1999. Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kearney, Richard. 2003. Strangers, Gods and Monsters. Interpreting Otherness. London: Routledge. Melzer, Patricia. 2006. Science Fiction and Feminist Thought. Austin: University of Texas Press. Mulhall, Stephen. 2002. On Film. New York: Routledge. Russell, Lorena. 2005. “Queer Gothic and Heterosexual Panic in the AssEnd of Space,” in Gothic Studies, Nov.2005, Vol. 7 Issue 2, pp.143-57. Sontag, Susan. 2009. “The Imagination of Disaster,” in Heather Masri (ed.), Science Fiction. Stories and Contexts. New York, Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. Smith, Warren. 2001. “Alienation and Freakishness,” in Warren Smith, Mathew Higgins and Geoff Lightfoot (eds.), Science Fiction and 2UJDQL]DWLRQ. London and New York: Routledge. Stein, Atara. 2004. The Byronic Hero in Film, Fiction, and Television. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Williams, E. 2006. “Birth kills, abortion saves: Two perspectives by incongruity in Ridley Scott’s Alien. E-Clectic 4”, no.2. Available at http:// abacus. bates.edu /eclectic/vol4iss2/pdf/troaaewf.pdf. Accessed 04/28/2013.

CHAPTER TEN SUBJECTIVITY (UN)PLUGGED: THE MATRIX (1999) ELIZA CLAUDIA FILIMON Introduction Temporality, spatiality and other material conditions play an important role in both the existence and the continuous shaping of human subjectivity. Hyper-reality and its electronic technologies have brought about sweeping transformations in the construction of human subjectivity, thus altering people’s perception of spatial and temporal realities. Detached from everyday reality, the artificial electronic environment is proving to be a threat to traditional notions of subjectivity, as simulacra, now “more real than the real,” begin to appear and to somehow condition subjectivities. My focus is the treatment of these postmodern issues in the Sci-Fi Hollywood production The Matrix (1999). Directors Larry and Andy Wachowski borrow from Baudrillard’s postmodern theories for their movie The Matrix. It presents the Matrix as a simulation of the real world, a self-sustained virtual reality constructed by the Artificial Intelligences to dictate what people know as the real world and to manipulate human minds. With the question at issue being the notion of reality, the primary question in The Matrix concerns the definition of the real, while it also examines the emergence of the posthuman subject from the collapse of the real into virtual reality. In a discussion of the virtual subject in postmodern science fiction, Scott Bukatman refers to the realm of virtual reality, the interactive computer-generated environment, as “terminal space”. (Bukatman 1993, 107) Virtual reality suggests total immersion in a virtual world, which makes people feel directly involved within the computer-simulated environment with the help of different mechanical devices such as stereo headphones, goggles and data-gloves, which provide sensory experiences to the subject. A unified space with perfect simulation is an essential

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element for such total immersion, making any distinction between the real and the virtual impossible. Theoretically, such a perfect representation of the real causes the suspension of disbelief, adds in credibility, and convinces the subject of its subsequent perceptions. However, the idea of total immersion in simulacra is difficult to achieve in practice except in a very limited sense, an imaginative exercise, with virtual reality as a kind of postmodern utopia. In utopia, the imaginary elsewhere, one could imagine the possibility of building an ideal society. Seeing virtual reality as the imaginary ideal techno-world, total immersion can be read as an act of envisioning alternative worlds and contemplating potential outcomes for human beings and the material world. Baudrillard asserts that simulation is “the generation of models of a real without origin or reality; a hyperreal.” (Baudrillard 1994, 1) He identifies the loss of original referents in postmodernity and describes the successive phases of the image as follows: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum. In the first case, the image is a good experience–representation is of the sacramental order. In the second, it is an evil appearance–it is of the order of maleficence. In the third, it plays at being an appearance–it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer of the order of appearances, but of simulation. (Baudrillard 1994, 6)

Accordingly, representation is an image of the real, whereas simulacrum is an image of an image of the real. The simulated reality is metaphysically as real as the reality. Instead of being a perfect image of the actual, simulation within the virtual reality exists on its own. In the post-apocalyptic setting of The Matrix, the Artificial Intelligences have taken over the world of human beings. Throughout the movie, the directors have created a very dark, claustrophobic atmosphere to build up a machine-dominated future. Depicting the real world as a wasteland, the film offers a pessimistic vision of the future. In science fiction, dystopia often serves as a warning of the dangers of uncontrolled scientific research and developments. In dystopian narrative, human beings often become victims of science. Similarly, in The Matrix, human beings are held captive and enslaved to man-made machines. Farmed in breeding centres, humans in the year 2199 are no longer born, but are grown in soaring towers to be reaped for the generation of energy. With their real, physical bodies being placed in the desolate “desert of the real,”

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human beings are “plugged into” the Matrix, live out disembodied virtual lives and supply energy to the machines as mere batteries. The fear of machines getting out of control has always been an important concern in the science fiction tradition, traceable back at least as far as Metropolis (1927). Dystopian science fiction in particular sees in technology a serious danger of dehumanization. As human existence appears as merely a power supply in the movie under discussion, the fear of dehumanization is constantly looming.

Wiring subjectivity In The Matrix, the cybernetic deconstruction of the human subject begins from the narrative background. Following a war between humanity and Artificial Intelligences (AI), human beings no longer occupy the central, privileged position. The Matrix holds humans captive under technological surveillance. Being now controlled by machines, human beings lose their central position and are at the complete mercy of the Artificial Intelligences. This constitutes a limit on human subjectivity, with human subjects being subjected to the power and regulations of technology. Regarding the subjectivity and identity of the human being in the movie, Chad Barnett suggests that the human body that functions as a battery for the machine is the “ultimate depiction of the death of the subject.” (Barnett 2000, 362) Veronica Hollinger has argued that cyberpunk is about the cybernetic breakdown of a number of classic nature/ culture oppositions, while science fiction frequently problematizes the oppositions between nature and the artificial, human and machine, it generally sustains them in such a way that the human remains securely ensconced in its privileged place at the center of things. Cyberpunk, however, is about the breakdown of these oppositions.” (Hollinger 2000, 30)

Trapped in the false consciousness of the Matrix, the majority of the people are even unaware of the enslavement and marginalization of humanity. Only those who have been unplugged from the Matrix realize the truth. Thus the movie, by undermining the presupposition of the centrality of the human subject and giving humans the role of slaves of technology, prompts audiences to reconsider the subject position of human beings. Apart from the issue of subject position in relation to the machine, imprisonment, freedom, and agency are some interconnected themes that are crucial in the exploration of human subjectivity in the Matrix, the

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ultimate containment tool. In the movie, the sense of force and control is conveyed through the imagery of wires and electrodes used in transmitting electric signals from the Matrix to the human beings. In the human farm, there are towers of naked and wired human beings. Each human being is placed in a pod and connected to so many wires and electrodes that the wires and electrodes appear to be chains and padlocks holding the human being in place. The pods lined up in the human farm have the appearance of cells in a prison, keeping people in place. James Lawler offers an alternative reading of the notion of subjectivity and imprisonment in the Matrix. In the movie, Agent Smith explains to Morpheus that there have been two Matrixes: Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where no one suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. (The Matrix script 1999)

Based on Agent Smith’s explanation, Lawler links the process of bioenergy production with the process of milk production. He suggests that contented humanity produces the best energy in the same way as contented cows give the best milk. The machines have to design the Matrix according to the need of human beings for contented sleep, while “sleeping humanity is unconsciously, instinctively, in charge of the program.” (Lawler 2002, 139) Following this reasoning, Lawler goes on to suggest that the plugged-in human beings are not objects deprived of agency, but that it is rather they who are in indirect control. According to Lawler’s claim, even though human beings are imprisoned within the virtual world, they still have indirect power to choose and get what they want in the Matrix. The Matrix is a system in which the balance of power affects human subjectivity. In fact the issue of imprisonment and agency is not only limited to the human beings who are imprisoned within the Matrix, it is also an issue that greatly concerns those who have been unplugged by Morpheus. These unplugged human beings live in the hovercraft 1HEXFKDGQH]]DU as a team resisting slavery and imprisonment in the Matrix, but seeking both freedom and truth. Neo declares (The Matrix script 1999), “I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life.” He wants to be free from the control of the Matrix and be a self-determining being. Freedom gives the sense of autonomy, the sense of agency, and also

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the sense of being. For the 1HEXFKDGQH]]DU team members, they can only be themselves and be their own subjects when they are free from the power of the Matrix. This is why they are fighting for their own freedom and the freedom of humanity. However, not all the members of the 1HEXFKDGQH]]DU’s crew perceive the meaning of subjectivity as a consequence of freedom from the Matrix. Theodore Schick suggests there are two different kinds of freedom at issue in the 1HEXFKDGQH]]DU: “positive freedom” is the freedom to make choices and act, whereas “negative freedom” is the freedom from restrictions on action. (Schick 2002, 88) Morpheus, Trinity and the majority of the team are all striving for “positive freedom,” whereas Cypher opts for “negative freedom.” Even though Cypher is not imprisoned in the virtual world, he does not consider himself to be a free agent. To Cypher, he is not free, as he has to take orders and listen to Morpheus. Therefore, he wants to acquire freedom from Morpheus and betray his team-mates in exchange for the life of a rich actor in the Matrix. As he is killing his team-mates, he asserts his belief and questions Trinity (The Matrix script 1999), “You call this free? All I do is what he tells me to do. If I have to choose between that and the Matrix, I choose the Matrix.” Cypher is exactly the type of person that Morpheus criticizes, those who are so “hopelessly dependent on the system that they’ll fight to protect it.” Cypher is ready to abandon the real world for a false sense of freedom in the Matrix. Like many people, he cannot bear the hard truths of real existence. This is why Morpheus suggests that “most people are not ready to be unplugged.” (The Matrix script 1999) Many prefer to remain ignorant as they are not ready for reality. Through the character Cypher, the film exemplifies how people in the real world are also hopelessly dependent on security, pleasure and comfortable illusions. Inside the Matrix, simulations produce “false consciousness.” The inhabitants of the Matrix perceive themselves as autonomous agents, but in fact they are just living out roles generated by the computer program. They have absolutely no control over their lives. They make no choices and perform no actions out of their own will. All they do is receive signals provided by the simulation program and lead a virtual life within the simulated world. Being bombarded with information provided by the Matrix system, the human subject is rendered passive. Instead of being agents possessing free will, human beings are forced to take up the passive role of “receivers” and lose control over self and environment. They are locked up in a “prison for [the] mind.” There are a number of scenes depicting the bodies of unplugged humans lying motionless in an armchair

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while consciousness is relocated in the Matrix. Even those who have succeeded in unplugging from the simulation system are forced into take up a passive position whenever they have to re-enter the Matrix. The act of connecting to the Matrix is therefore an act of surrender in which human beings are always forced into a state of passivity before the Matrix. Through depicting human beings who passively surrender to the simulation provided by the Matrix, the film warns of the danger of the image-dominated world where people are passively bombarded with images and representations of all kinds. Regarding the issue of image bombardment, Scott Bukatman and other cultural theorists suggest that we are now living in the “era of the blip” where blips of information are crucial in their implications for people’s identity (Bukatman 1993, 32-33).

All is not what it seems: The utopia of images The fictional world of The Matrix not only comments on the relationship between imprisonment and subjectivity but also warns of the totalizing power of representations and the extent to which the real world has been shaped by images and signs. In contemporary society, there is a widespread proliferation of images through television, film, and the internet. With advanced technologies, images are so convincingly established that people tend to receive them uncritically, substituting simulations or representations of reality for the real. (Turkle 1996, 23) In the fictional world of the Matrix, the character Cypher prefers simulated reality to the real world. After living in the dark, dingy hovercraft for years, the perfect simulated world in the Matrix is seemingly more attractive and desirable for him. While enjoying his steak and red wine with Agent Smith in the Matrix, Cypher says, “I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, do you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.” (The Matrix script 1999) To Cypher, the Matrix is a virtual paradise of pleasure and satisfaction which is more real than corporeal reality. During the betrayal scene, Cypher asserts: I think the Matrix can be more real than this world. All I do is pull a plug here. But there, you have to watch Apoc die. Welcome to the real world, eh baby? (The Matrix script 1999)

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Indeed, the simulation in the Matrix is not only a replication of the reality, but an enhancement of the real world designed to be “more real than real.” The enhancement of reality and heightened simulation in the film could serve as a commentary on the workings of the media and advertising images in the contemporary world. In today’s world, products are often fantasized into images of ideal and desirable products in advertisements, in which advertising images and representations are made to appear “more real than real” to arouse people’s desire for consumption. There is a danger that images and representations may be used as means to manipulate individual desire and experience, turning the subject into a consumer whose subjectivity is defined in relation to commodity instead of to individual experience. In his introduction to cyberpunk and cyber culture, Dani Cavallaro also writes about the potential of advertising, the media and the information industry to capitalize on and transform people’s subjective desires, emotions and fantasies through abstract networks of representations (Cavallaro 2000, x). Viewing the increasing dominance and totalizing power of representations and images, Guy Debord suggests that representations form a network constituting a spectacle which is closer to people than the non-representational: Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation. The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be re-established. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation… The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. (Debord 1983, 5)

He also argues that images and representations have become an important part of the economic world, where it is difficult to separate the economic realm from the cultural realm. In contemporary life, the most developed form of the commodity is the image, instead of the concrete material product. Indeed, many theorists have argued that the postmodern world is saturated with representations and simulations of all kinds. Instead of living in a world of things, human beings are now living in a world of representations of things. What was once directly experienced has now become mere representation. Signs, representations, images, and simulations form a crucial part of the postmodern world. In his discussion of electronic terminal space, Scott Bukatman points out that “the rise of simulation as a prevalent form” is a frequently noted phenomenon in the postmodern electronic era (Bukatman 1993, 106). He also suggests that a

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“simultaneous over- and undervaluation of sign systems” (Bukatman 1993, 106) occurs when the sign is everything but stands for nothing, as in The Matrix. The fictional world of The Matrix serves as an interesting platform from which to explore the kind of world we might be producing in the postmodern age of simulations and representations. At the beginning of the narrative, Morpheus explains to Neo the extensive, all-powerful nature of the Matrix: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth... that you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind. (The Matrix script 1999)

The Matrix is omnipresent and everything in the Matrix is simulation. Within the Matrix, displacement of reality takes place and there are only illusions and representations. Through the omnipresence of the Matrix, the film criticizes and warns against the all-powerful nature of computerconstructed reality. However, while criticizing this, the film itself relies heavily on the use of computer and digital visual effects. The movie won great acclaim for its innovative use of special effects through which virtual worlds are made “real.” Computer-enhanced and computer-generated images are somehow unconscious celebrations of technological achievements in computer simulation. As for the relationship of visual image and narrative in the science fiction movie, there is always a possibility that images and visuals may take precedence over narrative and subsequently decentre the importance of narrative. Sophisticated special effects create enjoyable visual experience, but there is also a potential danger that excessive use of visual effects will turn what might be insightful vision into mere spectacle on the screen. Visual image and representation are illusory and could distract the audience’s attraction from the narrative. With regard to the illusory nature of representation and the material world in general, Michael Brannigan reminds people not to place too much importance on the images when discussing the significance of the mirror in Buddhist teaching. He points out that the mirror only reveals and reflects what is before it, “the images are simply images, nothing more, nothing less.” (Brannigan 2002, 103) An interesting illustration of mirror reflection takes place in the Oracle’s apartment. In the waiting room, there is a Buddhist-looking boy who can

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bend a spoon by mind power. He says to Neo, “Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon. Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.” (The Matrix script 1999) This speech points to the illusory nature of image and of empirical reality in general. This illustration resonates with postmodern theories on the loss of reality in the postmodern world of representations, while the idea of turning the real into a simulation that conceals reality resonates with Jean Baudrillard’s ideas on simulacra. Early in the film, there is a direct reference to Baudrillard and his theories on simulation and hyper reality in a scene in which Neo picks up a leather-bound book entitled Simulation and Simulacra from the bookcase. Opening it at the chapter “On Nihilism,” Neo retrieves his illegal software from a hollowed-out book, a simulacrum of a book. The Matrix that is modelled on the real world of 1999 is just like Neo’s book, a hollowed-out illusion. Indeed, the whole Matrix is pure simulacrum, an alternative and absolute world that exists on its own. The simulacrum is so convincingly established that it appears to be no different from the real. Exploiting the vulnerability of the human nervous system, the Matrix sends out electrical signals directly into the human brain in such a way that direct experience is replaced by electronic simulation.

A taste of virtual reality Devaluation of direct experience is another issue tackled by the movie. In his discussion of reality in the virtual world, Slavoj Zizek criticizes the Matrix as reducing “the wealth of [the] sensory experience to not even letters, but the minimal digital series of 0 and 1, of the passing and notpassing of the electrical signal.” (Zizek 2001, 214) Morpheus presents perceptions and sensations in terms of physical states that can be interpreted by the brain. Experience is reduced and virtualized into electrical signals in a system in which direct experience is no longer possible. Explaining the workings of the Matrix to Neo, Morpheus says “What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” Provided that the Matrix sends out electrical signals in the same way as reality does, either the Matrix or the real world of 2199 seems equally real to the human brain. The Matrix is virtual, but it feels real. The people plugged into the Matrix can hardly detect any differences through sensory perception. In reality, with the use of those award-winning computer visuals, the virtual

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image of the film appears so realistic that audiences may sometimes wonder what is real and what is computer generated. The film is indeed self-reflexive in that it confronts the audience with its main theme–the question of what is real. One can scarcely differentiate between the real and the virtual solely on the basis of sensory evidence. Sensory perception is rendered unreliable in both fictional and real worlds. Though it is hard to identify the real and the simulated in terms of sensory perceptions or reductive materialism, Jorge Gracia and Jonathan Sanford suggest an interesting way of distinguishing the real and the simulated in terms of dependence and ontological status. The virtual world of the Matrix exists as long as the Artificial Intelligences keep running the simulation program, in which the ultimate energy source is the real human beings grown in the desert of the real. Therefore, the unreal world has “a weaker ontological status” because its very existence depends entirely on things in the real world, “machines, programs, electrical signals, and brains are real–which prompt the mind, also real, to produce the digital entities and appearances of the unreal world.” (Gracia and Sanford 2002, 62) The real world is independent in that it can stand on its own two feet for its existence, but the unreal world cannot. The Matrix is a perfect simulacrum whereas reality is only the hallucination of the Matrix. The distinctions between the virtual and the real implode completely in the movie. In the simulacrum, the lack of distinction between the simulation and the real leads to the blurring of the dichotomy between representation and reality. According to Baudrillard, the dissolution of dichotomies and the implosion of the real lead to states of panic and dislocation, There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality, of secondhand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience, a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic stricken production of the real referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phrase that concerns us, a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence. (Baudrillard 1994, 1213)

Baudrillard thus calls attention to the fading out of the real and argues that reality is no longer what it used to be. In contemporary culture, representation has moved in the direction of a situation of pure simulation, and everyone is going to have to rely on a second-hand or simulated

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reality. In connection with Baudrillard’s claim regarding the loss of the sense of difference, Christopher Norris makes the criticism that there is no point lamenting the lack of factual, objective or unbiased information when we simply don’t possess any yardstick–any grounds for comparison–that could enable even the most expert observer to achieve such a critical perspective. (Norris 1992, 12)

In the Matrix, Morpheus frees Neo and introduces him to the real world. Having been living in the Matrix since birth, Neo has a strong sense of dislocation and anxiety as the real world is completely different from the simulated one he used to live in. As Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift suggest, space is essential in providing “a self-grounding reality for identity” where one’s identity has intricate relationships with space (Pile and Thrift 1995, 47). Being dislocated from the external real world, Neo feels out of place and has difficulty making sense of the objective world and the self. He is overwhelmed when Morpheus reveals the truth that he has been living in a simulated, virtual world. At the same time, the audience may also experience the sense of dislocation and disbelief that overcomes Neo. In making The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers deliberately put the audience in the same position as the plugged-in human beings by showing the virtual world of the Matrix at the beginning of the movie. The film begins with the computer codes of the Matrix and then the images of the Matrix follow. Intentionally putting the Matrix before the real world misleads the audience into taking the virtual world as the real world; in addition, in this way the audience can identify with Neo more easily and experience the discovery of the real as he does. The sequence of images in the film echoes Baudrillard’s discussion of simulacrum, “the territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory– precession of simulacra–that engenders the territory.” (Baudrillard, 1994, 1) It is the Matrix, the simulacrum that precedes the real. For Neo, the path from ignorance to enlightenment is not an easy one, and he experiences both physical and mental pain in the process. When he is unplugged from his pod, the first thing he experiences is pain in his eyes. As Morpheus explains, his eyes hurt because he has “never used them before.” However, his physical pain is insignificant when compared with his mental anguish. Indeed, Neo’s adjustment period is in a way an experience of trauma. Though Neo has always wondered if there was something wrong with the world, his initial bewilderment shows that he can hardly believe that the things he has experienced up to now have all

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been simulations. Besides, the real world is far more terrible than he ever imagined. In the film, a sharp contrast between the two kinds of world is brought out through the use of colour in the shooting. The dark grey sky of the real world seems all the more terrible when it is compared with the bright blue sky in the Matrix. What appeared to be utopia turns out to be mere illusion, where the real world is indeed a dystopia. Neo seems completely unprepared for Morpheus’s presentation of the truth, and what he is introduced to entirely disorients him. The revelation of the truth of the Matrix undermines his notion of reality itself and consequently destabilizes his perception of the objective world in general. Indeed, this sense of uncertainty is not limited to the perception of immediate surroundings but also involves past experiences, memories and beliefs. Neo’s past experiences are rendered untrustworthy and unjustifiable, and this consequently undermines his belief system and leads to a strong sense of dislocation and uncertainty as regards the present. Neo now doubts the material world and his own existence. Now that Neo is dislocated from his past experiences, his sense of nostalgia, loss, and disappointment may be observed when he is being driven by car to the Oracle’s apartment. Looking out the window, Neo sees the noodle place he used to visit in the past. He cannot help but exclaim, “God, I used to eat here… really good noodles,” but then disappointedly remembers the existence of the Matrix and says, “I have these memories from life… none of them happened.” (The Matrix script 1999) Memory shapes a being. Possessing nothing but memories of non-authentic, simulated experience, Neo’s sense of subjectivity has become insecure. Doubts and fears prevail when Neo realizes that everything can be simulated from without. Revolving around the question of reality, the film is also concerned with the idea of not being able to make sense of the real world. Faced as we are with the world of virtual simulacrum, the issue of freeing the mind is one of the keynotes of the film. Instead of our passively receiving information provided by outside forces, the movie implies that we should possess a strong mind that has the power to act on its own. The mind is the key to self-knowledge and self-realization. In the struggle between Morpheus and Neo within the Construct, Morpheus tells Neo that it is not his technique that is his weak point; it is Neo’s mind that defeats Neo: Neo, ‘I thought it wasn’t real.’ Morpheus, ‘Your mind makes it real.’ Neo, ‘If you’re killed in the Matrix, you die here?’ Morpheus, ‘The body cannot live without the mind.’ (The Matrix script 1999)

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Minds are real. When the mind takes the virtual for the real, the virtual will affect the real. The world a human being perceives has a great impact on their subjective state of mind and the projections of human consciousness. Morpheus asserts the essential relationship between the mind, the physical body and the self. This explains why the fight takes place in the Construct, and yet Neo in physical form is still hurt and bleeds. The simulated world inside the Matrix is virtual, but death within the Matrix is not virtual. Death in the Matrix means death in the real world and vice versa. However, once the mind is free from confusion and can identify the virtual as the unreal, the mind will cease to be affected by the virtual. This occurs after Neo’s resurrection. It is this resurrection that frees Neo’s mind and gives him the ability to go beyond the rules of the Matrix, moulding it to his own will. Once Neo frees his mind, it is strong enough for him to deprogram himself and suspend the rules of the Matrix. He gains the ability to go beyond the imprisoning limitations of the Matrix and remain unaffected by what happens in virtual. At the same time, Neo can reprogram himself to perform extraordinary acts such as dodging bullets or reacting with superhuman speed. Playfulness is to be observed when death is immediately followed by rebirth, just like a restart in a computer game. Indeed, this resurrection and other extraordinary superhuman acts tend to shift the movie into the fantasy mode of narration. Perhaps the fantastic elements serve as a means to sharpen the audience’s awareness of reality by defamiliarizing it through fantasy. The free mind serves as an essential element for self-empowerment and liberation from the power of the Matrix. However, Slavoj Zizek points out a dilemma observable in the film. Zizek suggests that the additional power gained from freeing the mind does not lead to true liberation, as the problem is “all [those miracles] are possible only if we remain within the virtual reality sustained by the Matrix and merely bend or change its rule. Our “real” status is still that of slaves of the matrix.” (Zizek 2001, 227) This is an inconsistency concerning the power of the mind and the liberation of humanity that is observed but never finally resolved. Nevertheless, the film taken all in all celebrates the omnipotence of thought and the power of free will. It is the mind, not the physical body, which acts as the grounding of the subject in the narrative.

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Conclusion The narrative structure of the movie The Matrix is crucial in bringing out the importance of the mind in the discovery of what is real and the discovery of the self. Besides this, the interface between the Matrix and the human is a critical boundary between the real world and the virtual world that redefines the conception of the human self through the transgressive potential of the mind. Morpheus and the other team members are living out a border existence between the real and the virtual. After being unplugged from the Matrix, they are capable of moving between the two spaces at will; they can choose to stay inside the submarine-like hovercraft in the real world or connect to the simulated reality offered by the Matrix. The Matrix-human interface is where the subject transgresses, and it is the mind and not the body that crosses the boundaries when the subject jacks into the Matrix. The limits and definitions of a human’s physical presence are put under question during the process of jack-in. During this jack-in, the boundaries between the human and the machines are eroded, with the subject simultaneously existing in two worlds, the physical body in the real world and the self in the Matrix. It is a state in which the human brain and virtual reality interpenetrate, which leads to a sense of extension of being beyond the physical materiality of the human body. The assumption regarding a unitary self, bounded by a distinguishable physical body, is consequently undermined. The permeability of boundaries between the human and the virtual space and the blurring of the human-machine may suggest that there is no body that is essentially or uniquely human, an idea which radically decentres the notion of the human body as the principal grounding of human subjectivity. Displacement of the body within and across virtual reality demands a reconsideration of what it is to be human. The act of boundary transgression causes the subject to negotiate its existence between alternative worlds, which in turn reaffirms the importance of the mind in human subjectivity. The construction of human identity takes place not only in relation to technology, but also in relation to the nature of reality itself. By considering the ontology of simulacrum in virtual reality, the film provides visions of a society increasingly dominated by media, images and information. In addition to this, the movie also foregrounds the implications of virtual reality for the human subject and suggests alternative mappings of human subjectivity. Whereas in theory the real and the unreal are mutually exclusive terms, the emergence of virtual reality undermines this

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distinction. The presence of perfect representations and simulacra leads people to reconsider the idea of what absolute difference really means. Reality is said to be becoming displaced by simulated realities, and the blurring or erosion of distinctions between reality and simulation is regarded as one of the central features of postmodern experience. In the postmodern realm of The Matrix, dissolution of the subject comes with this crisis of reality.

Works cited Barnett, Chad. 2000. “Reviving Cyberpunk, (Re)constructing the Subject and Mapping Cyberspace in the Wachowski Brothers’ film The Matrix,” Extrapolation 41, pp. 359-74. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra & Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaster, Ann Arbor. The University of Michigan Press. Brannigan, Michael. 2002. “There is No Spoon, A Buddhist Mirror,” in The Matrix and Philosophy, Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Chicago: Open Court, pp. 101-10. Bukatman, Scott. 1989. “The Cybernetic (City) State, Terminal Space Becomes Phenomenal,” in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 2, pp. 43-63. —. 1993. Terminal Identity, the Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press. Cavallaro, Dani. 2000. Cyberpunk and Cyberculture, Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson. London: Athlone Press. Debord, Guy. 1983. The Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red. Dumit, Joseph. 1995. “Brain-Mind Machines and American Technological Dream Marketing, Towards an Ethnography of Cyborg Envy,” in Chris Hables Gray et al (Eds.), Cyborg Handbook. New York: Routledge, pp. 347-62. Gracia, Jorge, Jonathan Sanford. 2002. “The Metaphysics of the Matrix,” in The Matrix and Philosophy, Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Chicago: Open Court, pp.55-65. Hollinger, Veronica. 2000. “Cybernetic Deconstructions, Cyberpunk and Postmodernism,” in Mosaic 2, pp. 29-44. Lawler, James. 2002. “We Are (the) One! Kant Explains How to Manipulate the Matrix,” in The Matrix and Philosophy, Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Chicago: Open Court, pp. 138-152. Norris, Christopher. 1992. “Baudrillard and the War that Never Happened,” in Uncritical Theory, Postmodernism, Intellectuals & the Gulf War. Boston: The University of Massachusetts Press.

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Pile, Steve, Nigel Thrift (eds.). 1995. “Introduction,” in Mapping the Subject, Geographies of Cultural Transformation. London: Routledge. Schick, Theodore. 2002. “Fate, Freedom, and Foreknowledge,” in The Matrix and Philosophy, Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Chicago: Open Court, pp. 87-98. Turkle, Sherry.1996. Life on the Screen, Identity in the Age of the Internet. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Zizek, Slavoj. 2001. Enjoy Your Symptom!, Jacques Lacan in Hollywoodand Out. New York: Routledge.

Films cited The Matrix.1999. Dir. Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski. Warner Brothers; script available at http://sfy.ru/?script=matrix_ts.

PART IV VAMPIRES AND MACHINES

CHAPTER ELEVEN OUT OF THIS WORLD: (ARCH)ANGELS AS THE NEW VAMPIRES? NALINI SINGH’S ANGELS’ BLOOD ANDREEA ùERBAN Introduction Straddling the boundary between urban fantasy and paranormal romance, Nalini Singh’s Guild Hunter series introduces readers to an alternative, futuristic world, where angels, vampires and humans coexist. The series now numbers five volumes (with three more scheduled for this and the following two years (Luthy 2013) and its success has grown steadily since 2009, when the first volume–Angels’ Blood–was published. If, as discussed elsewhere (*RúDDQGùHUEDQ , such other vampire collections as Twilight deals with the angelization of the vampire, and The Black Dagger Brotherhood presents a heroified high-society vampire race ùHUEDQ  , Nalini Singh’s Guild Hunter series draws an even closer connection between these two types of creatures: in her fictional universe, vampires are created by a toxin regularly purged from the bodies of angels. For the duration of their fixed long-term contract, vampires occupy the lowly role of servants for their angel-cum-creator. However, if they choose to remain loyal to a particular angel, they become members of an elite army, promoted to a new role–that of protectors. In this alternative world, it is not only humans who seem caught in the middle, as they dream of immortality and can petition to become vampires, but angels too. These powerful and lethal creatures can also make a choice, veering towards vampirism and blood lust, or towards humanity and transformative love, according to their innermost desires. In a nutshell, the main storyline centers on Elena, a human vampire hunter, who is employed by Raphael, the Archangel of New York, to track a young vampire. Gradually, it is revealed that the presumed vampire is

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actually another archangel, who has given in to blood lust, has become power-crazed and has regressed. Although they start out on the wrong foot, Elena and Raphael fall in love, punish the villain and end up living a literal happily-ever-after, as Elena herself becomes an immortal angel at the end of the first book of the series. What this study aims to explore in particular is the intricately connected otherworldliness and humanity of Singh’s protagonists, the power relations between the three “races” that form her universe, and the courtship patterns established between a human and an angelic or vampiric Other. However, before dealing with Singh’s not entirely human protagonists, let us briefly look at the spatiality created in the Guild Hunter collection.

An Other world: New York of the imagination In an article on “the city of the imagination” and science fiction films, Vivian Sobchack (cited in Collie 2011, 424) argues that this imaginary architecture plays a much more important role than that of a mere background, bringing together “the anxieties, desires and fetishes of a culture’s waking world and dream world” and “literally ‘real-is[ing]’ the imaginary and the speculative”. Discussing the complex relationship between urban space, narratives and community engagement, Collie (2011, 425) suggests that cities become “enmeshed” in narratives of their spatiality. Over time, some stories become more popular and even more accepted than others, thus raising the issue of power by “inscrib[ing] boundaries that socially include some and exclude others.” (Collie 2011, 425) In a famous essay on walking as a way of experiencing the urban space, de Certeau (1984, 115-118) explicitly links narratives to space and everyday spatial practices and argues that narratives about place generate another, metaphorical–fantasy-generated, I would say–geography of the city that supersedes the real, literal geography of the actual city. For him, stories produce “geographies of actions” by traversing and organizing places and spaces, and establish hierarchies of spatiality based on processes of territoriality and othering. Despite chiefly occupying the heart of a futuristic New York City– Manhattan–Nalini Singh’s universe is built both horizontally and vertically. Together with the characters, readers too thus move both upwards, into the realm of (arch)angels and skyscrapers surrounding Archangel Tower, and downwards, into the realm of vampire hunters and

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their recovery hideout, the Guild’s Cellars. The novels thus traverse the urban grid-like space of the actual New York and reorganize it so as to present the power relations between the three races which together inhabit it. Structured in levels and layers, Singh’s New York of the imagination is a perfect mirror of the chain of creation that lives and moves within it. Each of the three main types of beings occupies a level of Singh’s world, from the underground through ground level, ending high up in the sky. While ordinary humans spend their ignorant lives close to earth and vampires mingle with them, angels usually fly, while vampire hunters move from the lowest up to the highest of these levels. The spatial universe is shadowed by the social one, in which Singh’s chain of being–read in terms of “degrees of” immortality–stretches upward from human through vampire to (arch)angel. However, as the story unfolds, it is revealed that each of the three races finds itself between the two others from one perspective or another. Thus, even archangels, the creatures who are presumed to have limitless power, actually find themselves in the middle of this hierarchy, liable to give in to one of the other “statuses” and develop the features of a vampire (e.g. the fangs and bloodthirst of Uram, the archangel of Eastern Europe) or of a human (e.g. the sensitivity of Raphael, the archangel of New York). Hierarchies thus grow blurred, and verticality and horizontality become fluid, as either power or love claims the leaders of Singh’s world; yet both categories make a conscious choice of the path towards their regression or evolution respectively. Visible from all parts of the city, not only is Archangel Tower a phallic symbol of power through the way it establishes strict hierarchies, but it also plays on the idea of constant surveillance, reminding one of Foucault’s (1995, 195-207) panopticism and social control. Paradoxically, however, even though the Tower stands for the city’s paramount centre of command, it is not explicitly described as exercising an omnipresent gaze over the city’s inhabitants, but rather the other way around. It is Elena, the vampire hunter, who constantly watches this guardian “tower of light and glass,” (Singh 2010, 9) fascinated by the celestial beings that fly in and out of it. She looked up, able to see the light-filled column of the city's Archangel Tower from the huge plate-glass window that had made this apartment so ridiculously expensive… and attractive. Being able to sit and watch the angels take wing from the high balconies of the Tower was her guiltiest pleasure.

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At night, they appeared as soft, dark shadows. But in the daytime, their wings shimmered bright in the sun, their movements incredibly graceful. They came and went throughout the day, but sometimes she saw them simply sitting, high up on those balconies, their legs hanging over the sides. The younger angels, she'd guessed, though youth was a relative term. (Singh 2010, 8-9)

In addition to amplifying power, Singh’s version of the Foucauldian Panopticon also represents the crux of her fictional universe. It is the meeting point of the upper and the lower levels in this metaphorical version of an archangel-ruled New York, where the three races that inhabit it (the human Elena, the archangel Raphael and the vampire Dmitri) frequently interact. It is in the Tower that vampires work and throw elegant cocktail parties, and it is only when specifically summoned by Archangel Raphael that a human ever walks the halls of Archangel Tower. Singh’s urban geography translates into the opposition of good/bad vampires, where the “good” vampires are Raphael’s loyal helpers, who live in the centre of the city and are presented against exclusive backgrounds (e.g. Dmitri), while the bad vampires are the strays who, having escaped from their masters’ service, hide in the slums or on the outskirts of the city (e.g. the young vampire Elena is hunting at the very beginning of the story.) Away from the urban grid, metaphorical as it may be, lies “Angel Enclave,” a spacious private area dominated by elegant manor houses belonging to the angels. A gated community to which not the rich and powerful but angelic creatures have access, Angel Enclave is ordered according to the Foucauldian logic of the panoptic and social exclusion, functioning as a Tower-surrogate symbol of power. This area was marked on maps as the Fort Lee / Palisades region, but even non-New Yorkers called it the Angel Enclave. Elena didn't know anyone who'd ever been beyond the gates that guarded each magnificent property. Angels were very private when it came to their homes. (Singh 2010, 193)

Within this naturally insulated area, each property is “guarded” by gates (yet another symbol of power), which inscribe further boundaries meant to exclude such socially inferior beings as humans. Although vampires come and go quite freely, doing the bidding of their angelic masters, only the human protagonist is allowed to penetrate this sanctuary and that only because she is indispensable to the successful accomplishment of the task–the capture of a blood-archangel.

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Juxtaposing the fears and desires of contemporary society, Singh’s New York of the imagination illustrates de Certeau’s “geography of actions”, where humans, angels and vampires alike are on the move, constantly inscribing new social as well as “racial” borders.

Not of this world: Vampires and angels as the new colonizers A keyword behind the idea of colonialism is progress (Jameson 2007, 284), a form of social memory demanded by capitalism. In Jameson’s view, progress represents “an awareness of qualitative social change that links the past to the present under the narrative logic of growth and development.” (Rieder 2005) Thus progress codes non-white peoples as savage brutes, childlike innocents who need the white man’s protection, while the entire non-European world is cast not just as Other but as the past, undeveloped and primitive. In his seminal book Orientalism, Edward Said defined the East by everything the West is not, i.e. in terms of lack and inferiority (Said 2006, 39-41, 45). According to Said, identity is constructed by establishing “others;” every culture requires the existence of a different and competing alter ego. The process of othering is always reciprocal and involves the agency of both sides, each of whom establishes its identity by contrast to the other. Basically, otherness prominently refers either to a lack or absence, i.e. different from the norm either within a culture or between cultures; or to an excess or incongruity. By bringing together and contrasting three cultures and views of the world, Singh’s series explores what it means to be human. It is noteworthy that in Singh’s universe, humans are a prerequisite for the survival of both vampires and angels, as both of the other “species” need human beings in order to survive: the angels periodically need to eliminate a toxin from their body and thus they create vampires, who, in their turn, need human blood to survive. Both angels and vampires are thus described in relation to humans in a way that reminds readers of colonialism and power relations. Both angels and vampires are defined by what humans are not but dream of being–namely, immortal. Adapting Said’s theory to Singh’s universe, I would like to suggest that both angels and vampires represent new forms of colonizers, with their own beliefs systems, values and ideology. Supreme physical and political power lies in the hands of the archangels and angels, as lethal as they are beautiful. Purging their bodies of a dangerous toxin, angels carefully select humans who will be turned into vampires and will serve their makers.

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Second in the “food chain” come the vampires. The dominant culture of the angels keeps vampires in check, since a vampire candidate has to sign in his/her own blood a 100-year contract of servitude with the angel that makes him. Because of this, vampires represent a gated community, closing ranks around the angels that have bestowed on them their much yearned-for immortality in exchange for a limited period of service. Any act of disobedience or rebellion (such as running away) on the part of a serving vampire entails physical punishment and torture by its angel-cummaker, the runaway being captured with the help of a Guild Hunter. Nevertheless, despite their subordination in the social hierarchy of Singh’s fantasy world, vampires hold a somehow privileged position: after being symbolically colonized themselves, they then “colonize” former peers (i.e. other humans), whose life resource (i.e. blood) they use to satisfy their basic needs. Finally, lowest in the hierarchy, humans are the twice-colonized race. Gregarious and eager for immortality, humans represent vessels of purification on the one hand, and means of sustenance on the other, thus being indispensable to both angels and vampires. All in all, whereas angelic colonialism relies on the promise of immortality (sometimes with such unexpected consequences as mental disorders–as in the case of Slater Patalis, who slaughtered half of Elena’s family), vampiric colonialism is centered on the promise of immense pleasure, read especially as unimaginable sexual gratification.

Otherworldliness vs. humanity Investigating the figure of the alien in science fiction cinema, Sardar and Cubitt (2002, 10-11) argue that the alien presence has, in time, undergone many transformations, having also become “an entirely earthly and contemporary metaphor” against such evils as communism, totalitarianism and nuclear war. According to these researchers, in science fiction narratives “civilization, [particularly] the civilization of the West, is always on the frontier,” (Sardar and Cubitt 2002, 11-12) while the figure of the alien-cum-Other holds up a mirror to humanity, reflecting by contrast what it means to be human. Reading representations of the alien body in science fiction and fantasy, Jameson (2007, 121-122) suggests that we usually form our image of the Other first and foremost on the basis of the body itself. To the different body of the Other, exemplified in our case by angels’ wings and vampires’ highly developed sense of smell, additional senses like telepathy may be added. However, as Jameson (2007, 123) further argues, telepathy

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is a rather negative attribute because it plays on the fear of violation and overpossessiveness. Although not from another planet, but not (entirely) human either, angels and vampires allow for an examination of humanity on the frontier, especially in terms of power relations and courtship rituals established between a human and an Other. This section of the paper will therefore explore the means used by Nalini Singh to convey the nexus of otherworldly and human features and traits of her characters. Looking at one character from each race, I shall discuss their striking physical features and manipulative psychic abilities. In addition, I will especially focus on the power relations established between the human (female) protagonist and a male Other, be he a vampire or an archangel.

Beautiful creatures First, let us focus on the female protagonist. In a world where angel power and vampire eroticism dominate, our heroine cannot be a mere human. That is why Elena (Elieanora) Devereaux is far from the “damsel in distress” type of heroine. Rather, she is a female hero, with a masculine occupation and a warrior’s strength, a woman who makes conscious choices about the roles she wants to play. She becomes a problematic character through issues related to the performance of gender, i.e. a specific type of self-presentation. Starting from the sex/gender distinction made by the English-speaking feminists of the 1960s, where sex was a biological and gender a social and cultural category (Moi 2005, 3), it may be inferred that gender identity is constructed through “something we do rather than [through] something we are” (Moi 2005, 56, italics in the original.) Much like cultural practices, gender thus becomes a reason for social marginalization or exclusion. Although biologically female, and in spite of her sexual attractiveness, Elena seems strangely masculinized, as she performs masculinity for the greater part of the novel. A vampire hunter, Elena is singled out twice at the very beginning both through her choice of profession (“Licensed to Hunt Vampires and Assorted Others,” (Singh 2010, 1) including a special highlight on the financial benefits) and as regards her physical appearance, in this precise order. The primary focus on her occupation as a vampireslayer is meant to underline her gender–the public, professional aspect of her life, as different from her privacy as a woman. Gradually, readers find out that Elena is

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a too tall female with pale, almost white hair and silver eyes. The hair was a pain in the butt. […] It was a good thing she’d inherited dark gold skin from her Moroccan grandmother or she’d have resembled a ghost. […] Her hair tumbled around her shoulders in a soft cloud, distinctive and bright. It wasn’t a risk. […] She knew what he [the vampire] saw. A lone female with bimbo blonde hair, dressed in black leather jeans and a form-fitting long-sleeved top in the same color, no visible weapons. (Singh 2010, 1-2)

It is the visual impact, the unexpected combinations of colours (almost white, Barbie-doll-like hair, silver eyes and dark gold skin) that lend Elena a strange, unearthly aspect, with only the mentioning of the “no visible weapons” suggesting the danger behind the easy woman disguise. In addition to her chosen profession, which has triggered her exclusion from her family, Elena’s “kick ass” uniform most often comprises black or dark clothes, with the occasional leather item (the leather jeans mentioned above,) further contributing to the overall description of the female protagonist as a female hero. Moreover, her initial mission of enforcing the law against vampires who violate the blood-signed contract turns into a mission to save the entire world from the blood-craze of the archangel Uram. This performed masculinity of Elena’s, emphasized through her combat clothes and occupation, may be read as a modern version of the Greek myth of the Amazons, those fearsome warrior women, endowed both with feminine beauty and with strong, athletic bodies, as well as being capable of remarkable prowess in battle (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 1993, 92-93). The connection with the mythical Amazons is made obvious in terms not only of Elena’s attractive appearance, but also of her physical fitness and more-than-human strength. Furthermore, Nalini Singh’s vampire hunters are essentially a group of women–despite the occasional and rather effeminate-looking man; they are led by a woman director, Sarah, a former hunter herself, exceptionally skilled with the bow and arrow, yet another nod in the direction of the legendary warrior women. Later, Raphael too associates Elena’s fierce spirit with that tribe, while commenting on his choice of sexual partners and underlining twice that all his lovers have been “warrior women.” (Singh 2010, 51, 214) The fact that Elena is closely associated with the Amazons also comes out through the way she is treated by another female. Much as it happened among the ancient Greeks, who viewed Amazons as unnatural freaks EHFDXVHWKH\GLGQRWFRQIRUPWRWKHLUSDWULDUFKDOYLHZRIWKHZRUOG%DEHĠL 2002), Elena too is looked down on by Michaela, archangel of Central Europe, when she realizes that she has a competitor for Raphael’s (erotic) attention. Michaela’s statement–“She is nothing, a man in women’s

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clothing.” (Singh 2010, 197)–is meant to downgrade not only Elena’s femininity, read as her ability to seduce a man, but also her entire existence. At the same time, the comment highlights the hunter’s performed femininity through its reference to the clothes she wears. From Michaela’s point of view, Elena is merely masquerading as a woman, since it is her warrior occupation that defines her gender. As mentioned before, the hunter’s clothing is always rather masculine, a combination of black cargo trousers and dark T-shirts. Intended to challenge both Raphael’s and the readers’ perception of our female hero, Michaela’s critical comment fails to downgrade Elena and ultimately reveals the archangel’s envy. Elena is set apart for a third time by the mention of the fact that she renounced her personal life as a consequence of a traumatic incident (when half of her family were killed by an insane vampire) in order to become the best in her field. Something alluded to in various ways twelve times in the book is the fact that Elena is “hunter-born”, not trained. As a consequence, she has a highly sensitive sense of smell, which helps her in her job, making her into the most gifted and valued of hunters. Closely related to both Michaela’s jealous comment above and to her own traumatic childhood experience, it is interesting to notice Elena’s fourth singling out (in addition to her profession, appearance and abilities), this time in regard to her feeling of inadequacy as a woman, unable to make friends outside of her profession or to remain in a stable relationship. As early as chapter 2, readers learn that, while her co-workers have settled down and now have families of their own, “she remained in limbo, a twenty-eight-year-old vampire hunter with no strings, no attachments.” (Singh 2010, 11) Later on, comparing her relationship with Raphael to her previous relationships with ordinary human men, Elena yet again points out her deficiencies: “All her life, she’d been too strong, too fast, too unfeminine for human men. They liked her, but after a while, most claimed she made them feel emasculated.” (Singh 2010, 134) This mention of the emasculation of her male partners harks back to the Amazons and their intimidating martial beauty. This inadequacy among her own kind–i.e. humans–, together with her wish for wings, develops a whole new meaning in Elena’s interactions with the vampire Dmitri and the archangel Raphael, and finally ensures her a place among the angels, as one of their own–a fifth and final highlighting of her singularity. Thus when, at the end of the story, it is revealed that Elena is the first angel ever to have been created, she is cast as unique through her “warrior wings,” “like blades” (Singh 2010, 332):

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[S]he turned her head and saw what she was lying on. Wings. Such beautiful wings. A rich, evocative black that swept gracefully outward in subtle increments of indigo, deepest blue, and dawn until the primaries were a vivid, shimmering white gold. Midnight wings. Incredible wings. (Singh 2010, 332)

The wings that Elena dreamt of at the beginning of the story now have a twofold significance: they are both a symbol of her resurrection and the reward for the well-done job of saving the world. Besides this, these wings stand for her advancing in the chain of creation, which will ensure a literal ever-after with her immortal archangel lover. By comparison, the Other combines human features with supernatural, non-human traits and elements. Physically speaking, both angels and their vampire helpers are arrestingly attractive “Ken-like” males, with beautiful athletic bodies, exotic eye colours and eye-shapes, as well as distinctive body scents. Even if they appear sexually or dangerously threatening towards the human protagonist, Singh’s vampiric sidekicks ultimately illustrate “‘the four B’s of the new vampire’: beautiful, bright, bold and benefic.” *RúDDQGùHUEDQ 5DSKDHO¶VYDPSLUHVDOOWXUQRXWWREH sexually attractive, clever, brave and loyal, members of an elite army whose mission is to protect their master against any enemy at whatever costs. Although they are usually referred to as “men,” their otherworldliness is highlighted through the fascinating abilities they have developed over the multiple centuries of their existence. Incredibly charismatic and stunningly beautiful when older, Singh’s vampires have a dark intense scent and do not burst into flames if they go out in the sunlight. The oldest vampire in the story (about 1,000 years old) and the leader of Raphael’s guard (a.k.a. “the Seven”), Dmitri is first referred to as “the doorvamp,” and is described through his “secret agent” appearance–dark suit, white shirt, with the expected dark glasses and earphone–, yet what identifies him as not human is his “insidiously seductive” scent. (Singh 2010, 13) Together with Elena, readers gradually learn that Dmitri has a talent for sensual decoration (the room where vampires host parties in the Archangel Tower) and “a beautiful, deep voice.” (Singh 2010, 62) He is “wet-dream beautiful–silky black hair, dark, dark eyes, skin that spoke of the Mediterranean rather than the Slavic climes.” (Singh 2010, 63) He also has the ability to entrance not only ordinary humans but also hunters with his “truly intoxicating–rich and dark and luscious” scent, a “seductive chocolate cake and frosting and sex with all the toppings kind of smell.” (Singh 2010, 62, 179) In addition to his being old and experienced and to liking challenges, we also find out

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that he was Made against his will (chapter 36), a pawn used against Raphael by a rejected female archangel. Venom, another member of Raphael’s Seven, is another handsome old vampire, whose seductive abilities are centered on his lips: “He was wearing sunglasses with a black-on-black suit, his chocolate-dark hair cut like some GQ model's, but his lips... they were dangerous. Bitable. Sensual.” (Singh 2010, 192) Yet what differentiates him from all the other Singh vampires is the shape of his eyes: “she got the full impact of his eyes. Bright green and slitted like a snake’s.” (Singh 2010, 192) Unlike Dmitri’s scent-induced seduction, Venom has developed “the power to entrance humans, much as a cobra did its prey.” (Singh 2010, 295) Contrastingly, it is the language of adoration and idealized immortality together with a particular physical feature (wings) that creates distinctions among the all-beautiful (arch)angels. If vampires stand out through their abilities, angels do so through the splashes of colour they flaunt not only in their wings but also in their eyes or skin. That the angels are worshipworthy is evident in the description of any such character, yet they are humanized through the use of the word “man.” For example, an angel like Illium, who serves as Elena’s bodyguard, is “an DPD]LQJO\EHDXWLIXO man with blue wings” (Singh 2010, 226, my emphasis), which are also touched with silver, while his eyes are “a vivid, shimmering gold, startling against black hair dipped in blue.” (Singh 2010, 226) Jason, Raphael’s spymaster, has wings of “a deep, sooty black,” which seem “to absorb light, the edges fading into the spreading gloom.” (Singh 2010, 286) Unlike Illium, Jason stands out because of an exotic tattoo that covers all of his left-hand side in a mixture of fine dots and swirling curves, the ink pure black against his glowing brown skin. There was a hint of Polynesia in that skin, that tattoo, but the sharpness of his facial features hinted at part of her own ancestry. Old Europe mixed with the exotic winds of the Pacific—it was one hell of a sexy combination. (Singh 2010, 285)

Just as in the case of the vampires, the fragment is centered on the sensual impact the angel has on the protagonist, but it also touches on a feeling of kinship through the description of the facial features and the implied marginalization. By comparison, our male protagonist, Raphael, is, from Elena’s viewpoint, again singled out by his physical beauty. She took a deep breath and a step backward before turning to face him. The impact hit her like a physical blow. He was... “Beautiful.” Eyes of such

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pure undiluted blue it was as if some heavenly artist had crushed sapphires into his paints and then colored in the irises with the finest of brushes. She was still reeling from the visual shock when a sudden wind swept across the rooftop, lifting up strands of his black hair. But black was too tame a word for it. It was so pure it held echoes of the night, vivid and passionate. Cut in careless layers that stopped at the nape of his neck, it bared the sharp angles of his face and made her fingers curl with the urge to stroke. Yes, he was beautiful, but it was the beauty of a warrior or a conqueror. This man had power stamped on every inch of his skin, every piece of his flesh. And that was before she took in the exquisite perfection of his wings. The feathers were a soft white and appeared dusted with gold. But when she concentrated, she saw the truth—each individual filament of each individual feather bore a golden tip. (Singh 2010, 17-18, my emphasis)

Cast as a warrior, similarly to Elena, and hence all the more a suitable valiant partner, Raphael is the only one worthy of the warrior woman, an equivalent of the mythical Orlando. As emphasized in the above fragment, Raphael is shown as a creature out of this world, while the language of adoration combines words denoting physical beauty and intense colours (sapphire-blue, black and gold) and has an almost physical impact on Elena. It is also meant to position Raphael at the top of the Singh-created universe, while simultaneously highlighting his otherworldliness. Indeed, so out of our world is Raphael that human imagination cannot grasp his “eyes of impossible blue” (Singh 2010, 31, my emphasis), which adds to his individualizing cool “clean, fresh, rainy scent of the sea.” (Singh 2010, 88, 175) Another archangel, Michaela, is set apart through her physical perfection (emphasized through the use of superlative adjectives and adverbs): The other archangel had skin the color of the most exquisite, fine milk chocolate and a shining fall of hair that cascaded to her waist in a wild mass. Her body was quintessentially female, slender and curvy at the same time, her wings a delicate bronze that shimmered against the richness of her skin. Her face... “Wow.” Even from this distance, Michaela's face was perfection given form. Elena fancied she could see her eyes—a bright, impossible green—but knew she had to be imagining it. They were too far away. […] She was beautiful beyond compare. Even among angelkind, she'd always been the brightest of stars, never lacking for lovers or attention. (Singh 2010, 26, 42, my emphasis)

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Her otherworldly beauty seems overwhelming to the human imagination, as the description of the archangel’s face is summed up by an interjection indicating amazement (“Wow”) and an abstract noun (“perfection”). Like Raphael’s, Michaela’s eyes also exceed the bounds of human imagination (“a bright, impossible green”). Michaela’s seductively feminine body, emphasized through the curves in her figure and hair, represents the contemporary ultimate ideal feminine body, which she flaunts in a tightly fitted garment and which also bespeaks her vanity. At the same time, Michaela’s otherwordliness–now read as immortality–is conveyed through the primary focus on her wings and the colour scheme of her appearance (bronze, green, brown and gold): The woman stood by the mantel, wings of bronze, eyes too green to be mortal, and skin of such a beautiful dusky shade it was as if gold had been pounded into bronze and then mixed with cream. Her hair was a curly mass of brown and gold that reached the curve of her butt. A butt displayed very nicely in the catsuit currently painted over her body. A shimmery bronze, the garment zipped up the front and left her arms bare. Right now, it was unzipped just enough to hint at the perfect globes of her breasts. (Singh 2010, 195)

By contrast, beside her physical perfection, another archangel, Lijuan, also stands out through her ethereal appearance: “strange pearl grey eyes,” (Singh 2010, 44) and the “ghostly wind she alone could generate,” (Singh 2010, 98) which causes her hair to float. Perhaps most important here is the fact that Lijuan is the only angel to display slight marks of age (wrinkles) and to rejoice in them, unlike human women, who usually try to conceal such marks. Although both are worshipped by humans because of their beauty and immortality, both angels and vampires are imperfect creations. Even though they wield great physical, psychological and financial power, the angels’ knowledge is seen to be limited, as Raphael confesses to Elena that they never know the full details of the Making process and, consequently, there is the occasional failure (e.g. the afore-mentioned case of the mentally deranged vampire Slater Patalis). As concerns their abilities, archangels’ powers are also limited. Even if they all glow when infuriated, not all archangels can hide themselves in “glamour” to become invisible (Michaela), create energy bolts or “angelfire” (Michaela), or communicate mind-to-mind, as Raphael does. Having briefly observed the unearthliness of Singh’s characters, let us now move on to the ways the non-human characters exploit their

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psychological abilities and heightened sexuality in terms of courtship rituals and patterns of seduction.

Seduced by an Other Sexuality–argues Palumbo (1986, 3)–is a distinctive characteristic of fantastic literature, usually regarded as a way to symbolically calm humanity’s fears of the unknown in general and of death in particular. Palumbo further explains that in fantasy, above all, sexual intercourse is seen as the antidote of death and is even associated with immortality. In our case study, however, immortality is embodied in two rather contrasting creatures, i.e. an archangel and a vampire, who are stereotypically linked to life and light and to darkness and death respectively, yet each of whom promises unimaginable sexual satisfaction. In a study devoted to sexual intercourse with aliens, Leonard Heldreth (1986, 131) explores how science fiction focuses on sensual relationships with monstrous aliens, manipulating “the sexually menacing monster cliché to portray a wide range of erotic responses to nonhuman stimulation.” He goes on to explain how fictitious sexual encounters with unearthly Others challenge taboos about “incest, bestiality, or species miscegenation”, while also raising awareness of “the dangers of stereotypes.” (Heldreth 1986, 132) The sublimated sexuality of the nonhuman Other presents desire as the ideal sexual act, even if it often contains a “promise” of death as a consequence of previously unimagined temptations (Heldreth 131-133). With Singh’s Others, their sublimated physical gorgeousness and powerful, unearthly sexuality translates into forceful seduction, read as a threat of invasion. However, the two Others that attempt to seduce our female hero should not be lightly labeled as hero and antagonist, since both archangel and vampire turn out to be beautiful monsters who abuse their powers to obtain what they want. But whereas the vampire threatens to invade only Elena’s body with his seductive scent and his drinking of blood, the archangel is the one that proves the more dangerous, as he forcefully penetrates Elena’s mind and manipulates her into physically desiring him. Although not exactly from another planet, yet definitely nonhuman, both the archangel Raphael and the vampire Dmitri represent other species that seduce Elena. Both archangel and vampire rely on sexual power and manipulation, while promising unimaginable sexual gratification. The main difference between Raphael and Dmitri, however, lies in their “prey’s” reaction to the stimulus they employ. Whereas Dmitri tries to

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entrance Elena with his seductive scent, but is always rejected, Elena’s initial rejection of Raphael, who first tries to control her mind, is subsequently replaced by a conscious physical attraction. Fancying Elena particularly because she rejects him, Dmitri uses his ability to arouse her sexual desire. His scent resembles a physical caress, as she feels “tendrils of hunger snak[ing] around her,” (Singh 2010, 94) a highly “erotic allure for her hunter-born senses.” (Singh 2010, 62) This forcible seduction is taken even further when, after shooting Raphael, Elena is tied to a chair by Dmitri himself in a way that clearly points to BDSM roleplay. Bondage, that figured. Dmitri probably liked to tie his women up in all sorts of interesting positions. Her face flushed. She didn't want him—not when he wasn’t throwing out that damn scent like a lure. But she melted the instant he turned on that talent of his. (Singh 2010, 147, my emphasis)

From Elena’s viewpoint, Dmitri’s “seduction” resembles a sexual manipulation of the senses. Since it is artificially created, through the vampire’s use of his seductive scent, the sexual tension created in the Elena-Dmitri pair is intense but short-lived and incomplete, (chapters 7 and 12) and culminates with her slashing his throat open. Once Elena is claimed by Raphael, (chapter 8) Dmitri’s sexual interest changes into an exercise in loyalty. A faithful vassal to the archangel, Dmitri becomes a loyal protector of Elena, and helping her translates, for him, into serving Raphael. Unlike with Dmitri, however, the sexual tension between Elena and Raphael builds slowly and gradually, moving from self-inflicted pain (when the archangel shows off his power, in chapter 3), through increased sensitivity to his touch (chapter 4), “mind-rape” (chapter 6), sensual manipulation (chapters 7-11, 17-18) that culminates in physical violence (when Elena shoots Raphael in an attempt to resist his sensual manipulation, in chapter 18), all the way to completed sexual intercourse (chapter 31) and a verbal declaration of love as a promise of happily-everafter (chapter 40). In the genuine “soul-mate tradition” (cf. O’Brien Mathews 2011, 7-8), both Raphael and Elena mark each other: while he coats her in angel dust, she shoots his wing, which heals in a spider-web pattern. However, unlike ZLWKRWKHUYDPSLUHVRXOPDWHVùHUEDQ WKHPDUNLQJLVKHUHSDUWRI the prelude (as opposed to the actual intercourse in the Black Dagger Brotherhood series, for example), a rather violent seductive game that brings the two increasingly closer.

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The smooth brushstrokes of gold had been interrupted at the point where Elena's bullet had torn through. Now the bottom half of that wing bore a unique pattern in gold on white—an explosion from a central point. (Singh 2010, 154)

Nonetheless, we can see some similarities to Dmitri’s approach in the fact that Raphael intensifies the sexual tension by covering Elena with a special, erotic, blend of shimmering angel dust. It is this external stimulus that prompts Elena to reject first Dmitri’s and then Raphael’s sensual advances. Depriving her of control over her own body, both the erotic scent and the aphrodisiac angel dust appear as drugs that threaten to invade her personal space and ultimately deprive her of agency. Only when the archangel rethinks his strategy and stops abusing his power to mindcontrol those around him does Elena become aware of her conscious attraction to Raphael. And then he kissed her. Her feet lifted up on tiptoe as she tried to get closer. His arms crushed her to his chest, his wings blocking out the world as she gripped his shirt and tried not to drown under the overload of pleasure. That erotic, aphrodisiac angel dust seemed to be sinking into her pores through every inch of exposed skin, snaking through her body to collect in the hot, aching place between her thighs, the excess flowing through her body in a rush of liquid heat. Her breasts ached, her lips craved him. (Singh 2010, 164)

It is Raphael’s second and “violently erotic kiss” (chapter 22) that triggers Elena’s first thought about her femininity and adequacy as a woman, especially in terms of strength. There was nothing removed or angelic about him at that moment. He was pure sexy, gorgeous male. And strong, so beautifully strong it made her feel feminine to the core. For the first time in her life, she didn’t have to hold back her hunter strength. (Singh 2010, 165, my emphasis)

Although the description of the first actual intercourse stresses the mutual immense pleasure and loss of control, the language of gratification and contentment conveys the idea of an unparalleled sexual experience (“exquisite”, “utterly magnificent”, Singh 2010, 256, 260), a genuine bonding of soul mates. Moreover, Elena’s angelification–i.e. her transformation from human with supernatural abilities and unearthly eyes into the first angel ever created (not born)–is the only change that can make possible a long-term relationship between two members of such different races/ worlds.

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Conclusion Bringing together three worlds, cultures and races, Nalini Singh’s book explores the ways they relate to and cope with one another. In this intricate futuristic universe, we are encouraged to associate, on the one hand, vampires with servitude and protection, and on the other hand, angels with politics and power. What unites these two races is a heightened sexuality, sensuality and physical beauty, which–together with immortality–compel humans to worship and devotion. Caught in the middle, between two versions of immortality, humans–even hunters like Elena–can only dream of becoming one or the other (with, I might add, a certain degree of success). Subtle colonizers, whose superiority is granted by their unlimited power and strength, both vampires and angels ultimately act as mirrors, projecting back to us the diversity of human identity and culture, with a special emphasis on the human wish for immortality and unparalleled sexual experiences. Nonetheless, although Singh’s collection introduces the theme of sexual tension between a human and an angel, the pattern of sexual encounters follows the trend established by other vampire stories such J. R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series (ùHUEDQ  . The only notable difference is that these new otherworldly creatures have wings and the power to create vampires, as well as the occasional angel.

Works Cited %DEHĠL $GULDQD  $UDKQH úL SkQ]D. 7LPLúRDUD (GLWXUD 8QLYHUVLWăĠLL de Vest. Certeau, Michel, de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Transl. by S.F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chevalier, Jean and Alain Gheerbrant. 1993. 'LFĠLRQDUGHVLPEROXUL. Vol. 1. Bucharest: Artemis. Collie, Natalie. 2011. “Cities of the imagination: Science fiction, urban space, and community engagement in urban planning”. In Futures volume 43, issue 4, pp. 424-431. Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Transl. by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. *RúD &RGUXĠD $QGUHHD ùHUEDQ  ³7KH 9DPSLUH RI WKH UG Millennium: From Demon to Angel”. In Océanide, no. 4/ 2012, Online Journal of SELICUP, edited by Rubén Jarazo Álvarez. Available at http://oceanide.netne.net/articulos/art4-10.php. Accessed 06/01/2013.

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Heldreth, Leonard. 1986. “Close encounters of the Carnal Kind: Sex with Aliens in Science Fiction”. In Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature, edited by Donald Palumbo. New York: Greenwood Press, pp. 131-144. Jameson, Fredric. 2007. Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London & New York: Verso. Luthy, Gabrielle. 2013. Nalini Singh (website). Available at http://www. nalinisingh.com/index.php. Accessed 07/04/2013. Moi, Toril. 2005. What is a Woman? Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Brien Mathews, Patricia. 2011. Fang-tastic Fiction: Twenty-firstcentury Fantastic Paranormal Reads. Philadelphia and Washington: American Library Association. Palumbo, Donald.1986. “Sexuality and the Allure of the Fantastic in Literature”. In Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature, edited by Donald Palumbo. New York: Greenwood Press, pp.3-24. Rieder, John. 2005. “Science Fiction, Colonialism and the Plot of Invasion (1)”. In Extrapolation 46.3 (Fall 2005). Available at http://www. thefreelibrary.com/Science+fiction,+colonialism,+and+the+plot+of+in vasion+%281%29.-a0141727002. Accessed 06/24/2013. Said, Edward. 2006. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Sardar, Ziauddin; Sean Cubitt. 2002. “Introduction”. In Aliens R Us. The Other in Science Fiction Cinema, edited by Ziauddin Sardar and Sean Cubitt. London & Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press, pp. 1-17. ùHUEDQ $QGUHHD  ³5RPDQFLQJ WKH SDUDQRUPDO $ &DVH 6WXG\ RQ J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood”. In Romance: The History of a Genre, edited by Dana Percec. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 89-110. Singh, Nalini. 2010 (2009). Angels’ Blood. London: Gollancz.

CHAPTER TWELVE STEAMPUNK: DISCOVERING OLD AND NEW ATTRACTIONS ANDREEA V(57(ù-OLTEANU Motto: What is steampunk? “The future ain’t what it used to be.” (Yogi Berra)

Peculiar inventions that one might come across in Jules Verne’s novels, tones of sepia, things that make you feel the “savour” of the 19th century, all characterize the artistic genre known as steampunk, fascinated with craftsmanship and retro flavours. It is the subculture which blends Victorian-age steam-engine aesthetics with modern technology in an atmosphere of romantic and, at the same time, fantastical sensibility. There is also a hint of rebellion and transgression in it, but, mainly, “a touch of technology with a pinch of antiquity and perhaps a dash of the macabre.” (Kuksi, in Moskowitz 2010) Steampunk is a re-envisioning of the past with the hypertechnological perceptions and tools of the present. Steampunk is a vibrant culture of do-it-yourself craftsmen, writers, artists, and other creative types, each with their own slightly different answer to the question: “What is it to be steampunk?” Even the genre’s name, steampunk, brings to mind a flagrant anachronism: steam is outmoded, no longer in vogue, whilst punk, especially at the time of the coinage of the term, evoked something modern and contemporary. Steampunk depends, as a genre, on a kind of double awareness, in which we perceive the Victorian era as simultaneously different from and identical with our contemporary times. Some say that steampunk is appealing because there is a close connection between the Victorian world and our own (Sweet 2001; Standage 1993), a similarity close to near-identity: More so than other historical periods, the 19th century, especially the Victorian era (1837-1901), is an excellent mirror for the modern period.

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The social, economic, and political structures of the Victorian era are essentially the same as our own, and their cultural dynamics–the way in which the culture reacts to various phenomena and stimuli–are quite similar to ours. This makes the Victorian era extremely useful for ideological stories on subjects such as feminism, imperialism, class issues, and religion, as well as for commentary on contemporary issues such as serial murderers and overseas wars. (Nevins 2008, 8)

However, in the case of steampunk, nostalgia equals denial. “Denial of the painful present. The name for this denial is Golden Age thinking–the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one’s living in.” (Paul, Midnight in Paris (2012) People turn to the past to escape in many ways, from taking part in historical re-enactments, to attending Renaissance fairs or even reading books depicting long-gone eras. Steampunks turn to the Victorian era, with its inventions and awe in the face of technology, in order to escape the present-day consumerist society of simulacra and disposability (Jones 2010, 103), to which they oppose the aura of hand-crafted objects. In this respect, the Victorians have been compared with rearview mirrors: we look forwards to see what is behind us, paradoxically quite the opposite of what we do when reading history in order to catch a glimpse of the future. (Joyce 2007, 4) We thus come to a steampunk text in order to find a confirmation of our own superiority to the sexist/racist past, only to find ourselves enmeshed in an atemporal ambiguity.

The history and development of the steampunk genre Motto:“To some, ‘steampunk’ is a catchall term, a concept in search of a visual identity. To me, it’s essentially the intersection of technology and romance.” (Jake von Slatt)

The origins of steampunk, along with SF as a genre, can be traced back to the early years of the scientific romances, Victorian penny dreadfuls, and Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires. An increasingly literate public took advantage of the opportunities for adventure and high romance offered them by Verne, H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, George Griffith, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Garrett P. Serviss, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain and Edgar Rice Burroughs, who were themselves inspired by the likes of Charles Babbage, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and the growing age of technology, colonialism, scientific exploration and heavy industry (Gross 2006).

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According to Cory Gross, a steampunk critic, the genre began at the turn of the 20th century, finding its roots in the works of two European authors, H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. Even if nobody disputes these two historical antecedents, there is however one feature that distinguishes their fiction from the steampunk movement: the latter’s affection for creative anachronism, while there was nothing retro-Victorian about either Wells’ or Verne’s retro-Victorian scientific fantasies since they were writing about their own time period. Furthermore, Gross believes in the existence of “varieties of steampunk experience,” these varieties also dating back to the same two authors, with Jules Verne inspiring a more “kitschy”, nostalgic Victoriana, while Wells’ political fiction has an impact upon those steampunks who use their work to make socialist statements. In Nostalgic Steampunk we find the creation of the Victorian Era as a Romantic myth infused with utopian desires and generally ignoring the more uncomfortable genuine history of the era. Nostalgic Steampunk— which can operate under the guises of most other terms for Steampunk, such as Victorian Science Fiction, Scientific Romance, Industrial Age Science Fiction, and so on—makes technology the portal of elegant exploration rather than the industrial torture rack of the poor, as brave soldiers and scientists of the Crown go on expeditions which don’t enslave and destroy the cultures they come across. The patron saint of Nostalgic Steampunk would easily be Jules Verne himself. The world of Verne was the world of the Voyages Extraordinaires... (Gross 2007, 62)

Nostalgic steampunk is the mythologized Victorian Era, the 19th century as it ought to have been. It revels in the elegance and the spectacle of the Empire. It chooses to close its eyes to the squalor and imperialism of this same Empire. At the opposite end of the kitsch scale is melancholia: while nostalgia is based in reconstructed conscious reminiscence, melancholia is based in intense unconscious remembrance. Nostalgia and melancholy represent two radically opposite perceptions of experience and cultural sensibilities. One, traditional, symbolic and totalizing, uses memories to conceptually complete the partiality of events, protecting them with a frozen wreath from the decomposition of time; the other, modern, allegorical and fragmentary, glorifies the perishable aspect of events, seeking in their partial and decaying memory the confirmation of its own temporal dislocation. (Olalquiaga 1998, 298)

Melancholic kitsch (patronized by the other father of SF, H.G. Wells) deals with the routine, the everyday, the plain experience of an event or a

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historical period, choosing to re-experience rather than to reinterpret. Through the eyes of melancholic steampunk we see the things that nostalgic steampunk desperately tried to ignore: corruption, decadence, poverty and intrigue. We see them as an indictment of our own times, albeit intermediated by a critique of our society’s Victorian roots. The middle of the 20th century witnessed a substantial development of the SF genre, with, however, relatively few contributions to the steampunk aesthetic, as it would later become known. Victorian science fiction went through a brief revival, but only in the movie theatres, where the stories of Jules Verne and Wells were kept in the public eye: Disney’s adaptation of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1954), Vincent Price’s Master of the World (1961) and City Under the Sea (1965), and George Pal’s War of the Worlds (1953) and The Time Machine (1960). And we should not omit Georges Melies’ inspired movie Trip to the Moon, itself a scientific romance masterpiece, released in 1902, only a year after the death of Queen Victoria! To return to steampunk, the genre really began to take shape in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when authors originally rooted in the cyberpunk genre, such as K.W.Jeter, Bruxe Sterling and William Gibson, to mention but a few, started creating alternate-history narratives, set against a Victorian background and rich in science, technology and incongruities in time. K.W. Jeter is the author responsible for having coined the term steampunk in 1979, in a letter to the editors of the SF literary magazine Locus. Arguing that fantasies set in Victorian times were the next best thing in literature, Jeter suggested that the editors name the genre after the technology on which the stories were based: steam. Due to this suggestion, Jeter’s 1979 novel Morlock Night is considered the first steampunk novel. His Infernal Devices (1987), in which a young man discovers that his clockmaker father has built clockwork humans, introduces another ‘first’ and, subsequently, popular element of the genre: robot technology with a twist, namely high-tech robotics executed with 19th century materials. In 1990, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling co-wrote The Difference Engine, perhaps the most popular and well-known example of the genre, unintentionally legitimizing the label steampunk. The two writers created a mid-Victorian world in which Charles Babbage, the real-life British mathematician-engineer, was able to realize his plans for a programmable and mechanical computer. It was in this novel that the Information Age first met the Steam Age, as the computer revolution happened a century earlier than it did in our world, with all the societal and political changes that resulted from this technological intervention. And despite the fact that Gibson expressed as his biggest desire: “I’ll be happy just as long as they

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don’t label this one. There’s been some dire talk of “steampunk,” but I don't think it’s going to stick,” (Gross 2007, 58) the name did indeed stick. Following the success of Jeter and of Gibson and Sterling, steampunk expanded in the 1990s into other textual practices, such as the role-playing game (or RPG) circuit. In 1988, Frank Chadwick created Space: 1889, a role-playing game scenario in which Thomas Edison ventured to Mars on an ether-flyer and opened up the inner solar system for colonial exploration. In the new scenario, outer space becomes accessible in Victorian times, allowing live-action game players to step into steampunk shoes. Space: 1889 ceased publication in 1991, but the mantle was picked up by the fantasy game Castle Falkenstein, which takes place in the Steam Age of the alternate world of New Europa, a game which sold out and was followed up by a steam-tech book of weird inventions and weapons and a horror-steampunk supplement called screampunk. Graphic novels extended steampunk’s reach into the visual until the genre finally invaded mainstream culture through the 1999 publication of the illustrated series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Written by graphic novelist Alan Moore and illustrated by Kevin O’Neill, the series, based upon fictional technologies and operating out of Victorian England, created further appreciation for the genre. The internet, with its superabundance of message boards, discussion forums and websites, enabled steampunk to fuse together from its varied forms of manifestation by allowing fans from all walks of life to find common ground in what was, in fact, a shared love of retro-Victorian SF literature. Thus steampunk became an international genre. Japanese animated productions start including steampunk-influenced elements such as we see in Steamboy (2004), in which a young tinkerer guards a powerful steam-producing ball from his corrupt inventor father, The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (2005), an Australian animated short, received an Academy Award nomination in 2005, and the highly artistic French film City of Lost Children (1995), in which a mad inventor steals children’s dreams by means of elaborate mechanical contraptions, brought the steampunk style to a larger audience after it became an indie foreign film hit. Blur Studios also created a computer-generated short, A Gentlemen's Duel (2006), in which a seemingly innocent tea party is transformed into mega technological mayhem when two imperious aristocrats, British and French, compete for the affections of a lady. With increasing numbers of authors embracing the genre, its fan base has grown dramatically. This is the moment for the mainstreaming of steampunk, although the reception has been mixed, both inside and outside

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of the subculture. Steampunk, despite its core aesthetic and ideology, has seen box-office success: the Will Smith and Kevin Kline summer blockbuster Wild Wild West (1999), in which two cowboys try to stop a rogue Confederate general, Dr. Loveliss, from holding the U.S. government hostage with his superior hydraulic and mechanical technology, along with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), despite its deviation from the comic books and a cold reception from critics, to mention but a few. The cultural phenomenon of steampunk has so thoroughly penetrated mainstream culture that even Comic Con International, the four-day SF and fantasy convention held in San Diego, California, has felt its impact. The Saturday of the event has unofficially been called “Steampunk Day,” where fans celebrate through fashion, art and music. The early years of the 21st century also witnessed the creation of SteamPunk Magazine, which began publication in 2006 and which operates a website http://www.steampunkmagazine.com. This contains articles devoted to the steampunk subculture, as well as readers’ forums and discussion groups, and its main mission is “putting the punk back into steampunk”, thus placing it in stark opposition to Hollywood’s steampunk productions or to artefacts such as the steampunk ‘skin’ for a Mac Powerbook, as offered on etsy.com.

Steampunk – postmodernism, anti-modernism, futurism, ecocriticism or anti-cyberculture movement? Motto: “It’s sort of Victorian-industrial, but with more whimsy and fewer orphans.” (Caitlin Kittredge)

When attempting to analyse the genre, one is bedazzled by the variety of sources from which steampunk draws its inspiration, ranging from Dickens’ novels, futurist SF and modernist art to cyborg theory. Steampunk cannot be categorised as modern, postmodern, anti-modern or futurist and yet it has a little bit of everything. Up to a certain point, one might say that steampunk is postmodern, due to its appetite for and use of “previously existing styles of physical technology and ideological modes of technological engagement.” (Onion 2008, 142) Steampunks love the innocence and the perceived sublime of 19th century technological and scientific knowledge, illustrated by the gentleman-scientist, tinkerer or inventor, times when machines were more visible, fallible, permeable, “human” even, and thus keep looking back to Victorian times. However, steampunks do not share the same awe for the

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technology of their own time, which they hate and despise. They see modern technology as offensively inaccessible to the ordinary man or woman, thus echoing the rage of the late 19th century and early 20th century anti-moderns who, with the Arts and Crafts movement, fervently pleaded for a return to a pre-modern “middle” landscape. We see this soft antimodern tendency in the emergence of the craft movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, inspired by John Ruskin and William Morris. Driven by a strong anti-industrialism, Ruskin, Morris, and other less well-known English figures encouraged a movement toward handwork and cottage industries, toward printing and woodworking and textile manufacture, in a way that was consciously opposed to mass production. They imagined a new non-industrialism that could be based on quality of life, not quantity of production. (…) American “Arts and Crafts ideologues . . . usually came from among the business and professional people who felt most cut off from ‘real life’ and most in need of moral and cultural regeneration.” (…) the movement tended ultimately to offer the illusion of escape rather than any authentic transformation of society. (Versluis 2006, 100)

However, unlike the anti-modernists, technological world to the natural one:

steampunks

prefer

the

(…) it is the physical nature of SteamPunk that attracted us to it in the first place, however we first heard of it. We love machines that we can see, feel, and fear. We are amazed by artifacts but are unimpressed by “high technology.” For the most part, we look at the modern world about us, bored to tears, and say, “no, thank you. I’d rather have trees, birds, and monstrous mechanical contraptions than an endless sprawl that is devoid of diversity.” (Ratt 2006, 2, my emphasis)

Ratt’s critique has a kind of environmentalist polemical aroma to it; it is very close to a refutation of overdevelopment and reminiscent of the joy brought by nature and its elements to the pre-development landscape. In their awe for powerful and sometimes terrifying machines, steampunks might be compared to the futurists who, led by F. T. Marinetti, revered what they saw as the beautiful violence of the new technologies of transportation and production. However, unlike Marinetti’s followers, steampunk is far more interested in the actual process of the building of the machines, rather than in the experience of their use.

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1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. 2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt. […] 11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds. (Marinetti 1909)

Since Marshall Berman has attempted to create a new and atypical category, namely modernists of the 19th century, who (…) understood the ways in which modern technology and social organization determined man’s fate... but they all believed that modern individuals had the capacity both to understand this fate, and, once they understood it, to fight it.... Even in the middle of a wretched present, they could imagine an open future (Berman 1982, 27),

one could apply this to steampunks as well, thus comparing them to 19th century modernists, fascinated by technology and deeply persuaded of its capacity to provide man with a more powerful sense of his own humanity and his links to the material world. The last genre that steampunks completely delimit themselves from is the cyberculture movement, which they strongly and fiercely criticize. The so-called machines of this era seek the cleanness and sleekness of thought, platonic forms unsullied by the earth from which they come. Floating beyond us in mathematical ether far above us and the golems of iron. These abstract replicated technologies ultimately seek in their purity a Nirvana of emptiness. (…) The difference between the machines of then and now is the same as the difference between an old-growth forest and a soulless tree farm. While it is true both are made up of trees, one strikes us as missing something: a spirit, or will, which speaks to us of intention. Intention that demands to be respected and understood, not for what it can be (or do) but for its simple existence. This intuition should enlarge our humanity, not reduce it. We should feel free to promote it in unlikely domains, including the mechanical. (Calamity 2007, 5)

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Despite the obvious clashes between them, mainstream readers usually classify steampunk as a subgenre of SF, a neo-Victorian branch within the wider universe of cyberpunk writing. Steampunk and cyberpunk do share common traits: they are both modes of a genre’s autocritique: “cyberpunk rigorously decomposes the bloated space operas and techno-futurist dreams of post-war science fiction, while steampunk disports in the literary and actual histories of the 19th century in order to throttle the cando optimism of late 19th and early 20th century popular fictions about science.” (Jones 2010, 103) And yet, steampunk predates its parent. Steampunk and cyberpunk differ in their views on the present. Steampunk believes that the present should be dominated by the Victorian attitudes of the 19th century, still upholding the importance given to machines and steam force. Meanwhile, cyberpunk sees a present dismantled by the future of a hypertechnologized society, the starting point of a consumer society in which what is consumed is information. In the 1970s a fundamental second shift in the nature of society was initiated: from agricultural to industrial and, now, to informational societies. It is claimed that the key resource at the beginning of the 21st century will be seen to have been knowledge, and universities and research centres will play the role that mines and foundries did in industrial times. Even with only this vague description, it seems highly likely that cyberspace, a place made of information, will be vitally important to societies based on information. Cyberpunk could thus claim to be a continuation of steampunk, especially if we consider, as asserted by Castells, that subsequent to the moment of production, what follows is an information society: I argue that information, in its broadest sense, e.g. as communication of knowledge, has been critical in all societies, including medieval Europe which was culturally structured, and to some extent unified, around scholasticism, that is, by and large an intellectual framework. In contrast, the term informational indicates the attribute of a specific form of social organisation in which information generation, processing, and transmission become the fundamental sources of productivity and power, because of new technological conditions emerging in this historical period. (Castells, 1996, 21)

Another element which persists in the thinking of both genres is that of machinery. However, unlike steampunk, which aims at a peaceful coexistence of man and machine, cyberpunk creates the cyborg, the manmachine. This would be the man whose life depends upon the machine, an indication of the psychopathology of modern life: the desire for a fantastic

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immortality and omnipotence which might inspire fear. By contrast with the steam-powered neo-Victorian themes found in steampunk, cyberpunk takes people into the dystopian future, where technology is man’s lifeblood. While the hype over technology may bring to mind space exploration and plasma guns, cyberpunk is usually set on Earth, where corrupt governments reign over black markets and ghettos disfigure cities, and people are targeted for being fully human, since becoming a cyborg is the new thing. Hence, the cyberpunk hero is generally more of an antihero. The blurring of the line between human and machine, real and virtual reality is a distinctive feature of the genre. Whilst cyberpunk is a genre of nihilism and revolt, steampunk is, at its core, a genre of hope and idealism, aware of the various ways in which people’s dreams can be abused, but implying that if everyone were to cooperate with an old-time sense of self-reliance and fair play, the world could be transformed into a better place. To conclude our analysis, steampunk does have an ideology, one which is grounded in a culture that greatly values both science and technology and worships the self-reliant, do-it-yourself inventor or artist. Furthermore, even though it is a nostalgic movement, “it doesn’t seek to return or recreate the past; instead, it seeks to recycle the most desirable aspects of the past and combine them with the most desirable aspects of the present.” (Pagliassotti 2009) By reusing and rethinking history’s lost dreams and nascent technologies, steampunk is determined to offer the world, with tongue in cheek and a shiny brass-and-wood carrying case, a vision of the future that offers restrained optimism instead of dystopian hopelessness.

Steampunk–fear and awe Motto: “We want to sing the love of danger.” (F.T. Marinetti)

Steampunk practitioners restore the sense of awe in the face of technological achievement, awe that the Victorians felt many a time when they contemplated the tools and inventions of the Industrial Revolution. The degree of awe very much depends upon the steampunk viewer’s visual, auditory and even tactile experience of the object. Such a direct interaction creates a much-desired profound connection that cannot be attained by means of the intellectual detachment of 21st century technology and its microscopic or even totally invisible actions.

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Chapter Twelve I fear it cannot be denied that Mr. Thackeray has actually gone and written a poem”, wrote Charlotte Bronte to a friend. “The whole of the May Day Ode is not poetry–that I will maintain–it opens with decent prose. But at the fourth stanza–“I felt a thrill of love and awe”–it begins to swell.” And the opening of the Great Exhibition which, for a brief moment, made a poet even of Thackeray, gave millions of others too “a thrill of love and awe”. “They were so fortunate as to see it”, said The Times next day, “hardly knew in what form to clothe the sense of wonder and even of mystery which struggled within them.” And the Queen, in her Diary, recorded the same impression. “There was but one voice”, she wrote, “of astonishment and admiration. (Bronte in Luckhurst 1951, 413)

But this “awe” is not solely British. The theorization of the technological sublime as a concept is attributed to Perry Miller who, in The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War, traces the appearance of sublimity in the rhetoric surrounding technological artefacts. Another influential theoretician of American technological awe is John Kasson, whose monograph, &LYLOL]LQJ WKH Machine: Technology and Republican Values (1776-1900), testifies to the emergence of awe in relation to industrial spectacles, especially in 19th century America. Kasson argues that “Americans’ intense aesthetic response to technology and their desire to discover beauty in utility were firmly rooted in republican values” (Kasson 1976, 143) and that “modern machinery… became manifestations of the sublime, achievements of mind that challenged the powers of comprehension and description.” (Kasson 1976, 47) Discussions of the sublime as an aesthetic category can be traced back to the 18th century: Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756) highlights an essential new element in the definition given to the sublime, namely terror and fear. In his turn, Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason (1790), argued that the sublime could by no means be an opposite of the beautiful due to the fact that it induced both pleasure and pain. Some of this sense of fear, terror and pain is associated with the possible harm that technology might cause to the human body. Steampunk seems to obsess about this likelihood, “re-casting danger as evidence of the aliveness or volatility of technology.” (Onion 2008, 149) At the same time, steampunk perceives danger as a criticism of the modern world, overly “catastrophe-proof.” In this respect, as mentioned earlier, steampunks seem to reflect the Futurists, the first principle of whose manifesto was: “We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.” (Marinetti 1909)

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Steampunk is very much interested in the failures and breakdowns of different 19th century technologies, appreciating these disasters as evidence of the valour of the people of that time. One of the technologies that have proven devastating to human life (since the spectacular explosion of the Hindenberg, in 1937) is, at the same time, an object that steampunk fetishizes about: the zeppelin, also known as the dirigible. In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the film), the Fantom’s gang raids a zeppelin factory outside Berlin and destroys it in spectacular fashion, with the help of harpoon guns. In Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan, (2009) the most iconic image is that of Leviathan, a sui generis zeppelin, namely a genetically modified mass of creatures, the most recognizable one being an enormous whale that confers the zeppelin shape. Some of the safety issues involved in the making of the film arose in connection with the precautions needed due to the flammability of the hydrogen gas used. Similarly, The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, a 2005 Australian short film, portrays a world characterised by an extensive use of airships. In addition, steampunk jewellery creators offer zeppelin bracelets for sale and steampunk interior designers offer to design rooms with an airship theme.

Steam gear lifestyle Motto: “Steampunk is what happens when goths discover brown.” (Jess Nevins)

Nowadays, steampunk seems determined to conquer the world of fashion as well. The style, which is said to blend “the gaslight romance of Victorian London with a frisson of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne-inspired fantasy,” (Murphy 2013) is likely to go from niche all the way to mainstream as fashion labels, accessory suppliers and jewellery houses are set to incorporate steampunk looks into their own original designs. We are therefore warned about a possible avalanche, in the near future, of corsets, petticoats and aviator goggles, platform lace-up boots, lace veils, velvet, frock coats and bowlers onto the high street. Recent catwalks confirm it. John Galliano’s new Dior collection (summer 2013) introduced Victorian hats and outfits inspired by horse riding, whilst some of Hollywood’s leading actors, such as Gary Oldman, Jamie Bell and Willem Dafoe, dressed for adventure, in Prada menswear, have been seen wearing heavily tailored, double-breasted, pin-stripe steampunk-inspired suits. Hugh Jackman, in 2004’s “Van Helsing,” Robert Downey Jr., in 2009’s “Sherlock Holmes,” as well as Lady Gaga’s

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onstage and offstage appearances, to mention but a few, all point towards the fantasy genre set in an alternative Victorian era. SteDPSXQN0DJD]LQH, one of the most successful magazines devoted to the steampunk subculture (online and print, semi-annual), included in its summer 2007 edition a clothing and style guide, as well as an illustrated advisory column about the kinds of facial hair a male steampunk might be interested in. Libby Bulloff gives a very detailed outline of how to dress steampunk and on the various sub-trends contained within this fashion. We are thus introduced to: The Tinkerer/Inventor: …well-designed garments with straps, pockets, et cetera, some sort of protective eyewear (the ubiquitous goggle goodness or other such spectacles)... perhaps lab coats or clothes that are impervious to spills and grease? I picture the tinkerer in more utilitarian garb, and the inventor in an eccentric amalgamation of cast-off lab wear and well-worn Victorian pieces. (…) Stitch cogs on or to your clothing. Carry your tools of trade as accessories—make yourself a leather belt with pockets or straps to harness useful implements. The steampunk inventor believes in form and function.

The Street Urchin/Chimney Sweep: We’re talking tatters, filth, safety pins, old leather, bashed-in derbies, and the like. This style of dress is functional, can be mucked about in, costs little to hack together, and nods smugly to the lowest classes of Victorian and steam society. It looks good dirty. Torn stockings puddled around one’s knees or tacked up with garters and pins are most delicious…

The Explorer: Think tailored garments, but more military-influenced and less I-boughtthis-at-the-suit-shop. Leather, silk, linen, tall boots, pith helmets, flying goggles—the list of explorer gear goes on. (…)Ladies—search Ebay or vintage stores for old-fashioned medical cinchers with fan lacing. Gentlemen—tuck your trousers into the tops of your boots and hang a compass and pocketwatch from your belt or rock a kilt and sporran. Mod your own steampunk ray gun from a water pistol and some aerosol paint and wedge it into your belt or your stockings.

The Dandy/Aesthete: As close to aristocracy as steampunk gets, which isn’t that close at all. These are the fellows in nicely rendered Victorian and Edwardian suits,

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brainstorming infernal machines over cigars and brandy, and these are the ladies in high-button boots who dabble as terrorists when they aren’t knitting mittens. (…) Dainty goggles or pince-nez scored at antique shops are a must, as well as simple corsets, handkerchiefs, cigarette cases, gloves, et cetera. By all means, do invest in a top hat or derby with some attitude. (Bulloff 2007)

While the look still seems to be more costume-focused than something for everyday wear, still it would not come as a great surprise to see some aspects of steampunk gain traction in the coming years, something that would in a way distress the genre’s initiators. The explanation is quite simple: any aesthetic movement is vulnerable to misinterpretation and a possible transition of a niche and “punk” style towards widespread success might bring about accusations of decline into superficiality and consumerism, thus contradicting the very essence of steampunk which, at its core, is as anti-commodity as it can possibly be.

Steampunk and film Motto: “I’d imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured, if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn’t be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason.” (Hugo Cabret, Hugo (2011)

Steampunk is not just a literary style. Mortified by the consumerist society, steampunk creators seek to perpetually invoke the aura and sublimity of the hand-crafted object, not only in the culture of makers or vernacular crafts, but also in cinematography. Modern cinema, like current literary works, is infused with genreslipperiness and there are some who argue that certain forms of anachronism are a consequence of such fusions. (Jameson 1991, 287) Jameson goes on to claim that nostalgic cinema has trained us to consume “glossy” references to the past, familiarizing us with both historical and futuristic tropes, thus allowing new and more complex forms of ‘postnostalgia’ to become possible. Some good examples are the Back to the Future trilogy (where the main character is transported to the 1950s, the 1850s and into the future), the British television series Life on Mars (where a 21st century detective wakes up in 1973) or even the Harry Potter series. Yet, while nostalgic and genre-slipping through time, these films do not belong to the steampunk genre because they do not possess the aesthetics of (tech)nostalgia.

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A great number of films, however, some of them enjoying worldwide box-office success, do make use of steampunk elements or aesthetics. The first steampunk cinematographic experiences were inspired by or even based directly on the works of steampunk’s literary predecessors, Jules Verne and H.G.Wells: screen versions of their novels, from the very earliest attempts, have included the technical and mechanical features so characteristic of the genre: from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with its fantastic submarine world and a total of 10 (!) dramatizations, the first from as far back as the beginning of the 1900s (1905), to The Time Machine–a Victorian Englishman travels to the distant future and finds that humanity has divided into two hostile species–whose 1960s version, with Rod Taylor, even won an Oscar for special effects, while the 2002 one, starring Guy Pearce, only achieved an Oscar nomination for… makeup. A steampunk movie tends to bypass the traditional course of the industrial revolution and make use of anachronistic technologies that employ steam power and clockwork in a fashion that goes way beyond their traditionally accepted uses. Some might argue that even Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) belongs to the steampunk genre. He combined many sources in this eclectic production: Biblical Old Testament references, the skyline of Manhattan, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Art Deco designs of the 1920s, angular sets, labyrinthine passages, Norse mythology and more. Now Metropolis is an ultramodern city of the future–which, from the very beginning, contradicts steampunk’s retro-futurism, and the costumes and interior designs, in their turn, are far from being Victorian, but what does fit the steampunk description is the giant Moloch M-Machine, the enormous machine pumping pistons, flywheels, a rotating crankshaft, and an offcenter disk–all parts thrusting, moving, pounding and turning. Even if Metropolis is more dieselpunk than steampunk, with its machines, oil and underground labour force, we can however include it in the steampunk avant la lettre category. There are a few other films which, because of their atmosphere, colour, mystery and “aftertaste,” can be classed together under the steampunk umbrella: one such is Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s City of Lost Children (1995, Cité des enfants perdus), which, along with Delicatessen (1991), has created an extremely hard-to-follow atmosphere. The former film is 100% steampunk: Krank, who cannot dream, kidnaps young children in order to steal their dreams. The devices used in the film show heavy wear as well as corrosion, suggesting that technological advancement has halted. The ocular implants are seemingly futuristic, but

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their art-deco styling and analogue output are clearly anachronistic. Krank’s dream-stealing machine is fitted with suction cups, vacuum tubes and pneumatic bladders. Delicatessen, set in an apartment building in a post-apocalyptic France in an ambiguous time period, focuses on the tenants of the building and their desperate bids to survive. It is less technological or mechanical and yet possesses the same retro-futuristic taste mentioned earlier. Pitof’s Vidocq (2001) takes place in a steampunk version of 19th century Paris, countering the historical figure of Eugène François Vidocq with a supernatural serial killer. Even though the story is extremely Sherlock Holmes-like, the atmosphere, the colours, the lights and the contrast between the outer, magical, shady world and the underground world are very much steampunk. Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006) is an excellent tale of embitterment and jealousy set between the theatres of Victorian London and the Colorado laboratory of a genuine historical figure, the famous physicist and inventor Nikola Tesla, who lends a hand with a “teleportation illusion” act by inventing a steampunk machine which can teleport various things, ranging from a hat to a human being. Somewhat similar to The Prestige, but enjoying less favourable reviews, is another film released in 2006, Neil Burger’s The Illusionist, which has the same aura of magic so characteristic of neo-Victorian steampunk. Terry Gilliam’s %UD]LO (1985) tells the story of a bureaucrat in a retrofuture world who tries to correct an administrative error and himself becomes an enemy of the state. Is it steampunk? Probably one of the most steampunk films ever made, if we consider ductwork as steampunk. The weird dedicated line phones plugged into different ports for different calls, the magnified computer screens, the ridiculous “personnel transport” Sam drives and subsequently loses, the inner parts of Sam’s air conditioning system churn and bubble to create something very Gilliam, but also extremely steampunk. Strangely, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films of 2009 and 2011 also fit the steampunk description: Sherlock Holmes is, more than anything else, a feast for the eyes. The sets are sumptuous, the costumes will feed your erotic tweed fantasies, and the CGI backgrounds recreate a rich, believable Victorian London of hulking industrial projects and factories. Director Ritchie deliberately stages this world to feel like steampunk: This isn’t the quaint, twee land of Victoriana; it’s a modernizing urban world of science and steamships and laboratories. Even when Holmes is fighting, we watch through the lens of rationality. In a couple of truly great fight scenes, we hear Holmes planning the trajectory

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And then we may mention some steampunk-inspired films which have enjoyed tremendous box office success: Stephen Sommers’ Van Hellsing (2004), Stephen Norrington’s The League of Extraodinary Gentlemen (2003), The Golden Compass (2007), Hellboy (2004, 2008), (2009), Barry Sonnenfeld’s Wild Wild West (1999), and The Mummy Returns (2001). Almost all of the above-mentioned films prove that, even though steampunk definitely started as an adult-oriented genre, it is increasingly visible in children’s media as well.

Conclusion Motto: “A clockwork heart can’t replace the real thing.” (Dru Pagliassotti)

Victorian machines were visible, human, fallible and, above all, accessible. Steampunk’s interest in the physicality of the machine points to its main aesthetic purpose, namely to contend against the so-called “black boxes” of the 20th and 21st centuries: instruments or laws which are immutable and unquestionable. Steampunks see modern technology as offensively inaccessible to the ordinary person and, accordingly, yearn to return to the age in which, so they believe, machines were vulnerable. Steampunk machines are real, breathing, coughing, struggling and rumbling parts of the world. They are not the airy intellectual fairies of algorithmic mathematics but the hulking manifestations of muscle and mind, the progeny of sweat, blood, tears, and delusions. The technology of steampunk is natural; it moves, lives, ages, and even dies. (Catastrophone Orchestra and Arts Collective 2006, 4)

Steampunk is an effectively applied anachronism. It represents the peaceful coexistence of past, present and future within the boundaries of the same space. We see instances of steampunk when television channels cover stories about countries in which coal locomotives and space programs coexist or about skyscrapers being built in places where some people do not have access to hot water or electricity. Steampunk means buying sheep’s cheese directly from the farmer and Camembert straight from the supermarket.

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According to Ilfoveanu (2013), occurrences of steampunk include the scenes from Huysmans’ À rebours where Jean des Esseintes avidly inhales the natural fragrance of factory pollution and the empty Coca-Cola cans left behind on Mount Everest. Steampunk means using wood stoves in the era of central heating. It means getting out of one’s car at an exhibition, after having heard the latest hits on the radio, in order to listen to gramophone music. Steampunk means, in fact, understanding how it all began and how we got here.

Works cited [Anonymous]. “The Pyrophone: Thermo-Acoustic Flaming Organ of Doom!”, 6WHDP3XQN0DJD]LQH, 1 (Fall 2006c), pp. 6-7. Baciu, Ioana. 2012. “StHDPSXQN úL F\EHUSXQN”, in Nautilus, 01.11.2012, Available at http://revistanautilus.ro/articole/steampunk-si-cyberpunk/. Accessed 04/20/2013. Berman, Marshall. 1982. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon and Schuster. Berra, Yogi. 2010. The Yogi Book. Workman Publishing Company. Bulloff, Libby. 2007. “Steam Gear: A Fashionable Approach to the Lifestyle”, in 6WHDP3XQN0DJD]LQH, 2 (Summer 2007), pp. 8-13. Burke, Edmund. 2009. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Oxford University Press. Calamity, Professor. 2007. “My Machine, My Comrade”, in SteamPunk 0DJD]LQH, 3 (Fall 2007), pp. 24-25. Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Catastrophone Orchestra and Arts Collective. 2006. “What, Then, is Steampunk? Colonizing the Past So We Can Dream the Future”, in 6WHDP3XQN0DJD]LQH, 1 (Fall 2006), pp. 4-5. Chadwick, Frank. 2000. Space 1889: Science Fiction Role Playing in a 0RUH&LYLOL]HG7LPH Heliograph, Inc. DirtyBirdd. Zeppelins Bracelet, viewed 27 November 2007. Available at http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=7132563. Accessed 04/20/2013. Ebert, Roger. “Review: Wild Wild West”, The Chicago Sun-Times, 30 June 1999, viewed 29 November 2007. Available at http://rogerebert. suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19990630/REVIEWS/90630 0302/1023. Accessed 04/20/2013. Fillippo, Paul. Steampunk Trilogy. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995.

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Flanders, Judith. 2004. Inside the Victorian Home. New York: Norton. Gibson, William; Sterling, Bruce. 2011. The Difference Engine. Spectra Publishing House. Gross, Cory. 2006. “Varieties of Steampunk Experience”, in SteamPunk 0DJD]LQH, 1 (Fall 2006), pp. 60-63. —. 2007. “A History of Misapplied Technology: The History and Development of the Steampunk Genre”, in 6WHDP3XQN 0DJD]LQH, 2 (Summer 2007), pp. 54-61. Ilfoveanu, Nicu. 2013. “Ce este steampunk?”, in Observator Cultural, 670 of 19.04.2013. Available at http://www.observatorcultural.ro/Ce-estesteampunk*articleID_10246-articles_details.html. Accessed 04/20/2013. Jameson, Frederic. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Available at http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ philosophy/works/us/jameson.htm. Accessed 04/20/2013. Jeter, K.W. 2011. Infernal Devices. Publisher: Angry Robot. —. 2011. Morlock Night. Publisher: Angry Robot. —. Infernal Devices: A Mad Victorian Fantasy. New York: St. Martin’s, 1987. Jones, Jason. 2010. “Betrayed by Time: Steampunk & the Neo-Victorian in Alan Moore’s Lost Girls and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”, in Neo-Victorian Studies. 3:1, pp. 99-126. Jordan, Tim. 1999. Cyberpower. The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet. London: Routledge. Joyce, Simon. 2007. The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror. Athens: Ohio University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1969. &ULWLFD UDĠLXQLL SXUH (GLWXUD ùWLLQĠLILFă úL (QFLFORSHGLFă Kasson, John F. &LYLOL]LQJ WKH 0DFKLQH 7HFKQRORJ\ DQG 5HSXEOLFDQ Values in America, 1776-1900. New York: Penguin, 1976. Kittredge, Caitlin. 2012. The Iron Thorn. Ember, reprint edition. Klaw, Rick. 2008. “The Steam-Driven Time Machine: A Pop Culture Survey”, in Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer (eds.), Steampunk. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, pp. 349-357. La Ferla, Ruth. 2008. “Steampunk Moves Between 2 Worlds,” in The New York Times, May 8, 2008. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/ 05/08/fashion/08PUNK.html. Accessed 04/20/2013. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987. Luckhurst, K.W. 1951. “The Great Exhibition of 1851”, in Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, vol. 99, no. 4845, 20th April 1951, pp. 413-456.

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Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41365158. Accessed 04/20/2013. Marinetti, F. T. 1909. “Futurist Manifesto”, in Le Figaro. Available at www.unknown.nu/futurism/manifesto.html. Accessed 04/20/2013. Miller, Perry. 1970. The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War. Mariner Books. Moore, Alan and Kevin O’Neill. 2000. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Volume One. La Jolla, California: America’s Best Comics. Moskowitz, Gary. 2010. “What’s with Steampunk?” in More Intelligent Life. 6 July 2010. Available at www.moreintelligentlife.co.uk/content/ lifestyle/gary-moskowitz/steampunk. Accessed 04/20/2013. Murphy, Margi. 2013. “Steampunk! Introducing Britain’s latest fashion craze”, in The Independent. Sunday, 20 January 2013. Available at http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/news/steampunkintroducing-britains-latest-fashion-craze-8458861.html. Accessed 04/20/2013. Nevins, Jess. 2008. “Introduction: The 19th-Century Roots of Steampunk”, in Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer (eds.), Steampunk. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, pp 3-11. Newitz, Annalee. 2009. Sherlock Holmes Brings on the Steampunk Tweed Hotness. Available at http://io9.com/5434619/sherlock-holmes-bringson-the-steampunk-tweed-hotness. Accessed 04/20/2013. Olalquiaga, Celeste. 1998. The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience. New York: Pantheon Books. Onion, Rebecca. 2008. “Reclaiming the Machine: An Introductory Look at Steampunk in Everyday Practice”, in Neo-Victorian Studies, 1:1 (Autumn 2008), pp. 138-163. Pagliassotti, Dru. 2008. Clockwork Heart. Juno Books. —. 2009. “Does Steampunk Have an Ideology?”, in The Mark of Ashen Wings. Available at http://drupagliassotti.com/2009/02/13/does-steam punk-have-an-ideology/. Accessed 04/20/2013. Ratt, Margaret P. “Putting the Punk Back Into SteamPunk”, SteamPunk 0DJD]LQH, 1 (Fall 2006), 2. Rauch, Alan. Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Sale, Kirkpatrick. Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995. Skarda, Erin. 2013. Will Steampunk Really Be the Next Big Fashion Trend?, in Time Style, Jan. 17, 2013. Available at http://style.time. com/2013/01/17/will-steampunk-really-be-the-next-big-fashiontrend/#ixzz2Ow46tIFP. Accessed 04/20/2013.

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Standage, Tom. 1998. The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth-Century’s Online Pioneers. New York: Walker & Company. Sweet, Matthew. 2001. Inventing the Victorians. New York: St. Martin’s. Versluis, Arthur. 2006. “Antimodernism”, in Telos, winter 2006, no. 137, pp. 96-130. Westerfeld, Scott. 2009. Leviathan. Simon Pulse Publishing House.

Films cited 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. Directed by Richard Fleischer. Disney, 1954. Film A Gentlemen's Duel. Directed by Sean McNally and Francisco Ruiz Velasco. 2006. Animated film Back to the Future. Directed by Robert Zemeckis. 1985-1990. Film %UD]LO Directed by Terry Gilliam. Universal, 1985. Film City of Lost Children (La cité des enfants perdus). Directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Canal & et. al., 1995. Film City Under the Sea. Directed by Jacques Tourneur. Bruton Film Productions, 1965. Film Delicatessen. Directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. 1991. Film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Directed by Chris Columbus. 2001. Film Hugo. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Paramount Pictures, 2011. Film Life on Mars. Directed by Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan and Ashley Pharoah. 2006-2007. Film Metropolis. Directed by Fritz Lang. 1927. Film Midnight in Paris. Directed by Woody Allen. 2012. Film Sherlock Holmes. Directed by Guy Ritchie. 2009. Film Steamboy. Directed by Katsuhiro Ôtomo. Sony Pictures, 2004. Animated film The Illusionist. Directed by Neil Burger. 2006. Film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Directed by Stephen Norrington. Twentieth Century Fox, 2003. Film The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello. Directed by Anthony Lucas. 2005. Animated short film The Prestige. Directed by Christopher Nolan. 2006. Film The Time Machine. Directed by George Pal. George Pal Productions, 1960. Film Vidocq. Directed by Pitof. 2001. Film Master of the World. Directed by William Witney. 1961. Film

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War of the Worlds. Directed by Byron Haskin. Paramount Pictures, 1953. Film Wild Wild West. Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. Warner Brothers, 1999. Film

PART V FANTASY AND BEYOND

CHAPTER THIRTEEN FANTASY THEME ANALYSIS: RHETORICAL VISIONS OF IMMIGRATION IN THE BRITISH PRESS IRINA DIANA MĂ'52$1( General context: British immigration, politics, and media in recent years Immigration has currently re-emerged as a key public issue in Britain and one of the policy areas with a significant potential to change the configuration of political power in the 2015 general election. A matter of concern since the early days in office of PM David Cameron, head of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition (see his 2011 speech on immigration), the intended reform of the immigration system has materialized into a future bill on the Government’s proposed legislative programme for 2013, which “will ensure that this country attracts people who will contribute and deters those who will not.” (The Queen’s Speech 2013–Oral Statement to Parliament) In the months prior to the Queen’s speech, immigration had been high on the public agenda, with an increased focus on the consequences for Britain of the end of transitional controls, beginning with 2014, for economic migrants from EU memberstates, Romania and Bulgaria. The immigration policy debate continues to be tightly bound up with Britain’s membership and position in the European Union (Geddes 2005), at present also under strain from British Eurosceptics. Tough measures on immigration, firmly rooted in a national approach, have been advocated by parties across the political spectrum in the face of the rising voter appeal of the right-wing populist and Eurosceptic UK Independence Party (UKip). The Eastleigh by-election results in February 2013, where UKip came in second, brought about a degree of consensus among the main political parties hard to anticipate in other circumstances, even though, as I

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discuss elsewhere, political compromise on immigration issues in order to attract votes and cater to public expectations is not uncommon in the UK 0ăGURDQHVHHDOVR*HGGHV +LJKO\UHSUHVHQWDWLYHRIWKHQHZ situation is Ed Miliband’s admission to Labour’s past mistakes with regard to immigration policy, the lifting of transitional controls for A8 countries in 2004 included. The party political broadcast on March 6, 2013, where the leader of the Labour Party and the Opposition acknowledged a number of wrong decisions on immigration policy under the past Labour Government (“Labour’s New Party Political Broadcast–‘Immigration Must Work for All’”), was followed up the next day with a speech on the same topic by the Shadow Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper; it reiterated and elaborated the main policy lines proposed by Miliband. The difference between Cooper’s speech and the speech delivered by David Cameron at Ipswich, on March 25, is a difference in nuance, to some extent, but hardly of substance. Common points on both agendas highlight the importance of immigration control and management, tight enforcement of the minimum wage and prevention of labour exploitation, the training of British citizens in order to fill jobs for which immigrants are needed at the moment, and the renegotiation with the European Union of policy documents concerning the EU migrants’ entitlement to certain benefits. Fairness to British citizens, a competitive British economy “in the global race,” and community coherence guide both the Conservative–Lib Dem and the Labour visions of immigration. Some discrepancy can be noted in terms of Labour’s greater involvement with workers’ rights, community integration, and collaboration with the European Union, by contrast to the Coalition’s emphasis on the interconnection between immigration and welfare, healthcare and housing policies, economic strength, and attracting migrants “for the right reasons,” i.e. contribution to the British economy and society. Illegal immigration and immigration from outside the EU remain the principal targets of migration management, but, in the public sphere, it is immigration from inside the EU, especially from the recent Eastern European member states, that has gained prominence, not least due to intense media coverage and campaigns. Political addresses, through the “rhetorical visions” they propose, construct audiences and publics as part of “rhetorical communities” that could be persuaded to identify with various political projects and, in the process, develop a group consciousness around how particular social problems are perceived and defined, and what solutions can be advanced. They are based on “fantasy themes” that stem from small group interactions in different social contexts and are reframed, reordered, and extended with the help of “imaginative language” (for clarifications of the

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concepts mentioned here, see the next section). Through their articles and reports, the media participate in the construal and transformation of rhetorical visions (Bormann 1982c) within the frame of journalistic institutional and organizational rules, which structure the mediation of events and the recontextualization of discourses from other social domains. (Richardson 2007) In the British political and social context of the year 2013, the national press has responded to the growing concerns about the end of transitional controls for Romania and Bulgaria by turning immigration from the two countries into one of the chief topics on their agendas, and thereby placing this aspect of immigration policy at the heart of the matter. The findings of an extensive quantitative study of the main British newspapers between 2010 and 2012, carried out by the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, confirm this tendency beginning in 2012: … BULGARIAN and ROMANIAN appear as collocates of IMMIGRANTS in 2012; similarly BULGARIA and ROMANIA are collocations of MIGRANTS in 2012 but not in 2010 or 2011 in broadsheets. (Allen & Blinder 2013, 23)

Another finding relevant to the present study is the “striking” “prevalence of Europe [and the European Union] over other geographical areas” throughout the researched period (Allen & Blinder 2013, 24). The report provides solid evidence of an increase in the stories on immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria. Nevertheless, the topic itself and the interest in intra-EU migration were not absent from the British newspapers in the SUHYLRXV \HDUV 0ăGURDQH   1RU LV WKH %ULWLVK SUHVV at its first construction of the symbolic reality of immigration from Romania and Bulgaria or from the Central and Eastern European states. The EU accession of the A2 countries in 2007 led to a similar type of reportage in the second part of the year 2006 /LJKW (OL]DEHWKDQ(QJODQG$&XOWXUDO+LVWRU\*XLGH], 2010, Drama and Culture in Shakespeare’s Age, 2011, $QJOLD YLFWRULDQă *KLG GH LVWRULH FXOWXUDOă >9LFWRULDQ England. A Cultural History Guide], 2012) and a collection of essays (De la Gargantua la Google [From Gargantua to Google], 2007), co-authored two teaching practice guides and two collections of essays, edited two collections of essays about literary genres (2 SRYHVWH GH VXFFHV 5RPDQXO LVWRULF DVWă]L >$ 6XFFHVV 6WRU\ 7KH Historical Novel Today, 2011, Romance. The History of a Genre, 2012), and co-edited another collection of essays (Despre lux [On Luxury], 2007). Francisco Javier Sánchez-Verdejo Pérez is Associate Professor at the National Distance Learning University, Spain. He has a BA in English Studies, Language and Literature and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain. His main areas of interest are English literature, cultural studies and gender studies. He is a specialist in Gothic, vampire and horror literature. In 2009 he held a research grant at St. Joseph’s College (Dublin). At present he is preparing a translation of popular 19th century ghost stories, and another project of his deals with vampire literature, its presence and close connection with other arts. He has contributed to several publications with articles and essays on Gothic literature: Poe Alive in the Century of Anxiety (2009), Edgar Allan Poe (1809-2009): Two Hundred Years Later (2010), Consciousness, Literature and the Arts (2011), Polifonía Scholarly Journal (2012), etc. AGULDQD 5ăGXFDQX is Assistant Professor in the English Language and Literature Department of Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey. She holds a BA in English and Spanish Language and Literature from the University of Bucharest, an MA in English Literature from Yeditepe University, Istanbul and a PhD in English Literature from the University of the West, 7LPLúRDUD 5RPDQLD 6KH KDV SXEOLVKHG H[WHQVLYHOy on contemporary Gothic novels, Jungian criticism, post-colonial theory, gender studies, and comparative mythology. With Fiona Tomkinson she founded the Gothic Studies option of the MA programme in English Language and Literature at Yeditepe University, Istanbul. Currently she is working on a monograph

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entitled: Speaking the Language of the Night: Aspects of the Gothic in Selected Contemporary Novels (Peter Lang, 2014). Daniela Rogobete is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English, American and German Studies, Faculty of Letters, University of Craiova, Romania. She holds a PhD in Postcolonial Studies and this continues to be her major field of study, with a particular focus upon Contemporary Indian Literature written in English. Her most important publications include the books When Texts Come into Play–Intertexts and Intertextuality (2003), Metaphor–Between Language and Thought (2008), Deconstructing Silence–Ambiguity and Censored Metaphors in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction (2010), together with articles and studies published in national and international journals, as well as literary translations. Andreea Ioana ‫܇‬erban is Senior Lecturer at the West University of 7LPL‫܈‬RDUD 6KH KDV D 3K' IURP WKH :HVW 8QLYHUVLW\ RI 7LPLúRDUD Romania, with a thesis on the novels of Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. She teaches English literature at the English Department of the Faculty of Letters, History and Theology. She is the author of The Call of the Wild: M/Other Nature in Margaret Atwood’s Novels (2010). She coauthored two textbooks for students (Shakespeare’s Plays. Seminar Topics, 2008; Drama and Culture in Shakespeare’s Age, 2011), as well as two cultural history guides on Elizabethan England a.nd Victorian England (published in Romanian in 2010 and 2012 respectively). She has published several studies and articles in academic volumes in Romania and abroad, in the fields of comparative literature, postcolonial and gender studies. Andreea Verte‫܈‬-Olteanu is Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Law and $GPLQLVWUDWLYH6FLHQFHVZLWKLQWKH8QLYHUVLW\RIWKH:HVW7LPLúRDUD6KH holds a Ph.D in English Literature, with a thesis on “Law in William Shakespeare’s Comedies”. She has published over 20 articles and studies in specialized journals, both in Romania and abroad. Fields of interest: British literature, culture and civilisation, legal language (co-author of the volume The Language of Law, 2006), translations (translator of the art albums Lux Lumen, 2005 and 6LOYLX 2UDYLW]DQ, 2009), and interdisciplinary studies.

INDEX acute science, 160 adoration, 210, 211 alien, xii, 11, 19, 85, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 205 alienated, 42, 146, 170 alienation, 13, 158, 162, 174, 180 allegory, xvii, 79, 137 alternative worlds, 132, 183, 195 amazons, 19 American exceptionalism, 109 anachronism, 218, 220, 231, 234 angel, 42, 200, 201, 202, 205, 206, 208, 210, 212, 214, 215, 216 angelic child, 142 angels, xii, 20, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 212, 216 anti-industrialism, 224 anti-realism, 161 Apartheid, x, 112, 113, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 126, 127 apocalypse, 96, 97, 100, 102, 107, 122 apocalyptic, x, 17, 96, 97, 101, 102, 106, 107, 109, 110, 161, 180, 183, 233 archetypes, xii, 5, 134 art-deco, 233 Arthur C. Clarke award, 120 Artificial Intelligences, 182, 183, 184, 191 Arts and Crafts, 224 audiences, xiii, 164, 184, 191, 243, 245, 246, 248, 255, 258, 259 Austen, 45 Babbage, 219, 221 Baudrillard, 182, 183, 190, 191, 192, 196

BDSM, 63, 64, 71, 72, 214 Blake, 41 Booker Prize, 97, 99 Bormann, xiii, xiv, 244, 245, 246, 247, 261 Breytenbach, 112, 117 Brink, 112, 117, 118, 127 British press, xiii, 244, 259 Brontë, 46, 47 Burke, 28, 33, 40, 84, 85, 93, 228, 235 Carroll, xi, 23, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155 Chevalier, x, 78, 79, 80, 82, 87, 88, 89, 90, 93, 207, 216 Child of Nature, 142, 143, 152 children’s literature, viii, xi, xv, xvii, 134, 136, 141, 143, 145, 146, 148, 150, 266 Christ, 79, 81, 92, 166 Christian, 41, 63, 68, 69, 70, 79, 81, 92, 155 Christianity, 35, 82, 167 Classics, 55, 56, 82, 93 clone, 21, 98, 100, 107, 170, 178, 179 cloning, x, 18, 97, 99, 101, 103, 104, 105, 171 Coetzee, 112, 114, 117, 118 Coleridge, xvi, xvii, 6, 7, 34 colonialism, 204, 205, 217, 219 Conan Doyle, 219 cyberpunk, xvii, 18, 184, 188, 221, 226, 227, 235 cyborg theory, 28, 223 Daily Mail, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 256, 259, 260, 262, 263

Reading the Fantastic Imagination Daily Mirror, 248, 254, 256, 259, 263, 264 Daily Telegraph, 248, 251, 253, 254, 259, 264, 265 Dandy/Aesthete, 230 dark hero, xi, 156 De Sade, 42, 47 defamiliarization, 29, 117 Deleuze, 148, 152, 154 Diderot, 51, 53 Disney, 135, 136, 137, 141, 147, 150, 155, 221, 238 DNA, 120, 176, 179 Don Quixote, 45 Dracula, viii, 2, 16, 47, 49, 54, 56, 66, 163 drawing-room child, 142 dream, 6, 9, 75, 89, 92, 121, 123, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 159, 165, 177, 200, 201, 204, 209, 216, 232, 249, 251 dreams, 4, 5, 6, 13, 22, 24, 61, 67, 75, 128, 132, 134, 135, 144, 145, 149, 152, 162, 222, 226, 227, 232, 249 Dystopia, 35, 96, 97, 100, 110, 111 Dystopias, 36, 96 E. L. James, 62 Edison, 219, 222 Emotions, 245 Empire, 39, 50, 114, 117, 220 Enlightenment, 42, 146 escapist, xvii, 15, 44, 49, 61, 67, 71, 134 ethics, 60, 110, 178 Eucatastrophe, 133 European Union, xiii, 242, 244, 246, 249, 251, 252, 254, 255, 263 Existentialism, 82 experiment, 98, 110, 266 Explorer, 230 Expressionist, 136 extinction, 50, 105, 107, 108 fabulation, 113, 117 fairies, 19, 20, 59, 234 fairy stories, 8

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fairy tale, xi, 9, 30, 59, 63, 67, 82, 139, 141, 156, 160 Fairy tales, 59 familiarity, 132, 147 fanfiction, 57, 60, 61, 64, 71, 76 FanLit, 266 fantasmatic narrative, 6 fantastic, viii, ix, x, xi, xiii, xv, xvi, xvii, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 22, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 36, 39, 41, 43, 45, 46, 49, 53, 57, 58, 59, 61, 63, 70, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 87, 89, 92, 96, 110, 113, 125, 132, 133, 134, 136, 139, 142, 143, 194, 213, 226, 232, 266 fantastic fiction, viii, 2, 28, 266 fantastic literature, viii, xv, xvii, 213, 266 fantasy, viii, xi, xii, xiii, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 51, 61, 62, 67, 75, 77, 78, 79, 82, 92, 99, 101, 104, 113, 114, 116, 120, 125, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 152, 157, 161, 194, 200, 201, 205, 213, 222, 223, 229, 230, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259 fantasy chains, 247, 259 fantasy theme, 247 fantasy type, 247, 253 freak, 158, 161, 178 French Revolution, 53 full fantasy, xv future, x, xiii, 5, 17, 25, 30, 64, 97, 99, 102, 106, 113, 115, 116, 118, 120, 159, 163, 183, 218, 219, 225, 226, 227, 229, 231, 232, 233, 234, 242, 246, 254, 266 futurist, 223, 226 Futurists, 228 fuzzy set, xv

274 Garden of Eden, 80 genre, viii, ix, x, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 29, 30, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 52, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64, 71, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 85, 96, 99, 101, 110, 112, 113, 114, 116, 132, 134, 157, 160, 161, 164, 166, 169, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 225, 226, 227, 230, 231, 232, 234, 266 genre analysis, xviii genre categorizations, 13 Globalization, 114, 128 Goethe, 42, 53 Gordimer, 112, 114, 117, 128 Gothic, ix, x, xi, xv, xviii, 33, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 75, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 94, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 181, 270 Gothic revival, x, 78 Graphic novels, 222 Griffith, 20, 219 grotesque, 3, 4, 7, 84, 85, 157, 179, 180 Guardian, 153, 248, 254, 256, 257, 259, 262, 263, 264 H. G. Wells, 17, 220 heavy industry, 219 Hegel, 42, 47 historical, viii, x, 2, 4, 10, 18, 23, 30, 31, 49, 51, 52, 53, 60, 77, 78, 100, 110, 115, 116, 218, 219, 220, 221, 226, 231, 233, 266 Hobbes, 51 Hoffmann, 42 Hollywood, xii, 136, 156, 157, 159, 174, 180, 182, 223, 229 horror, viii, xi, xvii, 2, 8, 10, 14, 15, 17, 18, 28, 31, 44, 49, 50, 53, 54, 101, 110, 116, 118, 135, 143, 156, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 222, 270

Index Hortus conclusus, 92 human, x, xii, 5, 6, 17, 18, 19, 21, 26, 27, 28, 30, 44, 48, 52, 63, 80, 87, 92, 97, 98, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 112, 113, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 133, 134, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 165, 166, 169, 171, 173, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 211, 212, 215, 216, 223, 227, 228, 229, 233, 234, 245, 247, 257, 258 human cloning, 98 human self, 195 humanity, x, 30, 92, 98, 99, 100, 105, 107, 135, 159, 167, 170, 177, 180, 184, 185, 186, 194, 200, 201, 205, 206, 213, 225, 232 hybrid, xviii, 18, 21, 60, 61, 92, 113, 178, 180 Hyper-reality, 182 idealism, 47, 227 imaginary, x, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 22, 23, 30, 46, 59, 77, 82, 91, 99, 101, 135, 139, 167, 176, 183, 201 imagination, viii, xi, xii, xvii, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 15, 26, 29, 30, 49, 69, 77, 78, 81, 84, 87, 92, 98, 102, 141, 149, 150, 152, 157, 201, 202, 204, 211, 212, 216, 246, 266 immersive, 133 immigration, xiii, 242, 244, 246, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263 immortality, 200, 202, 205, 210, 212, 213, 216, 227 Impressionist, 136 Independent, xiii, xiv, 94, 237, 248, 254, 256, 257, 258, 259, 262, 264, 265 internet, 18, 60, 62, 187, 222

Reading the Fantastic Imagination intertextual, 65, 143, 146 intertextuality, 138, 146 intrusion, 133 Ishiguro, x, 18, 21, 29, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 110, 111, 160, 167 J. R. Ward, 216 King James Bible, 80 kitsch, 220 Larry and Andy Wachowski, 182 Leibniz, 51 Lewis, xi, 23, 24, 29, 40, 42, 53, 141, 147, 153, 155 liminal, 133 Locke, 51 love, xii, 17, 18, 27, 28, 40, 60, 62, 63, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 92, 97, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 138, 158, 163, 164, 165, 166, 200, 201, 202, 214, 222, 223, 224, 227, 228 love triangle, 63 Lt. Ellen Ripley, xii, 169, 178, 180 Machiavellian, 53 machinery, 226, 228 machines, 21, 100, 103, 160, 183, 184, 185, 191, 195, 223, 224, 225, 226, 231, 232, 234 mad scientist/android, 177 magic, xvii, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 22, 28, 30, 51, 53, 59, 74, 79, 114, 118, 132, 133, 142, 152, 165, 233 magic realism, xvii, 10, 14, 16, 118 mainstream culture, 222, 223 Marinetti, 224, 225, 227, 228, 237 marvellous, 7, 8, 23, 26, 58 mashup, xvii Matrix, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197 McCarthy, x, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111 media discourse, 251, 269 mediated science, 160 Melancholic kitsch, 220

275

metafictional, 141, 146, 148 metamorphosis, 122, 123, 124, 133, 169, 175, 177 Meyer, ix, 62 Milton, 40, 42, 55 mind, xii, xv, 5, 6, 12, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 30, 39, 42, 43, 49, 50, 63, 70, 83, 85, 91, 101, 133, 137, 142, 151, 156, 157, 172, 180, 186, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194, 195, 212, 213, 214, 215, 218, 227, 228, 234, 245 monsters, 11, 15, 20, 28, 41, 116, 132, 136, 148, 161, 176, 180, 213 monstrous, 21, 135, 161, 163, 164, 169, 177, 213, 224 moral dilemmas, 78, 103, 105, 110 Morris, 224, 256, 263 motherhood, 161, 171, 174 multiculturalism, xiv, 112, 127, 257 multiverse, 23 Murdoch, x, 78, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 93, 94 mystery, 14, 26, 31, 52, 77, 83, 84, 105, 228, 232 mythology, 26, 80, 134, 232, 270 Nalini Singh, xii, 200, 201, 206, 207, 216, 217 narrative, x, xvii, 11, 13, 30, 40, 48, 50, 51, 53, 62, 78, 79, 82, 103, 108, 110, 112, 132, 133, 134, 146, 165, 183, 184, 189, 194, 195, 204, 245, 246, 247 narratology, 57, 268 natural, 4, 11, 25, 28, 46, 80, 81, 85, 87, 98, 102, 125, 133, 159, 177, 224, 234, 235, 258 Neoclassicism, 41, 51 neoliberalism, 108 neo-Victorian, 227, 233 nihilism, 227 nonsense, 137, 138, 142, 145, 148, 149, 150 Nostalgic steampunk, 220 Old Testament, 80, 92, 232 organ-harvesting, 104

276 Other, xii, 31, 35, 43, 54, 63, 115, 123, 125, 129, 140, 163, 165, 169, 201, 204, 205, 206, 209, 213, 217, 271 othering, 115, 201, 204 otherness, 28, 46, 115, 135, 136, 169, 170, 176, 177, 178, 204, 268 Otherworldliness, 205 Panopticon, 203 parallel worlds, 22, 23 Plato, 78 Platonic, 82, 113 Platonism, 82 Poe, xv, 47, 55, 219, 270 policy, 242, 244, 253, 254, 257 polycosmos, 23 pop Gothic Romance, 61 Pope, 46 popular fiction, 266 portal-quest, 133, 145 post-Apartheid, x, 112, 113, 123, 125, 127, 268 postcolonial, 113, 114, 115, 119, 122, 125, 126, 127, 268, 271 posthuman, 179, 182 power, xii, 6, 7, 27, 30, 43, 46, 50, 75, 77, 82, 84, 86, 98, 102, 115, 118, 137, 138, 148, 152, 184, 185, 187, 188, 190, 193, 194, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 226, 232, 242 pre-Romantic, 50, 84 prophecy, xvii Queen Victoria, 18, 221 Radcliffe, 28, 36, 52, 53, 164 reader-response criticism, xvi realism, 7, 47, 114, 118, 125, 141, 161, 162 reality, xiii, xvii, 3, 4, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 18, 21, 22, 24, 42, 45, 46, 48, 58, 81, 92, 115, 117, 123, 126, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 144, 159, 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 227, 244, 246, 248,

Index 251, 254, 255, 258, 259, 261, 264, 266 religious myth, 161 Renaissance, 25, 46, 49, 86, 146, 167, 219, 268 Resurrection, xii, 169, 170, 171, 173, 176, 178, 179 retro-Victorian SF, 222 revolt, 225, 227 rewriting, 29, 139, 146 rhetorical community, 247, 253, 254, 258, 259 rhetorical criticism, xiii, 245, 261 rhetorical vision, 247, 249, 252, 254, 258 Rice Burroughs, 29, 219 Rider Haggard, 116, 219 romance, viii, ix, xi, xii, xvii, 9, 14, 16, 17, 18, 31, 39, 40, 48, 49, 51, 53, 57, 60, 61, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 79, 83, 90, 110, 156, 159, 165, 200, 219, 221, 229, 266 Rousseau, 51 Rowling, 25, 29, 30, 134 Ruskin, 224 Said, 204, 217 Sartre, 78 satire, xvii, 12, 136 science, x, xi, xii, xvii, 2, 8, 9, 10, 14, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 30, 31, 61, 96, 99, 104, 107, 110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 125, 128, 132, 135, 156, 160, 161, 164, 166, 169, 172, 173, 174, 177, 182, 183, 184, 189, 201, 205, 213, 221, 226, 227, 233, 266 science fiction, x, xi, xii, xvii, 2, 8, 9, 10, 14, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 30, 31, 96, 99, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 125, 128, 132, 135, 156, 160, 161, 164, 166, 169, 172, 177, 182, 183, 184, 189, 201, 205, 213, 221, 226, 266

Reading the Fantastic Imagination Science fiction, x, 17, 99, 117, 169, 216 scientific exploration, 219 Scientific Romance, 220 seduction, 54, 92, 210, 213, 214 self, xi, xvii, 4, 5, 9, 18, 22, 23, 24, 27, 51, 52, 57, 61, 64, 69, 71, 74, 100, 106, 108, 115, 120, 121, 126, 132, 133, 137, 139, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 152, 162, 165, 167, 171, 177, 178, 179, 182, 185, 186, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 206, 214, 227 Serviss, 219 sex, ix, 20, 27, 28, 42, 53, 57, 59, 64, 65, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 88, 173, 175, 206, 209 Shelley, xi, 53, 54, 56, 156, 157, 161, 164 Sherlock Holmes, 229, 233, 237, 238 simulacrum, 183, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195 Smollett, 50 South Africa, x, 112, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 125, 127, 128, 268 space, xiii, 7, 17, 19, 23, 24, 25, 30, 67, 73, 91, 92, 101, 106, 116, 170, 171, 172, 175, 176, 177, 180, 182, 192, 195, 201, 202, 215, 216, 222, 226, 227, 234, 246, 248, 250, 255 spatiality, 182, 201 special effects, 189, 232 speculative fiction, x, 9, 27, 28, 29, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 125, 126, 127 speculative memoir, 99 steam-engine aesthetics, 218 steampunk, viii, xiii, xiv, xvii, 18, 25, 31, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237 Stoker, 16, 44, 47, 49, 54, 56

277

strangeness, 8, 132 Street Urchin/Chimney Sweep, 230 subgenre, xiii, 9, 13, 14, 15, 31, 58, 60, 73, 99, 110, 226 subjectivity, 138, 182, 184, 185, 187, 188, 193, 195 sublimation, 86, 91 sublime, 28, 40, 49, 50, 52, 84, 85, 144, 223, 228 Sun, 16, 64, 235, 248, 250, 251, 253, 254, 259, 261, 264, 265 supernatural, ix, xvii, 8, 10, 11, 14, 15, 18, 22, 27, 28, 31, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 58, 132, 133, 209, 215, 233 surrealism, xvii survival, 45, 90, 101, 105, 107, 108, 109, 134, 170, 204 Survival, 106, 134 suspension of disbelief, xvii, 22, 132, 183 symbolic convergence theory, xiii, 245 technological world, 224 technology, 17, 18, 67, 99, 113, 114, 117, 119, 120, 161, 177, 184, 195, 218, 219, 220, 221, 223, 224, 225, 227, 228, 234 Temporality, 182 terminal space, 182, 188 Tesla, 219, 233 the impossible, 7, 11, 143, 147, 266 the incredible, 58 Tim Burton, xi, 135, 137, 141, 147, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 161, 166, 167, 168 Time Machine, 18, 221, 232, 236, 238 Tinkerer/Inventor, 230 Tolkien, 8, 9, 15, 22, 24, 26, 29, 30, 33, 37, 134, 147, 152 Twain, 17, 219 unicorn, x, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92

278 urban, xii, xvii, 16, 18, 23, 25, 27, 28, 31, 33, 35, 43, 92, 118, 120, 124, 200, 201, 202, 203, 216, 233 utopia, 14, 96, 101, 183, 187, 193 Utopia, 16, 96, 101, 111, 128, 217 values, x, xiv, 16, 25, 26, 40, 41, 42, 46, 51, 59, 98, 109, 133, 170, 171, 178, 204, 227, 228, 245, 254, 257, 258, 259 vampire hunter, xii, 200, 202, 206, 208 Vampires, xii, 204, 206 Verne, xiii, 218, 219, 220, 221, 229, 232 Victorian, xi, xiii, 18, 25, 47, 124, 136, 138, 140, 141, 143, 144, 147, 151, 152, 153, 154, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 226,

Index 229, 230, 232, 233, 234, 236, 237, 238, 270, 271 Virgin, 79, 81, 92, 155 virtual, 18, 176, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 227 virtual reality, 182, 190, 195 Virtual reality, 182 Voltaire, 51 Walpole, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 85, 94, 159, 168 witches, 11, 15, 19, 20, 21, 59 wonder, xvi, 11, 26, 27, 49, 52, 59, 81, 104, 132, 134, 191, 228 wonderland, xvii, 143, 153, 154 Wonderland, xi, 2, 23, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155