Man
Behaving Badly.
Eric Jacobs.
Kingsley Amis: A Biography. St. Martin’s
(212-674-5151), 1998. xvii + 392 pp. $26.95 cloth.
The best part of this, the authorized biography
of Kingsley Amis, is the introductory chapter "Portrait of the Artist in Age."
In it the biographer follows his subject, a prematurely-aged and booze-sodden
seventy-year-old, on a typical day, from his first bowel movement to his last tumbler of
Macallan. In this "Portrait," a mere eighteen pages, all the apparent
contradictions of the life are resolved. How did the angry young Communist become the
national institution Sir Kingsley, dreaming amorously of Margaret Thatcher? The answer is
simple: there never was any paradox. Amis, an only child used to being the focus of his
parents’ middle-class suburban existence, was lucky to score a big enough early
success that he could continue to tap profitably the vein of Men Behaving Badly for the
rest of his life. Unlike some of his more disadvantaged postwar contemporaries, he was
never angry, he was merely peevish. In youth as in age he was quick to lose his temper
because he was easily bored, intellectually lazy, and impatient for gratification. Lucky
Jim after forty years of being indulged became, unsurprisingly, an Old Devil.
Amis’s chief contribution to sf is generally
considered to be New Maps of Hell (1960), based on a course of lectures he gave as
Visiting Fellow in Creative Writing at Princeton in 1958-59. That a light comic novelist
and versifier with no gift for or interest in literary scholarship should be offering
Christian Gauss Seminars at Princeton to an audience that included Hannah Arendt and
Robert Oppenheimer on a subject in which he had only the mildest interest (sf was later
replaced by television soap operas in his canon of approbation) speaks a good deal about
the residue of colonial deference in the Ivy League forty years ago. That the
infelicitously-titled book of those lectures should be considered the most influential
work on sf up to that time shows how uncertain was the relationship between sf
and the academy as late as a generation ago. New Maps’s endorsement of sf as an arm
of American popular culture whose function was to debunk the pretensions of utopians and
to expose the effeteness of fantasists was patronizing and utterly ahistorical. But the
young Amis thought he liked sf for the same reasons that he thought he liked jazz: because
it was pooh-poohed by Oxford dons, and because what he liked of it was undemanding.
Even before Amis’s death in 1995, New
Maps, like the rest of his extensive oeuvre, had become of historical interest
merely. Amis’s sf—notably The Anti-Death League (1966), The Alteration
(1976), and Russian Hide-and-Seek (1980)—never reached the depths of awfulness
plumbed, for example, by his co-editor of the Spectrum anthologies, Robert
Conquest, whose A World of Difference (1955) is one of the lowest points of British
sf. Amis was always a competent, readable writer, but unlike his friend Philip Larkin, who
was probably an even more unsavory human being, Amis was not an artist. Larkin cared
enough about language to restrict his output to a few slim volumes that nonetheless
contain about half a dozen of the best poems in English written since the war. Amis
meanwhile labored on at five hundred words a day, his love of language reduced to
accumulating the tired anecdotes and stale jokes that make up most of the entries in his
posthumous The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage (St. Martin’s,
1997).
Jacobs’s biography is readable and manages
to evoke more than a modicum of sympathy for the quite unlikable Amis. The paucity of
references to sf is not a fault. Amis was never very committed to the field, and by 1981
had come to feel that New Maps had given sf "a helping heave down the slope to
destruction" (221) by making it respectable. He was as wrong then about sf as he had
been in 1960, but he should not therefore be entirely dismissed for ego-centricity. A
writer who could authorize such an unattractive biographical portrait deserves a measure
of respect.
—Nicholas Ruddick, University
of Regina
Monkey
Business, or Primate Revisions.
Cynthia Erb.
Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture.
Wayne State UP (800-978-7323), 1998. 280 pp. $24.95 paper.
Variety’s reviewer knew exactly what
to make of King Kong when it premiered at Radio City Music Hall in March 1933:
"That it lends itself so freely and proudly to 12-cylinder exploiting is King Kong’s
ace in the hole. If properly handled the picture should gather good grosses in a
walk" (in Donald Willis, ed., Variety’s Complete Science Fiction Reviews
[NY: Garland, 1985]: 38). And it did, but the walk was longer than its makers expected,
since King Kong did not become an impressive money-maker until it was re-released
in 1952 and again in 1956, largely freed from its original genre identification as a
jungle adventure movie and recontextualized as an elder sibling of the creature-features
of the fifties.
The sf fan and scholarly communities have had
more trouble knowing what to make of King Kong, more often than not treating it as
fantasy or horror, with only tangential implications for sf film. The Clute-Nicholls Encyclopedia
of Science Fiction (St. Martin’s, 1993) identifies King Kong as "the
classic monster movie" and "one of the great mythopoeic works of the 20th
century," noting its impressive special effects; the unique blend of savagery,
regality, and pity evoked by Kong; and the film’s themes of nature destroyed in the
city and innocence destroyed by sophistication. While Bill Warren celebrates its 1952
re-release as a pivotal moment for the success of ‘50s sf film in his Keep
Watching the Skies: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties (McFarland,
1982-86), Vivian Sobchack doesn’t even mention King Kong in her Screening
Space: The American Science Fiction Film (Ungar, 1987). Jim Gunn includes three stills
from the film, but no comment about it, in his Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated
History of Science Fiction (Prentice-Hall, 1975), and I somehow wrote a book about the
impact of production technology and special effects on sf film—The Aesthetics of
Ambivalence: Rethinking Science Fiction Film in the Age of Electronic (Re)production
(Greenwood, 1992)—without doing more with King Kong than to note that it
challenges the boundaries of traditional sf film.
Cynthia Erb’s Tracking King Kong: A
Hollywood Icon in World Culture is not likely to affect this film’s indeterminate
status in sf discourses, but it offers a fascinating and compelling rethinking of King
Kong, one that should remind us how little we actually know about most of the
"classics" of sf film, and that may well suggest what can be gained from
rigorous cultural-studies approaches to other sf films. What Erb contends in this addition
to Wayne State University Press’s Contemporary Film and Television Series is that
"readings" of King Kong fail to account for its cultural power,
particularly since they tend to ignore or misunderstand the original and then the changing
contexts in which the film has been received. "King Kong’s monstrous
hybridity," she notes, "manages to absorb most of the binary structures
characteristic of Western thought—East/West, black/white, female/male,
primitive/modern" (17). Moreover, she argues that the "trivialization" of
King Kong through the creature’s many appearances in commercial and popular
culture—"advertisements, political cartoons, musicals, operas, novels, comic
books, film sequels, music videos" (14)—has actually "become a kind of
censorship that prevents us from looking at the figure’s cultural stakes" (13),
which Erb claims "are quite high." (Somewhat curiously, Erb does not even
mention articulations of the King Kong myth on the World Wide Web, a cultural site that
might be expected to offer useful evidence of the myth’s place in world culture.)
Aligning herself with film reception scholars such as Tony Bennett, Janet Woollacott,
Janet Staiger, Barbara Klinger, and Eric Smoodin, Erb presents a revisionist history of King
Kong’s original reception in 1933, as well as a persuasive account of its
influence on Mighty Joe Young in 1949 and, more importantly, on Godzilla in
1956. She then turns to the new cultural use-value of the creature King Kong as an object
of gay camp and mass camp treatment in the 60s and 70s and to black parodies that
reappropriate and reprocess this film "via a hateful history of degradation through
racist images of bestiality and sexual excess" (186). Her primary concern is with
"spectators outside the ‘mainstream,’ including international, gay, black,
and feminist artists and audiences" (14). Along the way Erb considers King Kong
"as a fertile site for artists and audiences invested in working through issues of
race, gender, sexuality, class, and national fantasy, from the 1930s to the present"
(14).
Erb’s first chapter recontextualizes the
1933 reception of King Kong in terms of its production history, the complicated
construction of its authorship (from the many writers and sources involved in the
evolution of its pastichelike form), the "ballyhoo" practices of theater
exhibitors, and particularly the cycle of jungle films that immediately preceded it. Her
point here is that while modern audiences regard King Kong as a horror or monster
film, its original audiences almost certainly saw it much more in terms of their
familiarity with jungle and even travel film traditions. These latter traditions are the
focus of the second chapter, which argues that any attempt to specify King Kong’s
genre must take into account the changing nature of its codes and conventions over time.
Specifically, Erb argues that original audiences best understood the film "through
codes characteristic of the travel documentary and jungle adventure traditions—two
generic fields in which Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack staked their professional
reputations in the 1920s and early 1930s" (66). Then, following Donna Haraway (and
Susan Sontag), she considers these traditions in terms of the "camera/gun trope"
and the "drama of the touch," both of which bind together issues of femininity
with issues of race and ethnicity. Chapter Three turns to the very different
contextualization—the "textual spread"—of King Kong in the
1950s, when it was twice re-released as part of the larger phenomenon of Hollywood’s
"recycling" of earlier films and when it was indirectly "remade" in
the guise of Mighty Joe Young and Godzilla. Erb’s very insightful
discussion of Godzilla will be of specific use to fans and scholars of sf film, and
her study of the ways in which King Kong’s cultural value was reconstructed in
the 1950s should be instructive for all of us who work with films that have attracted very
different audiences over time. It is unfortunate that Erb’s book went to press before
the 1998 remakes of Godzilla and Mighty Joe Young were available to her, but
her third chapter will suggest a number of valuable lines of analysis to anyone interested
in working with these newest "encrustations" of the King Kong myth.
Erb’s final chapter turns specifically to
the consideration of issues of male spectatorship raised by King Kong and to
parodies of the film. These parodies are largely grouped as "gay camp,"
"mass camp," and treatments that suggest a range of black responses to the
racist tropes of primitivism and animalism in—or attending exhibitions of—King
Kong. This is the chapter on which Erb’s identification of her work as a
reception study seems most directly to rest, the "bottom up" analysis of
spectatorship designed to complement the "top down" focus on production matrix,
ballyhoo, and other "industrial" discourses. Erb eschews a cultural-ethnographic
study of actual spectators, however, in favor of a kind of middle range "materialist
reception study" that allows her to interpret textual responses to King Kong
in lieu of actual interviews of inform-ants. I find Erb’s justification for this move
understandable, even persuasive, but wonder why it was so important to her to insist that
her book is a reception study even though it never actually isolates any specific audience
response. Nevertheless, her focus on the phenomenon of King Kong as a cultural icon that
has significantly to do with "male trouble" strikes me as quite valuable, and
her discussion of black uses of King Kong in a range of parodies offers an
intriguing glimpse of ways in which the film’s clearly racist dynamics have been
inverted and reconstituted.
This is a good book that will be an instructive
addition to the library of anyone interested in cultural studies approaches to popular
film. Erb acknowledges that part of the impetus for this study was her "personal
fascination with the unpredictable ways cinematic phenomena leave the space of the film
and exhibition industries, to be taken up in surprising sectors of culture and everyday
life" (207), a concern with particular application to both sf film and sf literature.
More important for the sf community is the fact that this book offers a good example of a
kind of saturation scholarship generally not found in sf film criticism, with the
exception of a very few films such as 2001 (1968) and Blade Runner (1982).
Indeed it is impossible to read Tracking King Kong without being reminded how very
little of the received knowledge of sf film would stand up for very long under
rigorous interrogation. Accordingly, this engaging study of a cultural myth that is
sf-related, but not sf-specific, should challenge us to do more with films central to our
discourse. And, if you have any sort of serious jones for King Kong, this is a book
you don’t want to miss.
—Brooks Landon, University
of Iowa
Dracula’s
Century.
Nina Auerbach and
David J. Skal, eds. Dracula, by Bram Stoker.
A Norton Critical Edition. Norton (800-223-2584), 1997. xiii + 492 pp. $11.25 paper.
Carol Davison, ed. Bram Stoker’s
"Dracula": Sucking Through the Century, 1897-1997. With Paul
Simpson-Housley. Toronto: Dundurn Press (416-667-7791), 1997. 432 pp. $22.00 paper.
The year 1997, centennial of the publication of
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, saw a flood of scholarship on that text, its cultural
influence, and vampire literature generally. Probably the most significant title to appear
was Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger’s anthology Blood Read: The Vampire as
Metaphor in Contemporary Culture (U Pennsylvania P, 1997; see review in SFS
25:2 [July 1998]: 385-88), in part because of its decision to focus not on Victorian
precursors but on more modern contexts and materials: this permitted it to stand out
against the horde of backwards-gazing volumes. The other major title was a re-issue of
Stoker’s classic in a Norton Critical Edition. Nina Auerbach, author of Our
Vampires, Ourselves (U Chicago P, 1995), and David J. Skal, author of Hollywood
Gothic: The Tangled Web of "Dracula" from Novel to Stage to Screen (Norton,
1990), were ideal editors for this project, and they have produced a wonderfully thorough
and useful casebook, including an annotated version of the British first edition, a
selection of contextual materials, a handful of contemporany reviews, extensive
information on dramatic and film adaptations, a sampling of extant criticism, a thoughtful
chronology of Stoker’s life and times, and a Selected Bibliography. The book will
surely become the standard text for upper-division undergraduate and graduate
classrooms— indeed, I am scheduled to teach a survey course on vampire literature and
film in the Spring of 2000, and I expect to make ready use of it.
The editors’ annotations to the novel are
models of brevity by comparison with the vast marginalia that fairly swamped Leonard
Wolf’s Annotated "Dracula" (Ballantine, 1985; reissued as The
Essential "Dracula" [Plume, 1993])—which included, for example, a
recipe for the chicken dish Jonathan Harker enjoys at the Hotel Royale in Klausenburgh on
his way to Castle Dracula. The section on "Contexts" gathers a brief essay on
"Transylvanian Superstitions" from Emily Gerard’s 1888 travelogue The
Land Beyond the Forest, a source for Stoker’s knowledge of the subject; an
excerpt from James Malcolm Rymer’s penny dreadful Varney the Vampire
(1845-47), featuring the staking of a female vampire that clearly inspired Stoker’s
bloody "purification" of Lucy Westenra; a selection of the author’s
"Working Papers" for the novel, originally gleaned from the Stoker collection at
the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia and edited by Christopher Frayling for
his excellent anthology Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (Faber and Faber,
1991); and Stoker’s story "Dracula’s Guest," posthumously published in
a volume of that title edited by his widow in 1914. Regarding this last item, Auerbach and
Skal endorse the critical commonplace (prompted by Florence Stoker’s headnote to Dracula’s
Guest) that it represents a deleted first chapter of the novel, a viewpoint which has
been sharply criticized—by, e.g., Clive Leatherdale in his Dracula: The Novel and
the Legend (Desert Island Books, 1985) and, conclusively, by Frayling in his
introductory note to the story in his aforementioned anthology. This is one of the few
missteps made by the editors, who were perhaps overly persuaded by Auerbach’s
polemical view that Stoker removed the "chapter" willfully in order to erase
evidence of the influence of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 lesbian vampire story
"Carmilla" (see Our Vampires, Ourselves, p. 66).
The "Reviews and Reactions" section
pulls together five immediate responses to the novel, four following its appearance in
Britain (from The Daily Mail, Athenaeum, Spectator, and Bookman)
and one following its first publication in the U.S. (from the San Francisco Chronicle
in 1899). This is perhaps the most disappointing section in the book, not because the
editors haven’t done their homework, but because the reviews are so generally
insipid. As the editors point out: "While modern readers and critics of Dracula
are transfixed by both the story’s primal narrative power and its extraordinary
psychosexual, sociopolitical subtexts, the novel was initially treated by reviewers as a
harmless, if thrill-producing, entertainment" (363). Who could have guessed at the
time that it would become perhaps the most well-known and influential piece of fiction of
the twentieth century, remaining consistently in print in most major languages and
generating more dramatic treatments, in diverse media, than any other work?
That Auerbach and Skal were especially suited to
editing this volume is proven by the section on "Dramatic and Film Adaptations,"
which features substantial excerpts from their own books (Skal on the 1920s
Balderston-Deane "Vampire Play," Auerbach on film adaptations of the 1950s, 60s,
and 70s). Along with annotated checklists of major theatrical and film treatments, this
section also includes an excerpt from Gregory A. Waller’s The Living and the
Undead: From Stoker’s "Dracula" to Romero’s "Dawn of the
Dead" (U Illinois P, 1986), which offers a reading of Tod Browning’s 1931
film version starring Bela Lugosi.
The final section gathers seven critical readings
of the novel, including feminist (Phyllis A. Roth), colonial/postcolonial (Stephen D.
Arata), Marxist (Franco Moretti), and queer-theoretical (Christopher Craft). Due to
necessities of space, the essays are abridged—Moretti’s "The Dialectic of
Fear," included in his Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of
Literary Forms (Verso, 1987), prominently discussed Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1816) as well as Stoker’s Dracula, and the editors have understandably chosen
to emphasize the latter reading exclusively—but the result, for those who know the
originals, is at times somewhat alarming (Moretti has, essentially, been reduced to only
one side of his "dialectic": the vampiric aristocrat is represented but not the
proletarian monster). I can’t quibble with the inclusion of any of these four essays:
all are pathbreaking; my only real concern is that two of them (Roth and Craft) are
readily available, in unabridged form, in Margaret Carter’s anthology Dracula: The
Vampire and the Critics (UMI Research Press, 1988).
The other three critical studies, however, are of
debatable importance, especially given all that has been omitted. Presumably intended to
highlight "psychological" themes, Carol Senf’s essay (also in Carter’s
anthology) is thin and diffuse compared to some of the classic psychoanalytic
interpretations, from Maurice Richardson’s infamous take on the novel as "a kind
of incestuous, necrophilous, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match" (in "The
Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories," Twentieth Century 166 [1959]: 419-31; see p.
427) on down to more recent treatments. Talia Schaffer’s essay on the relevance of
Oscar Wilde’s trial to Stoker’s conception of the novel is interesting, but
rather redundant given that Christopher Craft’s "‘Kiss Me With Those Red
Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula" argues
brilliantly for the novel’s homoerotic subtexts. Schaffer’s essay was likely
included due to Auerbach’s fascination for the general subject, as evidenced in the
editorial introduction (xi-xii) and in her Our Vampires, Ourselves (see especially
pp. 83-5).
Similarly, Auerbach’s interest in nineteenth
century images of demonic women—the subject of her earlier book Woman and the
Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Harvard UP, 1982)—probably explains the
presence of the brief excerpt from Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies
of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford UP, 1986), which excoriates Dracula
as a "commonplace book of ... antifeminine obsession" (460). But Dijsktra’s
earnest, quirky argument—which links the novel to a host of late-Victorian discourses
on female sexual predation—is barely given room to breathe (only two pages) before
being snuffed out. In my view, the omission of Senf, Schaffer, and Dijkstra would have
made room for two other, more trenchant critical pieces—which might have included
Judith Halberstam’s study of Stoker’s anti-Semitism ("Technologies of
Monstrosity," in Victorian Studies 36:3 [Spring 1993]: 333-52), or a sample of
David Glover’s fine work on nationalist ideology in Stoker’s texts (material
recently gathered into Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of
Popular Fiction [Duke UP, 1996]), or Friedrich Kittler’s potent meditation on
information-processing systems in the novel ("Dracula’s Legacy," in Stanford
Humanities Review 1 [1989]: 143-73). But these various carpings and second-guessings
should not be perceived as diminishing my deep respect for this timely, useful volume.
Carol Davison’s Bram Stoker’s
"Dracula": Sucking Through the Century, 1897-1997 is also obviously timely,
though not so useful as the Norton edition (and is, moreover, lumbered with an execrable
title!). Intended to trace "the specific bonds Stoker’s novel had with its 1890s
point of conception, and the nature of its subsequent transmutations within other
socio-cultural contexts" (23), the volume contains a substantial Introduction by
Davison; a Preface by New-Gothic author Patrick McGrath; a lengthy study of the geography
of Dracula, liberally illustrated with maps, by Gerald Walker and Lorraine Wright;
four sections containing fourteen essays (all but two of them original) covering 1890s
contexts, twentieth-century outgrowths, cinematic traditions, and broad social concerns
raised by the novel; an archive of information on various Dracula societies and fan
groups; two appendices containing information on Stoker’s personal library and his
controversial death-certificate, and a brief catalogue description of his papers held at
the Rosenbach Museum and Library; and an extensive bibliography. While much of
this material is worthwhile, I feel the general rationale for its gathering is
never made convincingly by Davison, and as a result the book is something of a hodgepodge.
Also, its design is not exactly reader-friendly:
there is no index, and the diverse collocations of front and end matter are confusingly
arranged and dubiously purposed. For example, I have no idea what possible value can lie
in reprinting the catalogue description of Stoker’s notes for Dracula,
especially given that Frayling has made most of this material directly available in his
anthology. Leslie Shepard’s terse remarks on Stoker’s death certificate,
intended to fend off the notion—forcefully argued by Stoker’s great-nephew
Daniel Farson in his biography, The Man Who Wrote "Dracula" (St.
Martin’s, 1985)—that the given cause of death ("Exhaustion") was a
Victorian-Edwardian euphemism for tertiary syphillis, are unconvincing and seem like
special pleading. The section of entries on Dracula-related
"Associations/Awards/ Resources" features an odd conglomeration of items that I
am at times hard-pressed to grasp the relevance of. The information on the various
Stoker-Dracula-Transylvania fan clubs is readily available in J. Gordon Melton’s The
Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead (Visible Ink, 1994), whose encylopedic
form justifies its inclusion of such ephemera; and the list of winners of the Bram Stoker
Awards, given since 1988 by the Horror Writers of America, seems a curious offshoot of the
volume’s basic design (are we to assume that the work of these contemporary
authors—Stephen King, Thomas Harris, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Straub, et al.—has
been somehow inspired or influenced by Stoker’s Dracula?) The effect of these
pack-rat gatherings is at times a white-noise of unassimilated data given coherence merely
by reference—sometimes in name only—to Bram Stoker and/or his most famous
creation.
But the heart of the book is the fourteen essays,
and most of these are quite good. I suppose it is rather a problem that the best of them
are the two reprinted pieces: an excerpt from Auerbach’s Our Vampires, Ourselves on
1970s vampire fiction and Veronica Hollinger’s Pioneer Award-winning essay "The
Vampire and the Alien" (originally published in SFS 16:2 [July 1989]: 145-60),
which traces connections between Gothic horror and science fiction. I suppose it is also a
problem that these two pieces are connected to Stoker’s novel in only the most
tangential of ways. But it is a pleasure to encounter them here, as they substantially
build out and deepen the discussion of modern vampire fiction inaugurated by Margaret L.
Carter’s essay on the "Sympathetic Vampire in Mid-Twentieth Century Pulp
Fiction." The essays on 1890s contexts are equally interesting if not as critically
compelling: indeed, they work better as a unit rather than as individual studies. Carol
Senf’s, Jan Gordon’s, and Stephanie Moss’s essays all address, in different
ways, the horrible force of the monstrous past erupting into the present—Senf by way
of a comparison of Dracula with Stoker’s mummy novel, The Jewel of Seven
Stars (1912), Gordon through an examination of the literary tensions between Gothic
roots and fin-de-siècle realties, and Moss by exploring connections with
proto-Freudian psychological theories. Davison’s own essay in this section, which
considers Dracula and Jack the Ripper as "Blood Brothers," is energetically
written and broadly researched, though not very deep.
The weakest section of essays covers
"Celluloid Vampires." The problem with Jacqueline LeBlanc’s essay on
"Dracula and the Erotic Technologies of Censorship" is not that it is
bad—in fact, it is excellent—but rather that it is out of place, having little
really to do with cinema save for some closing remarks on Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram
Stoker’s Dracula (1992). On the other hand, Jake Brown’s essay on major Dracula
film adaptations, while more clearly relevant, is essentially a rehash of commonplaces,
and Natalie Bartlett and Bradley Bellows’ essay on "Vampires in Japanese Anime,"
while entertaining, is critically superficial (a much better discussion of popular
Japanese vampire texts is Mari Kotani’s essay in the Gordon-Hollinger volume Blood
Read). The final section, which considers social issues raised by the novel and its
legacy, includes Richard Anderson’s provocative but undeveloped discussion of the
"landscapes of modernity" implicit in Dracula; Livy Visano’s diffuse
but generally fascinating consideration of the novel as a "critical ethnography"
of Victorian moral contradictions (though why this essay appears here and not in the
1890s-contexts section eludes me), and Benjamin LeBlanc’s meandering diagnosis of the
vampire’s cultural mainstreaming and consequent demise. In sum, Bram Stoker’s
"Dracula": Sucking through the Century is an uneven but ultimately
worthwhile collection, proving if nothing else the endless fecundity of Stoker’s
novel to provoke responses, generate interpretations, and generally to haunt the twentieth
century imagination.
—Rob Latham
A Monument of
Feminist Horror.
Julie Bates Dock,
ed. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s "The Yellow
Wall-paper" and the History of Its Publication and Reception: A Critical Edition and
Documentary Casebook. Penn State UP (814-865-1327), 1998. xii + 132
pp. $35 cloth; $16.95 paper.
With the possible exception of Kate Chopin’s
novel The Awakening (1899), there is no more famous example in American literature
of feminist recovery of a forgotten text than Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short
story "The Yellow Wall-paper." Gilman’s first-person account of a young
wife and mother’s suffering under the harsh regimen of a "rest cure"
imposed by her clueless physician-husband is universally hailed by modern critics and
scholars as a scathing allegory of patriarchal oppression. As the story has made its way
into the American literary canon, it has brought with it a compelling back-story: based on
the author’s own mistreatment at the hands of the famous physician S. Weir Mitchell,
"The Yellow Wall-paper" was either misread or ignored in Gilman’s own
lifetime. Not until Elaine Hedges’ edition of the story appeared from the Feminist
Press in 1973 was the story rediscovered; since then, it has acquired a small mountain of
critical commentary and become a staple of college literature anthologies.
But then, not quite, according to Julie Bates
Dock. In a 26-page introduction, "The Legend of the Yellow Wall-paper," Dock
convincingly dismantles some of the stories that have grown up around Gilman’s text.
"The Yellow Wall-paper" was ignored and/or misunderstood during Gilman’s
lifetime? Dock quotes numerous contemporary reviews of the story, almost all of which are
favorable and some of which are fully aware of what the story says about the often
oppressive realities of marriage. (One—male—reviewer wrote in 1899,
"Nothing more graphic and suggestive has ever been written to show why so many women
go crazy.") William Dean Howells falsely took credit for helping to get the story
published? Dock points out that Edwin Mead, the editor of The New England Magazine,
where Gilman’s story first appeared, was a Howells protégée and cousin by marriage,
and so was quite readily influenced by Howells. S. Weir Mitchell abandoned his "rest
cure" after reading the story? Dock demonstrates that there is no evidence to support
this claim other than Gilman’s own after-the-fact comments. The story disappeared
until resurrected by Hedges and the Feminist Press? Dock lists 23 reprintings of the
story between its original publication and 1973—not an avalanche, to be sure, but
still well short of obscurity. Admirably, Dock lays out her case without falling victim to
Camille Paglia Syndrome and blaming a monolithic feminist conspiracy for the partially
inaccurate myth of Gilman’s story and its reception. There is, to be sure, a quiet
satisfaction evident in the footnotes that document other editors and scholars taking her
critiques into account (based on an earlier essay in Publications of the Modern
Language Association), but for the most part Dock presents her case with malice toward
none. Genre readers will undoubtedly forgive Dock her obvious glee in noting one
critic’s howler: a claim that H.P. Lovecraft had "included" Gilman’s
story in Supernatural Horror in Literature "as recently as 1973" (17).
Dock’s main purpose in the present
volume, however, is to provide an "authoritative text" of Gilman’s story, which
she does convincingly. Fourteen pages are occupied by the story itself; 90 pages
are given over to textual commentary, apparatus, supporting documents, and a
bibliography of reprintings of Gilman’s story that shows what a difference a few decades can make.
After going through three editions as a small book from 1899-1911 and the aforementioned
20 reprints between 1911 and 1972, "The Yellow Wall-paper" has been reprinted at
least 80 times—Dock describes her post-‘73 listings as "representative, not
exhaustive" (121). In choosing for her copy-text the story as it was first published
in The New England Magazine rather than an extant handwritten manuscript, Dock
allies herself with Jerome McGann’s "‘social theory’ of textual
editing" which, rather than privileging a pure notion of authorial intent, holds that
"editors should recognize the essentially interactive nature of texts as
communicative events that involve authors, printers, readers, and others in a complex
network of social relations" (44). Dock supports her position by suggesting that in
fact a different handwritten manuscript may have been edited for magazine publication and
by citing Gilman’s own writings to show that the author was not particularly
concerned about her work on a word-for-word basis: writing in 1898, Gilman declared that
she was "‘No self-conscious artist. If you care little for my style why I care
less’" (61). (One wonders, however, why, after her skeptical reading of
Gilman’s comments on Weir Mitchell, Dock should here take Gilman’s comments on
her own work at face value.) Given that there was relatively little difference between the
handwritten manuscript and first magazine publication, any debate as to which is a
preferable copy-text is of interest primarily to textual scholars. Critics and scholars at
large should, however, read with great interest Dock’s detailed accounting of
variations among subsequent texts that were often unacknowledged by later editors and
occasionally make a real difference. As Dock points out, it may not matter if the word is
spelled "phospites" or "phosphites," but it does matter if the
sentence "John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage" is
changed in a later edition to read, "John laughs at me, of course, but one expects
that" (7).
In addition to its obvious value as a textual
study, Dock’s book is of special interest to sf scholars for what it says, and
doesn’t say, regarding the status of Gilman’s story as a work of the fantastic.
Implicit (and sometimes explicit) in the assertions of earlier feminist scholars that
"The Yellow Wallpaper" was "misread" in Gilman’s day is the
notion that turn-of-the-century readers were reading it as "only" a horror or
ghost story. Was there really a woman behind the wallpaper? According to this line of
thinking, the reader who says "yes" devalues the story and misses the point.
Dock seems to buy into this false dilemma when, during her discussion of feminist
critics’ complaints about Gilman’s work being compartmentalized as a
supernatural story, she notes that "there is a definite distinction between a tale of
horror and a tale of ghosts" (16). True enough, but the implication remains that, the
more literally we interpret the story, the further away we get from its "real"
meaning. Nonetheless, Dock also points out that the story "has appeared in at least a
dozen collections of gothic horror or suspense since feminist critics taught us all how to
read it aright" (20). (She does not, however, mention its likely influence on recent
feminist sf—e.g. Kate Wilhelm’s short story "The Downstairs Room"
[1968], wherein sinister lineoleum tiles replace the eponymous wall-covering.)
One of those "collections of gothic
horror" was The Dark Descent (NY: Tor, 1987), edited by David G. Hartwell. In
his introduction to Gilman’s story, Hartwell writes, "‘The Yellow
Wall-paper’ is either a haunted house story or a story of insanity, but in either
case it is a monument of feminist horror, pointing out subtly and effectively all the
restrictions which bring the central character to the moment of the story" (460). We
may hope that someday academic criticism may be able to respond to Gilman’s story as
sensibly as Hartwell and realize that the phrase "feminist horror" is neither an
oxymoron nor an insult. In the meantime, Julie Bates Dock has provided us with an
extraordinarily useful book which sheds new light on a story that remains, however one
chooses to interpret it, one of the most extraordinary performances in American
literature.
—F. Brett Cox, Gordon
College
Better Than
It Looks.
Lionel Adey.
C.S. Lewis: Writer and Dreamer. Eerdmans
(616-459-4591), 1998. x + 307 pp. $22 paper.
Lionel Adey’s characterization of C.S. Lewis
as "Writer, Dreamer, and Mentor" is the rationale for this new book on a man
already buried under a plethora of critical studies, memoirs, and biographies. "Why
another book on C.S. Lewis?" asks Adey, and his answer—at once factually
inaccurate and critically valuable—is that there has been until now no study of Lewis
as "a maker and reader of books" (1). This is hardly the case, since
Lewis’s fame and hence the many books about him implicitly rest on his dual vocations
of writer and scholar—that is to say, maker and reader of books. Nevertheless, in
spite of its apparent redundancy, Adey’s study performs a valuable service in
explicitly drawing together these particular aspects to create a portrait of the life of
the mind, tracing the threads of Lewis’s intellectual and creative life as literary
historian, critic, theorist, writer of fiction for adults and children, poet, essayist,
and speaker.
While Lewis, although a little out of fashion at
present, is still a respected scholar, and has as well a devoted following as a Christian
apologist, I venture to guess that most readers will hone in on Adey’s treatment of
Lewis’s fiction—his adult fantasy novels and the "Chronicles of
Narnia" (1950-56). Addressing these in turn, Adey begins with the seven works (they
are not all novels) which he groups as Lewis’s adult fantasy. These he sees as moving
through a series of genres from the naive allegory of The Pilgrim’s Regress
(1933) to the psychological realism of Till We Have Faces (1956) by way of the
science fiction of the space trilogy. Thus, the Regress is allegory, Out of the
Silent Planet (1938) is science fiction, Perelandra (1943) is "mythopoeic
fantasy" (126), That Hideous Strength (1945) an uneasy mix of fairy tale and
satire, and Till We Have Faces "psychologized myth" (151). The
Screwtape Letters (1942) and The Great Divorce (1945), which Adey classifies as
theological satire, are the two misfits in the group, for they are hardly fiction, only
thinly disguised as fantasy, and their religious didacticism is considerably more overt.
Nonetheless, the grouping interacts fairly well
with Adey’s two Lewisian personae of Dreamer and Mentor, with the Mentor dominant in
the satires and the Dreamer in the fantasies. But of course both are present in both. Thus
during Ransom’s voyage in Out of the Silent Planet, the night sky is
inexpressibly beautiful but the earth is a "megalomaniac disc" (124).
"Here," says Adey, "the Mentor jogs the Dreamer’s arm" (124), as
happens again in the next novel in the series, Perelandra (though Adey does not
note this), when the luscious beauty of that planet becomes the setting for theological
disputation. The Mentor is paramount in That Hideous Strength, which
"pillories everything Lewis disliked about twentieth-century life, from feminism,
relativism, and reductionism to vivisection, technology, and philistine development"
(134).
The operative phrase throughout Adey’s
discussion is "maker and reader of books," for Lewis the writer is presented as
the offspring of Lewis the reader. This is not in itself invalid, for writers write in the
shadow of their predecessors, and few modern authors have borrowed from their reading more
explicitly and unabashedly than did Lewis. Adey, however, tends to find influence
everywhere, making Lewis’s reading a major influence on his writing and linking both
to the climate of his emotional life. Lewis himself called this The Personal Heresy, and
argued vigorously—though not altogether unassailably—against the proposition
that "all poetry is about the poet’s state of mind" (see Walter Hooper, C.S.
Lewis: A Companion and Guide [San Francisco: Harper, 1998], p. 598). The poet’s
state of mind must be a concern of any critical analysis, but Lewis was on the right track
in seeing that an exclusive focus on this privileges the author over the work, resulting
in biography rather than literary criticism.
Adey himself falls into the trap, arbitrarily
linking episodes or figures from Lewis’s life not just to similar elements in his
writing, but to episodes or figures in his personal experience. This is reductive when
applied to any work, and does a disservice not just to Lewis, but to several of the great
fantasy authors whose books had a palpable influence on his fiction, among them George
MacDonald, H. Rider Haggard, and David Lindsay. Lewis was perfectly capable of
appreciating the imaginative power of these authors, and of learning from their works,
without necessarily finding in them reflections of his own early life. The White Lady in
MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858) need not "have represented Lewis’s
early bereavement" (27) in order to have impressed his imagination; the heroine of
Haggard’s She (1886) and Ayesha (1905) might have been fascinating in
her own right, without speaking to Lewis as "a recently bereaved boy," nor need
the fact that she is multilingual have "surely" recalled to Lewis his
"mother, his first teacher of Latin and French" (14). Stretching the
biographical approach beyond reasonable limits, Adey asserts that the episode in
Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) wherein a mother abandons her children
"touched the ever-sensitive spot of Lewis’s grief for his mother" (117). No
evidence is produced to support any of these claims.
It is a bit surprising, therefore, to see Adey
open and close his discussion of the "Chronicles of Narnia" in outraged reaction
to David Holbrook’s Freudian-biographical approach to Lewis in The Skeleton in the
Wardrobe (Bucknell UP, 1991). While he concedes that "most, if not all, works of
art spring from some trauma," Adey’s strictures against "the now-dated game
of psychoanalytic reductionism" nevertheless lead him to conclude that "the only
issue that should concern a critic is the quality of craftsmanship evident in the
resultant works" (193). Given Adey’s critical posture as described in the
previous paragraph, one has to wonder if he had read his own book. Once past this
inconsistency, however, Adey settles down to inquire into the popularity of the Chronicles
and comes up with some cogent reasons.
The enchantment of the series owes much to the
Dreamer’s predilection for folklore and romance, while the heavy-handed attacks on
modernism and secular humanism derive from the Mentor’s cultural prejudices. Adey, I
think correctly, sees the continuing popularity of the Chronicles as coming from their
childless author’s identification with children and the attractive and exasperating
fact that part of him never grew up. The exterior chronology of their writing shows a
progression from early childhood to old age, as well as increased subtlety in narration,
as Lewis warmed to his theme and entered more deeply into his story. Read in this order,
as Adey perceptively notes, the sequence gives evidence of Lewis’s
"underthought" and fosters a personal experience of the books, especially for
young readers. The interior chronology of events in the story approximates the Christian
mythos from the creation and Fall of The Magician’s Nephew (1955), through
sacrifice and resurrection in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), the
"Narnian equivalent of Exodus" (175) in The Horse and His Boy (1954), the
journey toward Heaven in The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" (1952), a
descent into Sheol in The Silver Chair (1953), and the apocalypse in The Last
Battle (1956). This order of reading, whose recognition depends on the reader’s
age, education, and acquaintance with the Bible, puts greater weight on Lewis’s
theological "overthought."
As with Mark Twain’s characterization of
Wagner’s music as better than it sounds, this book is better than it looks. While
there are inconsistencies in his study, on the whole Adey takes a thoughtful and critical
look at the pervasive themes of Lewis’s literary career. The personified headings
give Adey a handle on the sometime interaction, sometime conflict between Lewis’s
rationalist and romantic selves out of which the fiction, especially, arises. In sum, for
people who do not like C.S. Lewis, or who find him only mildly interesting, the ground
covered here may seem already well-trodden, and the Mentor and the Dreamer a predictable
allegorizing of a man whose intellect often muffled his emotions. For people who like C.S.
Lewis, on the other hand, this is the sort of book they will like.
—Verlyn Flieger, University
of Maryland
Canadian
Dreams.
Edo van Belkom.
Northern Dreamers: Interviews with Famous Science Fiction,
Fantasy, and Horror Writers. Out of This World Series #4. Ontario:
Quarry, 1998. 254 pp. $19.95 CDA; $14.95 USA paper. Dist. in USA by InBook (800-243-0138).
This collection of 22 interviews with Canadian
sf, fantasy, and horror writers is the first of its kind, and as such it is a valuable
guide to the genre in Canada. Edo van Belkom is a professional editor, author of horror
fiction, and a Canadian Regional Director of the Science Fiction Writers of America. His
familiarity with his interview subjects and the field in Canada is immediately evident. He
can be forgiven, then, for the effusive claims he makes for these authors in his
introduction. While not all of these writers are "pioneers, leaders, and supreme
masters of their realms" of speculative fiction (8), as he suggests, they do
represent the leading voices in Canadian speculative fiction. Indeed, most of those
included have received international awards, critical and reader acclaim, and some
commercial success.
Van Belkom can also be commended for the breadth
of his selection since the volume includes male and female writers in nearly equal
numbers. Attention is focused on professional writers who have established active careers
in speculative fiction, including gaming fiction, rather than on newcomers to the field.
The book thus makes an excellent companion to David Ketterer’s Canadian Science
Fiction and Fantasy (Indiana UP, 1992), since more than half of these writers appear
in his overview of the Canadian genre. American and Canadian readers and scholars will
recognize, in particular, the names of William Gibson, Robert Sawyer, Spider and Jeanne
Robinson, W.P. Kinsella, Guy Gavriel Kay, Terence Green, Charles de Lint, and Phyllis
Gotlieb. The anthology does not include other Canadian writers like Margaret Atwood,
author of The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and a number of sf short fictions, who
are not primarily identified with speculative writing. One particular shortcoming for
researchers is the volume’s emphasis on English Canada. The only Quebecois author
represented here is Elisabeth Vonarburg, whose work has been translated and distributed
widely in English Canada and the US.
Despite what the subtitle may suggest, it is not
fame that unites these writers; rather it is the fact that all the interview subjects live
and work in Canada. Since the majority of these authors were born in the United States,
questions about Canadian content and identity have an interesting spin. When van Belkom
asks his interviewees about the importance of their identities as Canadians, two linked
themes emerge: the importance of a Canadian identity for their writing, and the difficulty
of success in the publishing marketplace. Despite their international awards and sales, as
van Belkom points out, few of these 22 writers have had books published in Canada. These
are writers who have largely made their professional careers and reputations in the US.
According to those interviewed, the Canadian literary mainstream, including both critics
and publishers, is mostly uninterested in speculative fiction; only smaller presses like
Quarry, Tesseracts, and Pottersfield have consistently published sf anthologies and genre
books.
When questions of Canadian content and the
significance of national identity arise, few authors, at least in this context, seem
concerned with a symbolic landscape of the North or with the idea of geographical
alienation. Instead, many embrace Canadian urban landscapes. Nancy Baker, Tanya Huff,
Charles de Lint, and Spider Robinson use Canadian urban settings despite the publication
or marketing of their novels in the US. As Terence Green suggests, "it’s very
much not having an inferiority complex as a Canadian and realizing our world is as
interesting to outsiders as it can be to insiders" (107). Similarly, Michael Coney is
not alone in suggesting that, though adamantly committed to Canada, the literary
distinctions between American and Canadian sf elude him: "The truth is: I don’t
know what a Canadian story is.... Currently I have a story ... [that] has snow, Indians,
possibly even caribou, and it was deliberately written to sound Canadian. We’ll see
what people think of that" (31).
As one might expect from interviews, these
writers respond well when asked to discuss their literary influences, their reasons for
choosing their genre, anecdotes from their careers, and their views on the direction of
the genre as a whole. More unusual is the subject of the publishing marketplace. Strong
insights into complexities of marketing forces in Canada and the US and their influence on
speculative writing are articulated in nearly every interview. Among the most penetrating
on this subject are Terence Green, Robert Sawyer, Michele Sagara, Candas Jane Dorsey, and
Dave Duncan, who offer candid opinions about genre categorization, sales figures and
marketing, agent and author relationships, and self-promotion strategies. On the whole,
this collection remains positive about the genre. Many of these same authors also discuss
the writing process and its personal rewards. Phyllis Gotlieb, now in her seventies,
remarks that while she began her career as the only visible Canadian writing sf, with
little support and few models, she has few regrets. Now, after a career of 36 years, she
asserts: "neighbors who came snickered at the dust on my furniture, but then
afterwards they said, ‘Phyllis you had the right idea!’ (103)."
—Nancy Johnston, Ryerson
Polytechnic University
Ghosts and
Other Masochists.
Katherine A.
Fowkes. Giving Up the Ghost: Spirits, Ghosts, and Angels
in Mainstream Comedy Films. Wayne State UP (800-978-7323), 1998. 202
pp. $24.95 paper.
In Giving Up the Ghost, Katherine A.
Fowkes investigates recent supernatural comedies, such as Heaven Can Wait (1978), Always
(1989), Ghost (1990), Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991), and Heart and Souls
(1993), which she locates in relation to the neighboring genres of fantasy/horror,
romance/ melodrama, and comedy. Drawing on scholarly work by theorists of filmic masochism
such as Kaja Silverman and Gaylyn Studlar, she argues that these ghost films expose and
bring to the surface masochistic structures and pleasures which underwrite many Hollywood
movies: "Ghost films dramatize an explicitly masochistic fantasy in which the desire
to switch genders is part of a desire to achieve sexual sameness" (11). In
Fowkes’ view, this masochistic aesthetic covers not only viewing pleasure but also
narrative and generic structures. That is, Fowkes’ central claim is that ghost movies
share with masochism a similar emphasis on "delay, suspense, and distance—all of
which is seen in abundance in the delay caused by the ghost’s transitional and
ineffectual status as it attempts to communicate with the living" (56). As this focus
suggests, Fowkes attempts to revive a dated discussion in film studies—sadism vs.
masochism—in order to frame her work as a corrective counterpoint to arguments that
explain the pleasures and narrative processes of mainstream films by drawing on
psychoanalytic theories of sadism. In this context, Fowkes’ all-too-familiar villains
are 1970s psychoanalytic film theorists—in particular, Laura Mulvey.
What Fowkes finds intriguing and significant is
the gendered nature of the masochistic aesthetic, its location in a generic form that
draws from women’s melodramas, yet still seems to be obsessed with issues of
masculinity. Indeed, as Fowkes asks candidly: "Why are all the ghosts men?"
(25). She finds an explanation in ghost comedies’ subversiveness. The male
ghost’s linkage to feminine-coded domesticity and his "passivity, poor
communication, and ineffectuality" (118) thwart his narrative agency and "in a
sense, [force him] to switch genders" (25). Masculinity’s alignment with a
"female position" prompts Fowkes to conclude that ghost comedies "provide a
substantially different approach to traditional gender roles" (11). Thus, ghost films
fulfill an important cultural function, since "the process of being made ineffectual
is extremely important for the male protagonist and the male viewer because this process
facilitates a suspension of passive and active categories and an engagement of varied
identificatory positions" (163).
For Fowkes, these utopian politics of ghost
comedies are not limited to the sphere of gender, but also cover the politics of
subjectivity more generally. For example, these films are apparently able to: expose the
voice "as the paradoxical vehicle of illusory subjecthood" (87); "expose
the dilemma of the subject who speaks but who is also himself spoken by the language"
(88); demonstrate "the unfulfillable fantasy nature of romantic union" by
simultaneously "provid[ing] the mechanism to reverse temporarily the melodramatic
tragedy" and prolonging it (106); and, by disassociating the voice from the body,
"manipulate the audience’s sense of the unified subject" (94). Indeed, such
a return to a utopian belief in the radical possibilities of the popular text to expose
the illusory nature of "bourgeois subjectivity" can’t help but produce the
uncanny feeling that Fowkes’ own work is haunted by a certain "delay" or
"suspense," the apparition of 1970s film theory’s valorizing of the
self-reflexive, avant-garde cinema of the time. In this sense, Fowkes is not alone in
seeming to fear that writing about popular commodities casts a suspicious shadow on the
political importance of a scholar’s work. This, then, requires as a counter-move an
(often desperate) attempt to convince the reader of their objects’ almost inherent
radicalness or subversive potential, rather than seriously engaging their function as
popular texts within the context of their social circulation.
Although Fowkes is working mainly within a
psychoanalytic theoretical context, with occasional and brief excursions into genre theory
and neoformalism, she nonetheless seems to argue for a need to locate these texts in their
cultural and historical contexts when she writes: "Because we must take into account
the role that the viewer plays in relation to textual meaning, any analysis of films or
film ghosts must stem from and be influenced by one or more cultural perspectives"
(13). She further adds that "meaning and pleasure do not lie in the text, but in the
interaction between the text and the perceiver" (14). Unfortunately the inference
that this might mean paying attention to how ghost films become meaningful in relation to
various cultural narratives of the time (i.e., discursive contexts of reception) turns out
to be unwarranted optimism, since Fowkes quickly reveals that this "cultural
perspective" is feminist psychoanalysis. Indeed, her insistence on the text-viewer
interaction is just an empty gesture, since nowhere in the book does she venture outside
the textual limits of these films and the hypothetical pleasures they imply. As a result
of this ahistorical, culturally undifferentiated psychoanalytic framework, she is unable
to explain the re-emergence of ghost movies during the last two decades or what particular
significance this particular cycle may hold.
Within the psychoanalytic methodology Fowkes
employs, the attention to gender instabilities as a central element of the films’
structural composition and potential viewer effect follows logically. However, Fowkes
fails to understand that the phenomenon of males taking up a masochistic position is
rarely accompanied by a shift in the dynamics and structures of gendered power. Due to her
emphasis on textuality at the expense of a culturally contextualized reading of texts,
Fowkes is unable to see how intimately male masochism is connected with contemporary
cultural narratives that locate (white) men as victims of various cultural forces, ranging
from the Vietnam war and economic shifts to Civil Rights and the women’s movement.
Indeed, as scholars such as Tania Modleski, in Feminism Without Women: Culture and
Criticism in a "Postfeminist" Age (NY: Routledge, 1991), have warned us,
during the last two decades we have witnessed a renewed attempt to uphold masculine
privileges by appropriating "feminine" and feminist positions. Indeed, we should
be wary of strategies that actually conserve male power in the very act of appearing to
renounce it. As Modleski so astutely observes: "The disavowal often involves the
illusion that one can not only have it all, but also be it all—male and female,
father and mother, adult and child—without altering the power structure in which men
rule over women and adults over children" (90). This may indeed be among the most
damaging of the "omissions or blind spots that are a direct result of the time lag
between the initial ideas and the publication of this book" (9), of which Fowkes
warns the reader in her preface.
—Martti Lahti, University
of Iowa
Brief Notices
Stephen T. Miller and William G. Contento. Science
Fiction, Fantasy, & Weird Fiction Magazine Index (1890-1997).
Locus Press (510-339-9198), 1998. $49.95 cd-rom.
Charles N. Brown
and William G. Contento. The Locus Index to Science
Fiction, with Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections,
by Contento. Locus Press (510-339-9198), 1998. $49.95 cd-rom.
These two cd-roms update, and make available in
electronic form, three of the most significant reference works ever devoted to sf
literature: Stephen T. Miller and William G. Contento’s Science Fiction, Fantasy,
and Weird Magazine Index: 1890-1990 (3 vols.; Garland, 1995), Contento’s Index
to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections (2 vols.; G.K. Hall, 1978-84), and
Charles N. Brown and Contento’s Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror: A
Comprehensive Bibliography of Books and Short Fiction Published in the English Language
(Locus Press, 1984-91), an annual volume which consolidated the bibliographic archive of Locus
magazine with Contento’s ongoing anthologies/collections index. Since 1991, when this
annual series ceased publication in book form, Brown and Contento have been working to
generate an electronic equivalent, and that has now appeared; the editors promise to
release updated editions annually, including information on new (and newly discovered)
publications. For those who purchase this year’s cd-roms, on-line addenda can be
readily accessed; indeed, two of these indexes are fully available on the World Wide
Web—the Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections at <www.best.com/~contento/0start.html>
and the Locus Index at <www.sff.net/locus/0start.html>.
Anyone who has ever made use of the hard copy versions (I assume that includes all of
you!) will know how immensely valuable they are—in fact, invaluable; there are simply
no other bibliographic sources as extensive or thorough. Taken altogether, they amount to
a treasure trove of information on over a century of English-language sf short fiction and
a decade-and-a-half of book publication. The electronic versions are easy to use,
essentially mimicking their book form by linking everything to a central Table of
Contents; cross-links are minimal but well-conceived. You will need to use a standard web
browser to access the cd-roms, a nice arrangement since it makes the discs compatible with
both Apple and PC machines (as well as making it simple to access the on-line addenda).
Information on purchasing the cd-roms can be found on-line at <www.
sff.net/locus/cdrom-ad.html>. All university libraries should acquire them immediately.
—Rob Latham
Russell
Hoban. Riddley Walker. Expanded
Edition, with Afterword, Notes, and Glossary. Indiana UP (812-855-8054), 1998. 235 pp. $25
cloth; $12.95 paper.
For Russell Hoban, until 1980 best known for a
series of (charming) illustrated books for young readers about a badger named Frances, Riddley
Walker was a breakthrough. Written in a dialect-of-the-future (Hoban’s Afterword
calls it Riddleyspeak) whose fractured and morphed English in itself attests to the
destruction of English society following a holocaust, the novel also discloses the
persistence of English (specifically, Kentish) folk customs and characters. Drawing its
own influences about equally from Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz
(1960) and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884), Hoban’s novel has
inspired subsequent writers from Connie Willis to Michael Swanwick. (I do not have any
signed depositions as proof of that, of course, but it is apparent that Hoban’s novel
has influenced most post-1980 fiction that has used a post-holocaust setting.) Riddley
Walker was wielded as a weapon in sf’s (and the mainstream’s) culture wars
of the 1980s: it was misread as essentially high-minded and elitist. According to John
Leonard’s early review in The New York Times, Hoban’s novel was
"designed to prevent the modern reader from becoming stupid," the kind of
nose-in-the-air comment that drives any self-respecting reader away from new novels.
Fortunately, as this re-issue of the novel shows, Riddley Walker is not sf at its
most edifying and highbrow but at its most linguistically and imaginatively exuberant; it
is a thought-experiment with a heart and a sensibility as well as a mind. It is also an
outright love-letter to Hoban’s adopted country—he was born in
Pennsylvania—and a work of authentic humanism, meaning a consideration (both
celebratory and cautionary) of human doings and undoings. The novel was a pleasure to
re-read in this attractively packaged new incarnation, but I should close by mentioning
that the "expansion" touted in the subtitle is very modest: four and a half
pages of Afterword, two pages of working notes, and two-and-a-half pages of Glossary,
along with a full-page photo of Hoban looking very much like Mr. Punch. The dozen or so
new pages are in themselves illuminating and helpful; the added material will provide
guidance to teachers without overwhelming students who may be encountering the novel in
high school or college classrooms. The new information provided, however, is hardly enough
to suggest (let alone explicate) all the playful invention of Hoban’s imagination and
language, and this skimpiness is probably for the best, leaving readers sufficient space
to immerse themselves in Hoban’s teasing linguistic landscapes. To paraphrase Riddley
himself: "Parbly we wont never know its jus on us to think on it." The anemic
scale of the enlargement is a slight disappointment, but it is wonderful to have this
classic back in print.
—Carol McGuirk
Charles L. Harness. An Ornament to His
Profession. Ed. Priscilla Olson. NESFA Press (fax: 617-776-3243),
1998. 520 pp. $25 cloth.
Murray Leinster. First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster. Ed.
Joe Rico. NESFA Press (fax: 617-776-3243), 1998. 464 pp. $25 cloth.
The New England Science Fiction Association
(NESFA) Press has recently been issuing substantial memorial volumes on important sf
writers whose work has either been long out of print or critically neglected. Following
fine tomes covering the short fiction of Cordwainer Smith (The Rediscovery of Man,
1993), Zenna Henderson (Ingathering: The Complete People Stories, 1995), and C.M.
Kornbluth (His Share of Glory, 1997), 1998 has seen the release of collections
focusing on the work of Charles L. Harness and Murray Leinster. An Ornament to His
Profession gathers seventeen of Harness’ stories— including the brilliant
novella "The Rose" (1953)—plus informative and valuable essays by David
Hartwell and George Zebrowski, and a thorough bibliography assembled by editor Priscilla
Olson. Harness’ fiction is both richly literate and extravagantly imagined, and has
led Brian W. Aldiss to coin the resonant term "Wide-Screen Baroque" to describe
it (in his introduction to the 1967 Four Square edition of Harness’ 1953 novel The
Paradox Men [a.k.a. Flight into Yesterday]). Aside from three tales included in
the 1966 volume The Rose, Harness’ short fiction has never been collected
before, and thus An Ornament to His Profession represents a valuable work of
salvage. By contrast, most of the 25 stories gathered in First Contacts have
already appeared in previous collections of Leinster’s work (Random House’s 1978
"Best of" volume featured twelve of them); moreover, the book’s scholarly
apparatus is non-existent—no bibliography, no contextualizing critical essay, merely
a brief tribute from sf writer Hal Clement. I must admit, too, that of all the authors
NESFA has so far selected to revive and enshrine, Leinster seems to me the least worthy
aesthetically, though the real value of these volumes is that they provide sf critics an
opportunity to assess the importance of purportedly "minor" writers to the
history of the genre. Future volumes will cover the fiction of Anthony Boucher and Eric
Frank Russell. For more information on NESFA titles, consult their website at <http://www.nesfa.org>.
—Rob Latham
Clive
Bloom, ed. Gothic Horror: A Reader's Guide from Poe to
King and Beyond. St. Martin’s
(212-674-5151), 1998. xvii + 302 pp. $19.95 paper.
This bizarrely organized critical anthology culls
snippets from 27 writers and critics, ranging in length from a paragraph to thirty-plus
pages, on the topic of Gothic horror in Anglo-American literature. While some of the
abridgments are abominable—Freud’s classic essay on "The Uncanny"
(1919) is reduced to four brief, elliptical fragments—others are merely odd (e.g.,
two pages from interviews with and speeches by Stephen King, but nothing from his vast
meditation on the genre, Danse Macabre [Everest House, 1981]), and altogether they
hardly amount to a coherent overview of their putative subject. The longest by far of the
four vaguely chronological sections is the fourth, canvassing "Contemporary Critical
Accounts," which cobbles together seminal theoretical insights (tiny bits hacked out
of Todorov’s The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre [Cornell
UP, 1973]), musings on general topics (e.g., Robert F. Geary "On Horror and
Religion"—an excerpt from his book The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction
[Edwin Mellen, 1992]), and studies of individual authors and texts (Gina Wisker on Angela
Carter, Judie Newman on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House [1959]).
The book’s subtitle claims it to be a "Reader’s Guide," but its
coverage is so spotty that it cannot adequately serve such a function, and editor
Bloom’s slapdash Introduction provides no real rationale for its structure or
contents. Teachers seeking a good critical anthology on the subject will have to look
elsewhere.
—Rob Latham
Roger Bozzetto. Territoires des
fantastiques: des romans gothiques aux récits d'horreur moderne. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Universitè de
Provence, 1998. 275pp. 160 French francs/24.4 euros, paper.
Although I have no special expertise in the
horror genre, this book is definitely one of the best comprehensive studies of the
evolution of early Gothic fiction into modern horror that I have read. In addition to its
lengthy introduction and conclusion, where the author offers a detailed theoretical
argument to "frame" his analyses, the main body of the text is structured around
three general divisions: 1) the gothic/horror tale in the West—from Walpole’s The
Castle of Otranto (1764) to James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) and to
Lovecraft; 2) its development in Latin America via "magic realism"—through
authors like Borges, Cortàzar, Casares, Ocampo, Marquez, Hernandez, et al.—as well
as in China (Pou Song Ling, mostly); and 3) an especially evocative discussion of the
genre’s ability to portray that shadowy realm where love, desire, and eroticism rub
elbows with death and dissolution in the works of Poe, Rodenbach, Benson, Stoker, Rice,
Ballard, et al. Very interesting!
—Arthur B. Evans
Stéphane
Nicot, ed. Les Univers de la Science-Fiction: Essais
(supplement to the sf magazine Galaxies #8 [March 1998]). April 1998. 222
pp. 70 French francs/10.7 euros, paper.
This collection of twelve essays on science
fiction by several well-known French sf scholars is noteworthy because it provides a
glimpse into the current "institutional" status of the sf genre in France.
According to its editor, this publication represents a concerted effort to establish a
venue for learned sf criticism within the francophone university system—where sf has
traditionally had difficulty in being accepted as a legitimate object of literary study.
As he explains (my translation):
Contrary to its status in Anglo-Saxon countries,
where science fiction now enjoys a growing institutional recognition, France still remains
"open territory" for this genre which could well become—as Dan Simmons
recently described it in an interview for Galaxies—one of the possible futures
for modern literature.
The French university today voluntarily embraces
the study of those various forms of literature descending from Dracula, but the
study of sf still remains essentially suspect.... A strong polarization has developed
between the specialists of sf—who, in the face of this disdain by the
"establishment," exhibit an invigorating if sometimes undisciplined
passion—and this institution of cultural legitimation called Academe. The former
enclose themselves in a kind of ghetto logic; the latter hide behind their outdated notion
of "paraliterature." Given these conditions, one can understand why serious
study of sf has been slow to develop, especially in comparison to other countries like the
United States or Canada.
It is to begin to remedy this regrettable
situation that, starting in the spring of 1999 and every other year thereafter, an
international university conference will take place in Nancy under the direction of
Jean-Marc Gouanvic (professor at Concordia University in Montréal and founder of the sf
journal imagine...). The proceedings of this conference will be published
regularly.
In the interim, we felt it necessary to begin the
debate: such is the goal of this publication. Both university scholars and specialists of
sf have agreed to confront each other in this public arena. And we thank them both warmly.
(3)
The volume is divided into three roughly
chronological sections: "Great Ancestors," "Sf and Modernity," and
"Confrontations." And the critical essays appearing within each
part—inevitably of uneven value but, surprisingly, about half of them recycled from
earlier publications—include the following (my translations): Michel Meurger,
"The Peril Comes from the Moon: A War of the Worlds in 1809" (on Washington
Irving’s A History of New York and the theme of lunar invasion); Dominique
Warfa, "The Adventure Novel and the Origins of Science Fiction"; Dominique
Kucharzewski, "Abraham Merritt: The Memory of Worlds"; Stéphane Nicot and Eric
Vial, "The Lords of History: Notes on the Uchronia" (reprint of a 1986 article);
Christine Renard-Cheinisse, "Religious Problems in this Literature Called Science
Fiction" (reprint of a 1968 article); Jean Marigny, "Desert Initiation in Frank
Herbert’s Dune" (reprint of a 1988 article); Michel Lamart,
"1984-2050: A Defense of Language—Notes to Accompany George Orwell’s 1984";
Gérard Klein, "A Petition by Agents of the Dominant Culture for the Dismissal of
Science Fiction" (reprint of his 1977 article, available in English in SFS 7:2
[July 1980]: 115-123); Jean-Marc Gouanvic, "The Social Stakes of Translating American
Science Fiction During the 1950s: The Case of Rayon Fantastique" (reprint of a
1995 article); Jacques Goimard, "The Science-Fiction Generation" (reprint of a
1985 article); and Pierre Stolze, "Science Fiction: A Literature of Images, Not
Ideas."
And the title of the final essay appearing in
this collection, by Roger Bozzetto, struck me as especially à propos given the
obvious lack of recent scholarship on sf by French university professors:
"Science-Fiction Literature: Desperately Seeking Criticism."
—Arthur B. Evans
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